Alvin Lucier

Todd Burns

Hello, and welcome to Red Bull Music Academy Festival NYC. We’re entering into our first full week of our month-long festival around the city, and I’m very excited to be the host for this event. My name is Todd Burns, and I’m the head of editorial at RBMA. The man sitting next to me is Alvin Lucier, a pioneering composer. He’s a pioneering composer of experimental music and sound installations that explore acoustic phenomena and auditory perception, among many other things. Over the next hour or so, we’re gonna talk quite a bit about his career.

I wanted to get started by asking you about percussion. I know that you aren’t a trained musician, exactly, but I do know that in college, you played the snare drum in the marching band.

Alvin Lucier

I did.

Todd Burns

Why were you drawn to the drum as an instrument early on?

Alvin Lucier

I was a kid. I loved jazz. I had a set of drums in our basement. Spent hours playing, improvising. At a certain point, I discovered I wasn’t gonna be very good at that. Anyway, when I went to college, I played in the marching band. I’m gonna jump to something else. Used to play in the Yale Bowl. The band would start playing in a tunnel. It was a hell of a sound. I’d be in the back of the band. As you went out into the Yale Bowl, that sound just echoed. You can imagine going from a terribly reverberant enclosed space to this huge... With the time delay, you could hear your echo. I think that was more interesting to me than playing. The space of that was just amazing. Anyone who plays in a band knows that the last line, you have to be aware of the timeline. When you’re marching, there’s sound echoing off buildings. Really have to think about. That was an experience that I may not have gotten if I’d played a wind instrument. I don’t know. Anyway, that was very important.

Todd Burns

Did you realize that at the time? The echo, and did it click for you? Or was that something that only came later in retrospect?

Alvin Lucier

Came later. I knew it was happening, but to use it in my work came later.

Todd Burns

When you were in college, you were studying music.

Alvin Lucier

Right.

Todd Burns

It was more this neo-classical Stravinsky inspired stuff.

Alvin Lucier

I wrote a piece my senior year. By accident it turned out to be a very successful piece. Everyone thought, this is wonderful. I met, it was a woman in the Yale School of Music. It was wonderful. I was an undergraduate at Yale. In those days, you could take classes in the music schools, in professional music school. After my sophomore year, my friends all became people in the music school, not the undergraduate core. There were these, that period of time, there were five or six young male players from New Haven, the Italian guys. All played saxophone. They all wanted to go to Yale to study a legitimate instrument. That’s what it was called. Flute, bassoon, oboe. So they could get jobs in studios. They could play two or three instruments. I found those guys terribly interesting. I used to talk to them for hours about embouchure tuning, stuff like that. I wasn’t too interested in my Yale college friends as much as I was these guys. It was a wonderful experience. I had the best of both of those worlds.

Todd Burns

You mentioned Italians. You went to Europe and Italy specifically.

Alvin Lucier

I shouldn’t. You can’t say that now. Mike [inaudible], [inaudible], Paul [inaudible]. They’re all Italian. Yeah, I went to Italy, but that’s not the reason I went. I got a Fulbright [scholarship].

Todd Burns

When you went to Europe and Italy, it seems like it was kind of a breakthrough moment for you. It was a moment of realization.

Alvin Lucier

I studied with a man named Petrassi. Goffredo Petrassi. Excuse me, I should know better than to bump a microphone.

Todd Burns

You of all people.

Alvin Lucier

I got there and I showed him, I had written a piece for flute, harpsichord and string orchestra. Can you believe that? He looked at the score. He said, “It’s too traditional. You have to study with my assistant.” I studied with this fellow, Boris Porena. It was wonderful. He looked at just all those Italian 16th century composers. But he was offbeat. His imitation would be free. In other words, the counterpoint was not strict. It was sort of free and all. Composers like Luigi Nono were interested in this guy because he was sort of experimental. Actually, he killed his wife too. He found her in bed with another man. I think he killed the man or killed... They never put him in jail though. It was an understandable murder. Anyway, we looked at Luigi Nono, his use of the 12th tone row if anyone is interested was very different from the other European composers.

Anyway, I looked at that music and remember Frederic Rzewski and I, one summer went up to [inaudible] Darmstadt. That was a big European summer school. Boulez was there, Stockhausen, and all the European composers. John Cage had been there one year before. I remember David Tudor had a piano. He taught piano. Piano. I snuck into his session. I don’t think he ever touched the piano at all. It was about piano. In that class was Stockhausen, Adorno, Theodor. Does anyone know that? Adorno? Nam June Paik, a lot of... They had a big argument, I remember, Stockhausen and Adorno. He was jawing about what this music was, John Cage indeterminate music. They went on and on and on. Finally, David Tudor looked up and said, “I’m afraid you gentlemen don’t understand this music at all.” That was shocking to say to those guys.

John Cage, he went over there to give talks. Instead of giving boring talks, he told funny stories. He told stories that didn’t have anything to do with music, but it was wonderful. Refreshing. I thought, “What is this?” Those Europeans, it was in their blood, talking analytically, set theory and all. It was in their blood. I said, “I’m not interested in that.” I went home and I thought, “If I wrote music like that, I could survive.” I’d get a job, but it wouldn’t be my music. I’d be speaking another language in kind of a dialect or an accent. I don’t want to talk music in an... I want my own music. For two years, I didn’t... I’d get home. Got a job as the choral director at Brandeis [University]. Didn’t know what to do. One night, David Behrman had a part in New York and Morton Feldman was there. I hadn’t even started as the choral director. This was August. I hadn’t seen my students at all. He said, “Oh, you teach at Brandeis.” He was impressed because he never went... Taught in a university. He said, “I’m doing a concert in Town Hall. Can you bring your Brandeis singers down?” I said, “Sure.” I hadn’t even seen these kids yet. They didn’t know what contemporary... He had this wonderful laugh. He said, “Can they sing modern music?” I said, “Sure they can.” I had this courage.

Anyway, I had a large group that went down and did that performance. Even at that point, I didn’t know what I was doing. That must have been ‘62, ‘63. Then John Cage, I was at Brandeis. We had the Rose Art Museum. I thought, “I’d like to have John Cage come here.” I didn’t dare ask my colleagues in the music department. They would have thought I was insane. Sam Hunter, director of the Rose Art, he had acquired paintings of Jasper Johns and all of John Cage’s friends. I said, “Sam, would you like to have John?” He said, “Yeah, call him up.” I called up John Cage. He answered the telephone. Composers from other countries would come and say, “Tell me, how can I get ahold of John Cage?” I said, “Why don’t you call him on the phone?” They said, “You wouldn’t call Pierre Boulez on the phone.”

I called John Cage. He said, “Hi.” He said, “I know you. You were down here, doing some stuff here in New York.” “Would you like to come to Brandeis and Rose Art?” He said, “Sure. I’ll do it on one condition. You have to do a piece.” I said, “I don’t have a piece.” Long silence. I said, “But I’ve been working with a brainwave amplifier, but I can’t get it to work.” He laughed. He said, “It doesn’t matter if you can get it to work. You have to try to get it.” The intention was so important for him, the intention of doing it. I said, “OK, I’ll do it.” All my colleagues at Brandeis, they thought it was kind of something. The idea of using alpha waves for a piece wasn’t very interesting. They thought it was kind of, I don’t know what they thought. One of them said, “You should record the sound of your brainwaves, Alvin, and make a tape piece out of it.” I thought, that’s not important. What’s important, try to generate alpha before an audience. You’ve got to do it live.

John Cage and David Tudor were devoted to live electronic music. Studios in other countries, the one in the West German radio, made these beautiful tape pieces. You’d record sounds on tape and mix them. You’d have a beautiful, clear, structured tape piece. People would sit in the audience. You’d get... Sounds would come out of the pair of speakers. You never saw any performance. I have to go back. You don’t mind. I’m just talking.

Todd Burns

Please. Go ahead.

Alvin Lucier

MIT, once, I was teaching at Brandeis, that time there was a big storm. Cage and Tudor came to perform at MIT. I took a bunch of my students down. David Tudor had his tables, his electronic wires hanging out all over the place. They didn’t know what things were... What was happening. I thought, “These guys are working hard. They’re not waiting for somebody to come and ask them to do it.” All my other friends were waiting for the Boston Symphony to ask them to write a symphony. They’d play it once. They were bitter and angry. No one was playing their work. Cage and Tudor, he didn’t care. They went out and played it themselves. Very inspiring.

Anyway, that interested me a lot. When I did my brainwave, the night before I did, I didn’t know what my place was gonna be, actually. In those days, it was wonderful. If you had your equipment, you sort of had your piece. There were no guidelines. No engineers would come in to help you. I had to grab loudspeakers from people’s houses. “Can I borrow your... Can I borrow your amp?” You’d patch it together. You didn’t know whether it was gonna work or not. It’s exciting.

In those days, in Cambridge, the acoustic suspension loudspeaker was being developed by KLH. The first home audio. I talk like I’m an old... Anyway, “In those days, we...” Anyway...

Todd Burns

Tell me about this performance of this piece. The day before, you’re still not sure that it’s gonna work, and then you get there.

Alvin Lucier

Talk about percussion. I thought, when I was in the studio at night trying to generate alpha, it finally got so I felt I could see the meter on the tape machine. I looked up. We had one of these acoustic suspension speakers on the wall. I see the cone of the speaker actually moving. The cone of the speaker bumping. Alpha waves that roll 10 cycles a second. I thought, “Heck, these speakers, that’s not the end of the music. They’re performers. They’re doing work. The speakers are actually...” I just put two and two together. I collected 16 percussion instruments. Bass drums, snare drums, gongs, cymbals.

The Rose Art Museum was on one floor, the little stairway down the middle. Bottom floor, it was a pool of water. I said, “Just scatter these instruments all over the place.” I put a loudspeaker up against each instrument, so when the burst of alpha came in, they would actually perform the instrument. What’s interesting was because a gong takes more energy to make sound than a snare drum, so built into that system is just the instruments themselves caused the way the piece work. Because you wait for a large burst of alpha to make the gong sound, but the other instruments would respond in various ways.

Todd Burns

Was someone controlling the mixer in terms of what you could hear?

Alvin Lucier

John Cage did that. I had eight Dynaco amps stacked upright. We had no mixer. Eight stereo amps. My alpha wave amp went into the first one. Pushed the mono switch, came out of one. By the eighth one, we had enormous gain because each stage, louder. First of all, I said, “Think the piece should be eight minutes long.” He said, “No, it should be 40 minutes.” 40 minutes in 1965 of a guy sitting there with his eyes here [closes eyes / laughter] was a long time. Cage, David Tudor confessed to me, all the years they played in the Brooklyn Academy of Music, he never knew what loudspeaker was coming out of what channel. Didn’t matter. Why does it matter? He’d turn dials, sound would come out. To him, the works were not made in that way that some other composers... In other words, John Cage mindlessly went from channel to channel, which is the way it should be. I didn’t want any buildup of any climax. I didn’t want it to grow. I didn’t want one of those growth forms. Cage would just turn a volume and, “Trum bum bum bum.” Turn another one, different sounds. His form of playing it was wonderful. It wasn’t that dramatic.

Todd Burns

It seems like there’s a sense of humor there too a little bit, in a way. I think that’s underrated about what John Cage and them were doing, is that there was a joy or a sense of humor about what they were doing.

Alvin Lucier

On that MIT stage, I remember Cage would say to David Tudor, “David, can I plug this into this?” He’d say, “No John, this is an amplifier and that’s an amplifier.” John Cage had no knowledge. He had the terrific insight into his music was about what electronics, electronic environment was: human beings. His piece for the 12 shortwave radios, people misunderstood that. The point of the story is about, they played it at 10 o’clock at night. All the FM stations were off, so that the sounds and... That’s not true at all. That piece, according to... 1,000. He had a numbers... The idea was that he wasn’t trying to get radio stations. He was using those as electronic studios. He had white noise, static radio. People, they love to tell that story, that it was so late at night that the piece didn’t sound. That’s nonsense.

Anyway, he was a genius. He was the first guy, some environmental music. In Milan, when I was in Italy, I had a woman at the Fulbright office, got me a week or two weeks up in the studio up in Milan. I went up, got into all the pieces. The engineer came in and said, “You know, John Cage was here.” I said, “Oh, God.” He said, “I showed Cage the whole studio. He drew it all in pen and ink, all the oscillators. Then he said, “Have you got a portable tape recorder? Go out into the city of Milan, record sounds of the city.”” He was the first person who did environment. If you don’t mind me using that word, environmental sounds. His music was about that, not about what the studio can do. I’m not explaining that as clear as I want.

Todd Burns

What was the reaction to Music for Solo Performer? What did people say?

Alvin Lucier

One of my colleagues pretended he was asleep. Melvin Gavin. You know that old thing? Put a match in someone’s instep, you light it. It’s hot.

Todd Burns

Hot foot.

Alvin Lucier

He did that to the guy that was asleep. I thought, these are my friends. Anyway, I don’t know.

Todd Burns

Were you spurred on to do more things by the reaction or were you flying in the face of what people were saying? Did it feel like you were onto something when you did this?

Alvin Lucier

I didn’t care about what people were saying so much. I felt that was a breakthrough for me. Performer doesn’t have to move. To make that piece, you have to sit, you can’t really move. Your alpha waves stop. They don’t stop, they’re not loud enough. The idea was you get in a semi-state of... That’s not really true either because people have EKGs all the time, EEGs all the time. You go in the hospital, put electrodes. They tell you just to relax. Your alpha gets strong enough. It was hard to do in front of the audience. By the time you have your piece set up, you’re so tired. You were tired setting up your loudspeaker. I was glad to sit there and not move at all.

Todd Burns

Let’s talk about perhaps your most famous piece. I Am Sitting In A Room. You wrote it in 15 minutes or something like this, right?

Alvin Lucier

Edmond, Edmond, this scientist Edmond Dewan. He was working for the Air Force. He was the guy that loaned me his amplifier to do Solo Performer. He was kind of an interesting scientist. Pilots during the war were having epileptic fits when their planes would land and the propellers would spin at certain speeds, locking it some visual. They wanted him to find out why this happened. He had this big amplifier. Anyway, he was the guy who loaned me his amplifier. About a year later, I’m walking in the hallway. He just passed. He said, “You know I was at MIT with a guy named Bose developing a new kind of a speaker.” All he said to me was Bose would produce a sound, play it back, recycle sounds through his equipment to make sure that the response of his loudspeakers were flat. That’s all he told me. I thought, this is a nice idea. I went in to my studio and I tried it out. I just said something. Recycle, sound pretty good to me. I went home one night. I got two field recorders from the ethnomusicology. They had these wonderful tape recorders. One, I had my speaker and microphone, thought, “I’ll give this thing a try.” “Should I use sounds? Music? I’ll use speech,” I thought. I thought, “Speech. We all have speech. It’s interesting. Speech has all these sounds.” I said, “OK.” I set up my... I had them. Had my microphone. Put my two tape recorders outside the room so they wouldn’t make any noise. Turned off the radiators. Turned off the refrigerator. I thought, “Now what?” I sat. I just wrote the text. I don’t know. Just, I sat there. Thought, “I don’t want to hide anything from anybody.”

In those days, if you wrote atonal music, you’d write these complicated tone rows. You’d never hear the tone. Everything is hidden. The technique of the composition is hidden. This is embarrassing to say, but I used to go see the Judson dance group. Trisha Brown did a piece. I misremembered it. I didn’t remember it correctly. I thought she was telling me what she was doing while she was dancing. My memory of that one. She’d say, “I’m not raising my right hand.” I thought, “I’ll tell people what I’m doing. That’ll be the subject matter.” I didn’t want to use a poem or a text or anything hifalutin. I’m sitting there in that room, probably not the one you’re in. I’m recording this sound and I just wrote it out. I recited it into the microphone, went out in the room, made sure that the tape wasn’t saturated. Spent the rest of the night outside the room re-recording that. That’s how I did that. Very simple.

Todd Burns

It’s amazing how resonant it’s been over the years. I guess that’s a good word, resonant. MoMA bought the piece and people have recorded different versions of it over the years. Has there been any surprising versions that people have presented to you? That you’ve said, “Oh, that’s a really clever ...”

Alvin Lucier

I had a wonderful... Two years ago, I was at MIT. MIT has come up in my life a lot. You don’t think of MIT music, but John Cage... I was asked to do this piece at MIT. There was a young 10-year-old boy sitting there. As I came off the stage, he said, “That was cool.” I thought, I’m 85 years old. A 10-year-old could say that is cool. A week later, he sent me a version he made at home with his laptop. Perfect. “I am sitting in a room.” Everything. Perfect version of that. That, I love that idea.

Todd Burns

Could you have ever imagined back then that people would be performing this years and years later?

Alvin Lucier

I never thought about that. What has surprised me, there’s a whole group of young people who want to recreate those pieces. I know that David Behrman’s analog pieces, guys are doing new versions. There are young performers who want to do that kind of thing. I never thought about it. I thought someday maybe somebody would do those pieces.

Todd Burns

One of the most interesting things that I don’t think gets talked about a lot is that you were a professor for many, many, many years.

Alvin Lucier

50 years.

Todd Burns

I read a book that you published a number of years ago called Music 109, which is basically essentially transcriptions of lectures that you gave to first-year students?

Alvin Lucier

Yeah.

Todd Burns

Tell people about what that class was and how you approached teaching that class.

Alvin Lucier

Came back from Europe. I thought, how am I gonna teach? I have this speech impediment. By God, when you teach, you have to talk all the time. I discovered if I’m talking about something I really know about, I can do it. When I taught this, I never read a book and would teach something from a book. It was all something that I had experienced firsthand. I’d say, “John Cage was at...” And I did this. I’d tell stories. I say to my class, the first, I say, “I’m gonna tell stories. I’m gonna go off on various tangents. If you don’t like that kind of teaching, don’t take this course.” I also would say, “I’m not interested in your opinions. I’m interested in your perceptions. Don’t tell me a piece is weird. Tell me what’s...” William Carlos Williams. Someone said, “Mr. Williams, what does this poem mean?” He said, “Don’t ask me what it means. Ask me what I’ve made.”

I had a senior take the class once. He said, “Your exam was terrible. You actually wanted facts.” They wanted to talk about how they feel about... I’d ask simple questions like, “What’s the difference between the way Terry Riley, Philip Glass, and Steve Hughes use phrases?” Very similar, but each one is very different. I want you to know the differences. I don’t want you just to say this is repetitious, this is trance music, that’s baloney. Tell me exactly... Courses would be trying to demystify pieces. Sometimes I have seminars. People, they read something or taught. It’s usually about yourself, how you feel. I’m a composer. I want people to not think about themselves, but what the objective music, what’s in the music itself. Does that make sense?

Todd Burns

Also, in these lectures, it seems like you went out and asked people to perform pieces as part of the class. I guess that’s that firsthand going out and doing these things. Immediately brings it to life.

Alvin Lucier

Christian Wolff, at Dartmouth I said, “What do I do?” He said, “Get students to make the pieces themselves, perform them. Get them involved in that.” “Cartridge Music” of John Cage. That’s a wonderful piece. We use all the phono cartridges, stick things, instead of the phonograph needles. Like toothpicks and make sounds. It’s wonderful. Each student has to realize an indeterminate... A minute or two of indeterminate... The score’s not so easy to understand. There are circles, there are clock faces. You have lines crossing, determine time lengths and so forth. To do it, really, as clearly as you can without putting your own ideas.

David Tudor, I invited him to come up to Brandeis once. We did a two piano concert. He played the piano. We did John Cage’s ”Music for Amplified Toy Pianos.” Each had five or six toy pianos stacked on each side, amplified. Contact mic, playing them, bang. Huge, enormously amplified sounds. The score, you have to make your own indeterminate score. I worked on it very carefully. I made it as perfect as I could. About a minute into the piece, my determinations came up silence for a minute. In those days, a minute of silence, people would scream. They couldn’t stand silence. David had almost the same thing. We stopped playing for like a minute. I thought, oh my God, this is terrible. I’m a professor here. Students, what are they gonna think of me? I went back. The piece went by in a flash. It was just amazing to have these things happen in the piece. You’d never do that if you were making the piece in any other way, right? You wouldn’t have a minute of music and then stop for a minute. But those silences were so poignant, so wonderful. They were like... They weren’t these silent points of light. Like Beethoven [sings]. They weren’t that kind of prompts in Beethoven. They just were holes in the music. Just amazing.

Todd Burns

Do you think your sense of time as a performer of your own music and your sense of time as an audience member is wildly different?

Alvin Lucier

My sense of time... Well, John Cage used stopwatches. He hated the idea of psychological time. There was a book by a famous composer about time in music. Psychological time. Cage did real time. Real time. My time, when I did my echolocation piece... The time it takes for a pulse to go out into the space, hit a wall and come back, is real time, isn’t it? If you make a cluck and it comes back one second later, you know that you’re 500 feet away from wherever it’s reflecting off. Takes half a second time. Sound travels like 1100 feet a second, something like that.

I just wrote a blurb for a book called Whale Song. It dawned on me that a dolphin or a bat using sound, echolocation, they can’t cheat. You can’t cheat if you’re gonna survive. Trying to eat something, you can’t make a sound, say, “I think I’ll go faster or slower.” It’s survival. I was thinking of that. This sounds so romantic, but this is true. One night I slept, I had a dream. I was in another planet, dark planet, and I had a sound gun of some kind. I was relaying information as to the space I was in to somebody back on earth. Two or three days later I was in a bar in Arlington, Mass. I had been reading a book by a professor called Echoes of Bats and Men. It’s about bats, how they echolocate. I thought, these creatures, they’re wonderful. They use sound. In the dark, they can avoid a wire. They have to survive. I thought my music, I wish I could make music that was so... I made these pieces where sound goes out. It’s in real-time space. It’s space and time. I know that sounds sort of...

Todd Burns

Sci-fi?

Alvin Lucier

... Arrogant of me, but that’s true if you’re echolocating. Echo. You can tell how far you are away as to the time. That’s my idea about time in music.

Todd Burns

One of the things that you’ve said over the years is that audiences nowadays seem to be able to hold their interest longer in your pieces than you thought.

Alvin Lucier

Someone asked me, “Can people use their iPhones? So distracted. How come?” Anyway, Charles Curtis and Anthony Bird did a concert of my music in one of these clubs, Stone, maybe. I went in. I didn’t know anyone in the audience. Totally different. I thought, “God, this is gonna be terrible.” These sounds are long. They’re gonna be bored. I was nervous. They played these pieces, long tones. I could hear a pin drop. People nowadays, a certain group, pay attention to that. I don’t know why that is, because if you’re distracted all the time, it seems to me you’d have that and you want something else to happen.

Todd Burns

Do you find yourself having a longer attention span as you get older?

Alvin Lucier

What did you say? [laughter] I remember I went out to Aspen, Colorado, hear Jim Tenney string quartet. He wrote a string quartet based on his beautiful piece for solo violin. Simply go from the G string, D string, to A. Just go up the strings. Once you know it’s gonna happen, the form doesn’t change. It’s inexorable. Just that, listen into the sound. Audience was distracted. This famous Pulitzer Prize winning composer kept turning around to say, “What is this stupid music?” Then they play the piece by a famous American. Every beat was different, everything you ever learned to do on a stringed instrument. ponticello, pizzicato, this, that. My mind wandered. It was terribly interesting. Every measure was different. I couldn’t concentrate on it. Thought maybe I have attention...

Todd Burns

ADD.

Alvin Lucier

The Jim Tenney piece, I focused right on. Two different audiences at that time. I don’t know. Does anyone know why this is?

Todd Burns

It’s above my pay grade, unfortunately.

Alvin Lucier

When I started teaching, it was de rigueur to say these students are not prepared the way we were when we were... That’s a lotta. The first thing I’d say to these students, I’d say, “The music you play every day is very amazing.” Imagine growing up with groups like electric guitars and those sound effects and noisy. I said, “Your ears, you’re very well prepared to hear this music.” Everyone. I don’t know. I don’t know what the answer is to that.

Todd Burns

You’ve been inspired by all sorts of different things, like brainwaves, bats. You’ve also been inspired by other artistic mediums, and I wanted to talk a little bit about that. Like a poet, John Ashbery, for example, is someone who’s inspired some of your music. What was it about his particular stuff that compelled you to write something?

Alvin Lucier

I met him in Berlin. I was on a DAAD grant. He came to give a lecture. I went to hear it, and the people said, “Well, what are you doing over here? You’re in a different...” Said, “Well, I wanted to hear poetry.” Then struck up a conversation with him. Then, years later at Wesleyan, Anthony Braxton was the chairman of the music department. He was one of these guys, wants everything big. He said, “Alvin, have to do a festival. Alvin Lucier festival.” I said, “I don’t want to do it on my own. I feel a little bit guilty.” “Have to do it.” Said, “OK.”

Having said that, I thought everyone in the music department would rally around me and say, “Can use my money for orchestra.” Nobody did a thing. I had to scrounge around. Get all the support I could. There was a poetry department. The woman in charge, I don’t know her, I said, “You know John Ashbery.” She said, “We couldn’t get him.” Said, “Why don’t I write him a letter?” I wrote him a letter. I said, “You remember.” He said, “I remember you.” I said, “Would you like to come to Wesleyan and give a poetry reading? I’d like to make a piece of you.” He said, “Sure, I’ll come.” He sent me a poem called “Theme.” “If I were a piano shawl, a porch on someone’s house, flooding the suave timbre. Then 40, a unique monsieur – and yet he never wanted to look into it.” I didn’t understand what it was all about. He would juxtapose different lines. It was wonderful. It didn’t have any meaning. I didn’t have to worry about meaning.

I thought, “How am I gonna do it? I made a big error, big mistake.” John Cage, I keep talking about, in San Francisco years before, he’d made some speech pieces using everyday people. I said, “I’ll get four professors in the English department to be in my four. They’ll read that poem.” Big mistake. They couldn’t keep time. Anyway, I thought, what I’ll do is I’ll find objects. I had an ostrich egg, milk bottle, faced. Put small microphones, and as they talk and hear the presence of their voice in these objects. I don’t think I could do it. Get feedback.

Anyway, I had them reading this poem into these objects so you hear the resonance of each object. It was a way of dealing with speech. I did that piece. Mainly, I was so inspired. It was just practical. I knew him, I thought it would be wonderful to have him come to Wesleyan. I did it for that reason.

Todd Burns

Seems like a lot of your career’s based on just picking up the phone or just writing a letter or whatever. It seems very plain and simple in a way, but it leads to extraordinary results. There’s no question in there. I just wanted to say that. One other piece I wanted to ask you about is “Nothing Is Real,” which interpolates the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever.” Why did you pick out that?

Alvin Lucier

Aki Takahashi, wonderful pianist, had made... They asked a recording company. Japan asked her to make a series of Beatles songs. She said, “Sure, I’ll do that, but I want to ask composers to make arrangements.” She sent it. I said, “Sure, I’ll do them. What song would you like me to do?” I didn’t care. I loved the Beatles, but I didn’t have any preference. She said, “How about “Strawberry Fields Forever”?” I said, “How come?” She said, “Thinking of the line, nothing is real, reminds me of your music.” I think it’s just the opposite, but anyway. So I took that song. I said, “I’m not gonna make another piano arrangement.”

I thought, what do I do? I thought, when you hear those songs when you’re young, you remember where you were when you heard a song for the first time. Have you ever had that experience? I remember. I thought, if I could put it somewhere, the song, in a room. I had a little pot, little teapot. Seven years before, I went to Donald Oenslager. He was a scene designer. I asked him, any theaters you can take the roof up and down, you can raise the roof, change the acoustics? It would have cost a million dollars, he said, in those days. I just went to him for that. That idea.

I thought if I played this song into the teapot, I could lift the lid of the teapot, changing the size of the room a little bit. Then I had to figure, what am I gonna put in there? I don’t play the piano because I play with one finger. I played the tune with one, da da da, and I was, da da da da da with the pedal down. If you think of those notes, D D D D, is beautiful. If you pay attention to the sound as it’s sustained, you hear the aftersound. Aftersound. Play a chord on the piano, you hear a rise. It’s because a single tone will have two or three strings. You can’t tune the strings perfectly in tune. If they’re a little bit out of tune, there’s this [sings]. If you play a chord on the piano, if you pay attention to it, you can hear it rises and falls. So da da da da... Hold that. If you raise the lid, you change the size. You should be able to isolate each tone of that. So [sings]. I did the piece that way, one finger.

Todd Burns

You mentioned raising the roof. I feel like architecture plays just an extraordinarily important role in your music. I think almost of your music as architecture sometimes. How do you view architecture as something ...

Alvin Lucier

I never know how to answer. You’ll go to a concert the night before. The stage, want to go in and see the space, want to hear the space. I say, “No, I don’t have to.” “Don’t you want to hear it?” “No.” I use whatever I find. I have no theoretical ideas about... People think I’m interested in architecture. I am, but only in the sense that I’ll go in and I refuse to clap my hands. Everyone goes into a room and does this [claps]. I find that of no interest at all. What does it help me? What does it do for me to hear? If I do a concert in the space, I’m learning what the space is like. I thought for years, I should think about designing concerts. I have no idea about that, honestly.

Todd Burns

Do you find your music almost as a learning process, as though every time you compose something, you’re learning what happens when you do?

Alvin Lucier

Yeah, sure. I think, when I did, I used to watch people in the audience. I’d finally understand what was happening. You could tell when they understood the piece. Each one at a different time. Could hear the intelligibility, that point at which it’s intelligible or non-intelligible. That takes the place of the dramatic climax of traditional music. Each person. I have pieces where, by accident, I discovered this. Pieces for solo wind instrument and a rising oscillator. Just one oscillator starts the low note on the clarinet. That’s a long time to make its 30 seconds of semi-tone. That’s a long time to go da da, of semi-tone. 30 seconds.

The player, as the wave is rising, he or she can start a minute before the pitch arrives. Stops when he or she arrives at that pitch, in which case the beatable, audible beating... Everyone knows about audible beating, when two notes are closely tuned together. You can hear pumps of sound where they constructively and destructively interfere with each other. They’ll start fast and slow down. Gets to use and there isn’t any beating. If you started 30 seconds and go across the way, starts fast, slows down, and speeds up again. If you start [inaudible] and it starts at zero and speeds up.

So I just arranged it. I had this fellow at school. He had wonderful control. He could play a pitch a minute long on the instrument. I made a piece for him where I wrote where the pitch is to start. Remember Frederic Rzewski, he said, “Alvin, you should change the pitch of the oscillator with your hand. Play it with your hand.” What good does that do? If you change it, you made a relationship. You have to change it again. I’m not interested in relationships in that way.

Anyway, speed of the oscillator goes the same, but the frequencies go twice as fast. Every octave of 2, 4, 8, 16, it’s geometric. From the first octave, the beating is slow. The last, it’s much faster, so you don’t have to change the relationship with your hand. It’s changing by itself. As it does so, I never knew this was gonna happen, I use one speaker, has the sine wave. The other player plays without any amplification. As the wave rises, the wavelengths get shorter and shorter. They echo off the walls and the wave moves in the space. It moves acoustically. It’s not electronic panning. It just moves by itself. You’ll hear it cross your head. It’ll move. Each person at a different time... Didn’t know that was gonna happen, but that was amazing.

Todd Burns

You’ve done a lot of work, starting in the ‘80s with instruments, like traditional instruments, and you’ve said in the past that people just ask you to make stuff who played instruments. I’m curious, is there a favorite or most interesting instrument that you’ve found over the years that you find has a timbre or something that you actually are really fascinated by?

Alvin Lucier

Not really. I have a cellist, Charles Curtis. He’s out in San Diego. He loves my music. I make him pieces, as many as I can. He’s a wonderful player and he knows my music. And he plays very well. I’ll make him pieces. If anyone asks me to make them a piece, I try to make them. I stick to... I don’t like extended techniques. I know that’s been a very engrossing and wonderful thing for people to do making new instruments, playing instruments in various ways. I just like to hear the sound of a string. Open A string, very different than an open G string. The timbres are enough for me. Very clear. It has to be clear. I have to do it. I can’t cheat. I’m talking about cheating. I have to have it as clear as possible to make the beating happen. Does everyone understand? A lot of my pieces have to do with beating. Tuning creates beating, which I find fascinating. If you tune your instruments close to an oscillator or another instrument, you can create these beats and they change.

Todd Burns

When did you first hear that beating in one of your pieces and you were like, “Aha, this is what I’m after. This is really interesting?”

Alvin Lucier

1980s, sometime, I’d guess. A group of seven players asked me to make them a piece. Thought, what am I gonna do? I tuned to C natural. I just have them tuning against that pitch. I thought it’d be interesting to create a resonance from tuning. I’m not the only composer that ever did that. The idea that you could tune, create rhythms, I make a lot of pieces like that if somebody asks me to.

Todd Burns

I want to open it up to questions in just a little bit, but I guess one of the last things I wanted to ask you is what are you looking forward to these days? I know you’re traveling still quite a bit.

Alvin Lucier

I’m making a new piece for Athens, for documenta. They were gonna give me the Acropolis theater, the beautiful outdoor theater, but it cost so much money, they couldn’t do it. Anyway, I taught a class at Wesleyan for first year students. They want you to teach seminar. I thought, “Orpheus. I love that Orpheus myth. Everyone loves that.” So I taught a course on the Orpheus myth. We did films. We did Tennessee Williams, cantos poetry, Rainer Maria Rilke, HD dance, Stravinsky, you can imagine. Stravinsky’s Orpheus. I used to love that music. I taught that course, and for the front piece of my syllabus book, discovered as sort of a bar relief, shows Orpheus, Eurydice, and a beautiful image. She’s in the middle. He’s got her hand. She’s already been down into hell and she’s gone forever. Thought I’d make a piece for Charles Curtis, could be, and Anthony. And a singer. My text is from H.D.. She was a poet, an American poet, beginning of the ‘20s. She was a friend of DH Lawrence, Ezra Pound. Images, wonderful. She wrote a poem called Eurydice. It’s from a woman’s point of view. The name of my piece is called ”So You.”

Starts, she’s speaking to Orpheus, saying, “So you, for your arrogance, I didn’t tell you to come down and yank me out. Who are you, some man? You didn’t ask my permission.” It’s this wonderful feminist poem. I took the first two words of each stanza: so you, so for, if you, and if. There aren’t any nouns or any adjectives. Just, “If I could, you did.” I’m describing. I have the oscillator pitches, scan going down to the low C string of the cello and going back up, taking an hour. They split into... One’s going 30 seconds a semitone, one’s going 31. They splay out, and instead of having loudspeakers, I’m having nine wine jars. Those lovely big... Each wine jar has a loudspeaker in it. The waves come out of the jars, and as they hit the points, each time amplitude changes happen. Charles starts playing across the waves, then the clarinet, then the singer. They command according to where their voice are. The singer, I had her starting at G. She said, “I can’t sing that high.” She starts at C, goes down. I don’t care, as long as they sing where they’re comfortable. That piece is coming up in June.

Todd Burns

That’s in June, OK.

Alvin Lucier

In Athens.

Todd Burns

Something to look forward to. Are there any questions in the audience? If we’d just wait a minute for a microphone.

Audience Member

Thank you. First, I just wanted to say thanks for coming and talking with us.

Todd Burns

Turn the mic on.

Audience Member

I think we’re good. OK. I was just not talking loud enough. I had a quick question for you about pedagogy. Because I have the good fortune to teach your work to a bunch of undergrads in a wider course about sound art that’s not explicitly related to music. And when I was designing that course long ago, your work kept coming up again and again and again. And even though we got 15 weeks worth of stuff to get through, we keep coming back to your work, again and again, to this day. Because I find it so honest and clear and communicative through experience, not from a position of being didactic or anything like that. I just wondered for you, as someone making new work for years and years, did the exchanges that you had as a teacher formally also feed in to the work that I see as being relatively pedagogical at its core? Not that you’re trying to preach, but that you’re trying to teach through the experience that you have while discovering the work as it unfolds. So I’m just wondering, was there a give and take there in the classroom too?

Alvin Lucier

I don’t know if that had any real influence. If I hadn’t taught, I’d probably do the same kind of music. I’d get a whole different idea, whether I was teaching or not. My ideas came from other sources, I think. I don’t think there’s any…there probably is some relationship there, but I don’t know about that.

Todd Burns

Is there a question?

Audience Member

I was just wondering if you had some advice for young composers or young artists?

Alvin Lucier

Yeah. Keep doing your own work. This is terrible. When I was 40, 50, Philip Glass’s name was in The New York Times every single day. Really. He’s a good friend of mine, wonderful composer. I thought, well, we’ve missed the boat. People love John Adams, Steve Reich, my good friends. I thought, who’s interested in pieces I do? But now, the older I get, the more people... if you stick to it. If you stop, that’s a mistake. If you change, I think it’s a big mistake to change your work to get to a wider audience. Do your own work as well as you can. That’s all I can say.

Audience Member

Awesome. Thank you.

Todd Burns

I think it’s interesting... I remember Philip Glass saying once that he was driving a cab until he was 40 or something like that. So even don’t stop composing even if you’re not finding that success...

Alvin Lucier

He owed $90,000 for doing Einstein on the Beach. He got into debt. That’s a wonderful piece. Do you ever know Einstein on the Beach?

Todd Burns

Seems like most of your pieces are pretty cheap in terms of cost involved. You’re borrowing speakers from friends and this sort of thing.

Alvin Lucier

Years ago, I came home from Germany one night, went to the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Einstein on the Beach. No, I hadn’t that much heard it. There was a black rider. I was falling asleep, jet lag. I thought, “What would I like to do before I die? I’d like to go salmon fishing in Iceland.” I did that. Like to ride my bicycle across the United States. I did not do that. I went down to the Florida Keys. Want to go to Epidaurus, the wonderful classical Greek outdoor theater. I’m gonna do that in June. Hear the acoustics. I’d like to do a piece with Bob Wilson. I went home. You get those ideas all the time. Then what?

I thought, “Well, Ronald Vance,” he was a colleague of mine. He was Bob’s financial advisor. I called Ronald up. I said, “Ronald.” I don’t ever do this, once in my life, I said, “How can I do a piece with Bob Wilson?” He said, “Why don’t you come next week? Bob’s having an installation in SoHo. Come down, I’ll introduce you to him.” There is a huge storm, thunder, lightning, flooding. Thought, “I’m not gonna drive down.“ Then I thought, “If you don’t go, all you can say is you never went.” I drove through the storm. I went into this room with 200 people. Ronald called Bob. Said, “Bob, this is Alvin Lucier.” He said, “Oh yeah, I know who you are.” I said, “I’d like you to do a piece...” Didn’t flinch. He said, “Speak to Keith McDermott, my assistant. Come to Watermill this summer.”

We did a piece with our students, Wesleyan. I showed up at Watermill. I showed him I had this moving door. Had this door on a platform controlled by a Volvo windshield wiper motor, controlled by a toy sailboat controller. I could move this wall across a space slowly, shining, illuminating it with a high frequency wave. Sound would move around the space. He said, “This is great.” Two days later, he said to Keith McDermott, ”Get me Jack and Jill, all these actors.” Came, they sat there on the stage, said, “OK, gonna make a piece. ABC ABC ABC. A is gonna be things I’m gonna be near. B is medium shot. C are gonna be landscapes.” He started with the seven actors. I’ll never forget this. They’re sitting there like this. He’d say, “OK, Jack, you get up. No no, don’t put your hand down. Keep your hand wherever it was.” He’d just do it, fast.

He’d say, “OK, take six steps. Stop.” He had these just... Just made them into a beautiful... I said, “Bob, could you stop a minute? If I could tune an oscillator to a D above middle C, everyone can sing that, men and women sing that pitch. When they’re moving, I can have them hum. When they stop, they would stop.” “OK, everyone, take five. Alvin has to set up my loudspeaker.” Went through. Of course, you can’t sing unison with the D, so you hear the beating. It’s beautiful. “OK, let’s do the next one.” Then I saw he had an actor walking. I said, “Bob, could you stop a minute. You have an actor walking upstage there. If I could get a drum, a snare drum, I could tune an oscillator as he moves through the crests and troughs of the standing waves, the drum roll.” “OK, everyone take five. Let Alvin.” He never said, “Change something. I don’t like this.” Every scene, I got an idea.

And we did the piece. Keith came up to school. Interviewed these... Some kids had never been on the stage before. He auditioned them by having them walk across, taking several minutes to walk across the stage. Those people that could do it. Then Bob showed up at night, rehearsed all the next day. We presented the piece the next day, it was beautiful. So I made my piece with Bob Wilson.

Todd Burns

Are there any other questions?

Alvin Lucier

Yes?

Audience Member

Does music have a spiritual meaning for you?

Alvin Lucier

No. Not in that... I went to a Benedictine preparatory school. I got out of public high school. My grades were so bad, I didn’t get into any schools at all. My father said, “Well, he’s not college material.” My mother was tough. She’d never been to college. She called me up in her bedroom. She said, “I’ve heard such a thing as preparatory schools. Go up to the Nashua public... [library]. Find yourself, prepare... You’ll go to school during the summer.” I did. I found a Benedictine school. Why a religious school? I’ve no idea. I wasn’t very religious. I’d been reading Joyce, I guess. I was reading Joyce, of course I flunked out of my... Joyce had a funny relationship with his teachers. He hated the Jesuits. He said, “What the Jesuits gave me was a way to organize my material.” I always remember that.

Anyway, I went to this prep school. I survived the summer. They let me go the next year. I remember a Trappist monastery burned down near Portsmouth, Rhode Island. The monks all... I went into the chapel one day. I saw a monk kneeling there, just contemplating. Came back in three hours. He was in the same position. I thought, what’s he thinking? If there’s any such thing as pure thought, this guy must be doing that. It just struck me. That image of this person contemplating, it’s the difference between meditating and contemplating. I don’t like to do the... I think you’re thinking of one thing a lot. I think that image stuck in my head. He wasn’t pious. He wasn’t praying. His eyes were open. He’s concentrating on one thing in some deep way. I think my mother used to say I had a one track mind. I think you have to have a one track mind to be a... In that sense, my music is spiritual. In that sense, but not in any spiritual way.

Todd Burns

Do you think seeing that monk had any impact on Music for Solo Performer?

Alvin Lucier

Yes, except I had to do, I had to be quiet. I didn’t decide to do it. It wasn’t an aesthetic idea, you have to sit quietly to let your alpha waves get strong enough. My decisions are real. The fact that those two things intersect is maybe... I didn’t think of it in that way.

Todd Burns

Are there any other questions?

Audience Member

I want to preface this question by saying I hope it doesn’t come off as silly, and I hope it’s not a sensitive subject. I did want to ask you about your speech impediment. Because listening to your work, it always somehow seemed relevant to the work that you did with time and delay, especially. I guess I was just wondering if that ever influenced or informed any part of the work that you do.

Alvin Lucier

I don’t think about it until you just said... No no, no. Delay. I remember reading. I read a lot about stuttering. People still don’t know why one stutters. I think it’s anxiety. Some people think there’s a delay between what you’re saying and the feedback you’re hearing. There’s this idea about delay. I never thought about it in that way, but maybe my interest in delay, because I’m not the only composer that’s been interested in that. Perhaps there is some subliminal. I don’t think about that, but perhaps there’s something in there.

Audience Member

Thank you.

Audience Member

Thanks very much. I’m hoping that you might have some advice for someone whose work is very much informed by yours, although I don’t work in sound. I’ve been developing work with EEG and video feedback loops. I’m curious if you’ve worked with video, if you have any thoughts about that, or if you are just a sound guy.

Alvin Lucier

The guy in... When I go in October over to Moscow, he wants me to do something that shows visually. I don’t like to do that for some reason. I don’t know why. It’s distracting. He said if there’s anything with fog. Fog. Can sound influence fog? It can’t. He’s got all these…people give you ideas. Although in my original score for the alpha wave piece, one of the mistakes we made was that you write a verbal score, fairly specific. At the end you’d always say, well, “I’ll broaden it out.” At the end, I say, “Well, you can use these switch.” I had this switch that activated my alpha. You could turn on lights. I’ve never done that. He said, “When you said that, the score.” I have to think about. I don’t want to do that unless it were environmental or something, lights are flickering. I guess I’ve never liked that idea.

I’ve never liked the idea of using alpha waves as control signals. I wanted a direct sound. Actually, it’s not a sound. It’s a bare pulse. Alpha rhythm is too slow to be a pitch, but you can hear those pulses bursting through loudspeaker. I was much more interested in that than in using other waves that would control electronic equipment. To me, that’s the same old stuff. I don’t know. I’m not too interested in that idea.

Todd Burns

Are there any other questions? There’s one behind you.

Audience Member

Hi, I was just wondering if you have any upcoming performances in this part of the world, I guess? Anywhere, the northeastern United States.

Alvin Lucier

Not enough. I may do something at the Issue Project Room in the spring. In October, November. I don’t have much going on.

Todd Burns

If there’s anyone in the room who books events, please. He’s here. He’s ready.

Alvin Lucier

I don’t know how ready I am.

Todd Burns

He’s here. He’s here at the very least.

Alvin Lucier

Gonna be 86 in May. Maybe that’s enough.

Todd Burns

Thank you very much, Alvin Lucier. Really appreciate that.

Alvin Lucier

Thank you very much. [applause]