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Inside This Issue George Handy’s Bloos by Benjamin Bierman Bukharian Jewish Music in Queens by Evan Rapport American Hymn Tune Index by Gayle Sherwood Magee Composing Queer, review by Howard Pollack Nine Hours with Jelly Roll Morton, review by Jeff Taylor |
Oscillating with Lucier Review by David Grubbs It both is and is not so unlikely that two new releases representing the American composer Alvin Lucier have appeared almost simultaneously. Anthony Burr and Charles Curtis’s Alvin Lucier (Antiopic/Sigma Editions ANSI002, 2 CDs) and The Barton Workshop’s Wind Shadows (New World 80628-2, 2 CDs) prominently feature Lucier’s drone-based works, a number of which pair a solo instrumentalist with a performer operating a pure wave oscillator. The result is that listeners now have at their fingertips not one but two recordings of “In Memoriam Jon Higgins” (1984) and “In Memoriam Stuart Marshall” (1993/rev. 2003), two of the most impressive and satisfying of Lucier’s works in this very specific idiom. One reason that we are seeing nearly simultaneous releases of overlapping material is that younger musicians and composers are currently creating work that invokes and invites comparison to Lucier. The selection of works on these CDs amounts to an argument for Lucier’s more minimal, process-oriented work as a crucial precedent for contemporary artists such as Toshimaru Nakamura, known for manipulating feedback looped through an audio mixing board, and Sachiko M with her Philip K. Dickian instrument, the sampler without memory. The gentle deployment of sonic interference patterns that create beating effects has become widespread among a group of composers, improvisers, and sound artists often designated by the term “lowercase.” Across these two collections, Lucier consistently reworks this and similar techniques, multiplying them, and eventually winding up with a series of works of crystalline, controlled beauty. Alvin Lucier is best
known for minimalist process pieces such as “I Am Sitting in a
Room” (1970). In that simple yet
astonishing piece, a recording of Lucier reading a paragraph that begins with
the work’s title is played back and transformed by successive
re-recordings such that Lucier’s stuttering speech is transformed into
the ghostly, abstracted, rubbed-out sounds of the room’s resonant
frequencies. As Lucier explained,
“Every room has its own melody, hiding there until it is made
audible.” This task of making
art out of heretofore obscure acoustical phenomena—often dealing with
sound transformed by a physical space—is a thread that connects much of
Lucier’s work. He is a composer
for whom recordings have only intermittently done justice, as his music often
demands to be experienced in the space in which it is performed. Recordings of earlier works such as
“Vespers” (1969) and “Chambers” (1968) arguably
create more questions than they answer regarding the experience of the work
in the space of its sounding. With
these two new releases, Lucier has found nearly ideal interpreters who have
selected works with an ear towards their representation in recording. Clarinetist Anthony Burr and cellist
Charles Curtis have assembled a fascinating collection of Lucier’s
works, all for solo instrument plus oscillator, with the exception of the
album’s concluding piece, “Music for Cello with One or More
Amplified Vases” (1993). Many of
these pieces are based on slowly changing relationships between an
oscillator’s drone and a solo instrument played with exquisite
attention to microtonal detail.
“In Memoriam Jon Higgins” features the slow upward
glissando of an electronically-generated sine wave; the clarinet part
consists of a sequence of held tones, and the two instruments create beating
patterns as their pitches move into and out of unison. Both Burr and Curtis are first-rate
performers of this ascetic, demanding music.
In Curtis’s case, this should be little surprise, given that he
has performed La Monte Young’s music for almost two decades. This
particular recording runs the risk that by grouping together a host of
too-similar works, the impact of any individual piece may be diluted. I didn’t find this to be the case. Listeners approaching this music for the
first time might find the differences between these works
slight—sweeping oscillator versus fixed-pitch oscillator—but
there are many subtle pleasures to be had when encountering these pieces as a
family. As
with much work that has a strong conceptual component, Lucier’s
music has suffered from the preconceptions of listeners who think that by
reading a description they already “get” the music. Burr and Curtis have done an interesting
thing in the accompanying booklet, which neglects descriptions of the
individual works—there’s no “getting” these works
without listening—in favor of excerpts from writings by Kepler on the
glissando, Helmholtz on beating patterns, Edgard Varèse on sirens, and Adorno
and Horkheimer on the Sirens. When
Lucier is quoted, it tends be something along the lines of “One of my
fantasies is having been a French Canadian fur trapper in the 19th century in
the American West.” Burr and
Curtis’s Alvin Lucier is a rewarding listen, a compelling read, and
unmistakable in its editorial-aesthetic slant. Wind Shadows, which
features performances of Lucier’s music by the Amsterdam-based ensemble
The Barton Workshop, gives a broader overview of Lucier’s music from
the last two decades. These are also excellent,
wondrously precise performances—what the compositions unambiguously
demand—but the album avoids the sharper, more extreme curatorial focus
of Burr and Curtis’s release. It
presents the listener with less of a minimal, monolithic exercise in sublimity. Does that render the experience of the
individual piece less immersive?
That’s for the listener to decide. Do you want twenty minutes of fine
gradations? Or more like two hours? Wind Shadows contains a number of pieces that have grown outwards from the trunk of the single-instrument-plus-oscillator tree. “Q” (1996), for quintet plus two oscillators, is a work of great textural complexity in which up to ten beating patterns are superimposed. The quintet operates within the compass of a major third (G to B) that contains the fixed pitches of two oscillators tuned to form a major second (A-flat and B-flat). Microtonal variations reveal a bristling world within this relatively narrow band of sound. “Fideliotrio” (1987), for viola, cello, and piano, features microtonal adjustments in the string parts that make it sound as if the piano’s tuning is changing before your very ears. I can describe the process, and you can understand it, but that’s a sorry second to hearing a performance such as this one. —David
Grubbs Brooklyn
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