Guest Writer: Steven Kado
I Am Sitting In a Room: Alvin Lucier

Posted by: zac | From: July 27, 2005

When young me looked an Ad Reinhardt painting and saw that big black square it was just so savage so 'BANG! BIG BLACK RECURSSIVE RECTANGLE!' that you just had to admire the power such a thing had. Getting hazed by 12th graders or being in circle pits are all kind of the same thing--macho minimalism. Who can deny that the perfect arc of a grade 9 thrown into a bush resembles the swooping arches of Eero Saarien's buildings, undoubtedly it was the similarity of circle pits to the swirling CACHUNGACHUNGACHUNGA of Steve Reich's 'It's Gonna Rain' and 'Come Out' that really sucked the inner me into the idea of contemporary composition in the first place (i would probably never have admitted this at the time). These pieces by Reich were pieces that swept confused young people off to an angry and political land of tribal repetition. Yet, it's not the nearly sado-masocistic art of Ad Reinhardt that still sticks with me most from those days but that of Agnes Martin. The personal uncertainty and gentleness that inhabits Martin's faded and washed out grids, the combination of absolute and abstract form and intense physical and personal connection with the work through it's creator's own vulnerability. So now, here, it is gentleness that I'd like to praise, the gentleness that teenage me knew about but couldn't access in recorded form until i was actually in a position to like such a thing fully, the gentle music of *America's #1 Composer of Music
*Alvin Lucier.

Lucier's gentleness is austere, yet still humorous and touching. It silences any claims that minimal work is too cerebral, too conceptual to be personal. In fact it silences most things since silence is the only response possible when first you confront the most incredible fact that music can offer: the fact of sound. No music can be more breathtaking than the music that shows you the wonder of actual hearing, the gift of ears brought home, the physical tangible force that is sound. There are lots of people who are into this kind of phenomenological thing, but most, like Panasonic, use facts to stun. Instead of "sound: the pulverizer", Lucier give you "my friend: sound." Lucier's deft use of the personal and the conceptual leaves all similar sounding musicians in the dust, while quietly dismantling the mind/body dichotomy that started with Plato and hasn't ever stopped giving us grief.

Blessed with one of the most ridiculous stutters known to all mankind Lucier has incredible problems communicating. Yet he does, to the extent of offering lectures and teaching, all things that presumably a debilitating stutter would make quite difficult. I saw a video about John Cage once where they interviewed Lucier about how he met Cage. It went like this:

[Prof. A. Lucier, looking like a New England version of John Cleese, and
Interviewer are seated in a TV studio, facing each other at a slight
angle and sitting on bent metal chairs]

Q: "So, when did you first meet John Cage?"

A: "I
fff....fff....fff....f.....fffff......f.f.f........fffrrrrrrrrrrrr.......[etc]

[the camera cuts to show John Cage setting up a concert on a street
corner somewhere, a piano being moved in, the sound track remains as
that of the interview with Lucier continuing to stutter, camera returns
to the studio]

A: ....fffff.fff..ffff... I first met John Cage in..nnn.n 19 53*.

[end]

*I forget exactly when this meeting was said to have occurred, I'm just putting it in there to make a point about the stutter.

This stutter, makes its way into Lucier's most famous piece, "I am sitting in a room" and in so doing reveals a graceful, elegant and touchingly simple way for work to be highly personal without making it
all about 'you', without tripping in front of the oncoming truck that is irresponsible expressionism. The music of "I am sitting in a room" consists of Lucier speaking a prepared text, slowly, comfortably and with only one audible stutter. He then plays the recording of that spoken text back into the same room he spoke it into while recording it again on another tape player. This process is repeated several times until the resonant frequencies of the room expand certain frequencies in the recording of his voice and remove certain others, the end result is a harmonious wash of sound (obviously, the room had some quite pleasing resonant frequencies) not unlike a microstoria album or the sound of
your room mate listening to a gamelan record in the next room. The goal he gives for this entire procedure is "not to demonstrate any facts or acoustic phenomenon, but to eliminate any imperfections his voice might have". The strange thing is that the only feature of Lucier's voice that
remains detectable after its final transformation is the rhythmic throb left by his stutter, all else has been removed. Think of it, here is a man showing us in a very revealing and vulnerable way what he is like in a place where he is (and for the piece he actually has to have been there). Yet, despite only really stuttering once, despite completing an almost perfect performance, it is through his "imperfections" that he is at all able to separate himself from his context, his flaws are all that
the room leaves to him of himself. You could either see this as a victory for Lucier's self, as the ugly duckling stutter growing into the beautiful and assertive rhythmic swan, or alternatively you could see it as a sign that it is only our failings that make us distinct, that keep us from being truly what we are (which is to say just prideful people in rooms somewhere).

It is so much more powerful to show than to tell, and Lucier never gets on stage and yells: "HEY THIS IS ME! I AM LIKE THIS!" he just gets up there and does stuff that shows you what he's like, or more often he just shows you what its like to be you where you are. This is what appears time and again in Lucier's work, i think of it as a kind of variation on "direct action gets the goods", and while some pieces aren't as well rounded or as moving as "I am sitting in a room" there are still tons of gems out there in Lucier's work. One piece, "Vespers," is written entirely for Soundols, which are these devices that simulate dolphin echolocation clicks and features a group of performers charting and demonstrating the acoustic nature of the place it is performed. Another, perhaps one of Lucier's more frivolous major works, /Music for Solo Performer/ features a 'performer' with ECGs mounted on their head monitoring their brain waves. The waves are then turned into signals that are then used to activate a roomful of passive percussion instruments. So while brain waves possess a generalized regularity (if they don't you're having a seizure) their action is still unfathomable and random-like. pieces like this tend to say relatively little, or have large weird gaps between the two elements being investigated (it is interesting to show, not to talk about, what is going on in your head, but what does that have to do with a room full of drums? what is interesting about the room where these Sondols are being used? Why do that here?) these kind of works succeed completely in aesthetic terms.
Yet don't meet the conceptual highs Lucier's best work achieves so effortlessly.

Alvin Lucier teaches at Wesleyan University. He said my friend's tape editing assignment looked like it was done by a three-toed sloth (it looked like shit apparently) and he likes to start his lectures off with
a joke. Last summer he was on the cover of the Wire and it made me feel so proud of him (it's weird, because I'm sure he doesn't care if I'm rooting for him or not). Although not strictly a band, I would definitely call Alvin Lucier my favorite composer ever. Of All Time. His only competition is Schubert and even there, Schubert wrote a lot more filler.

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