*In loving memory of Alvin Lucier (1931-2021)*
In loving memory of american composer, sound artist and maverick Alvin
Lucier <
https://rwm.macba.cat/en/sonia/sonia-226-alvin-lucier> (1931-2021),
we dig up a conversation with Alvin, one of the most amazing composers and
sound artists we've seen, in which he talks about the need to listen
carefully, the composers that have accompanied and influenced him over the
years, and the role of space and technology in his work, among many other
things. One of a kind.
Podcast:
https://rwm.macba.cat/en/sonia/sonia-226-alvin-lucier
A key figure in post-Cage experimental music, Alvin Lucier (1931-2021), is
one of a kind, a composer who, as James Tenney says, makes his fellow
musicians find themselves “having to revise our basic (and often
unconscious) assumptions – our self-evident axioms about music.” Driven by
a curiosity to understand “how things work” (an innocent and unprejudiced
curiosity that Tenney compares to that of a child), Lucier always seems
ready to disappear within sound.
It is as if his fascination with the sound phenomenon leads him to avoid
interfering in its manifestation. His work is thus by no means based on
self-expression or on compositional interventions. Instead, he allows
sounds to “be themselves” without pushing or directing them in any way.
*Timeline*
00:01 Not just listening
00:46 Revealing implicit sounds
02:53 Let it happen: on "Music for Piano and Magnetic Strings"
07:18 Transparency of sounds
08:35 The question of space
10:48 Music that happens in a loudspeaker
13:16 Letting the players play
14:59 "I'm Sitting in a Room"... live: something wonderful about real time
17:30 "All I wanted to do is to tell people what I was doing"
RIP