Browse by Artist: LUCIER, ALVIN

Artist:	LUCIER, ALVIN
Title:	Music On A Long Thin Wire
Label:	LOVELY MUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	LCD 1011

All-time classic release. Alvin Lucier is one of American's quintessential minimalist innovators, composing & performing extreme music for pure tones, brains waves, the ""generation of visual imagery by sound in vibrating media," etc. Music On A Long Thin Wire is one of his all-time classic works of hovering tones & sonic phenomena, recorded in 1979. "A 50-foot length of taut wire passes through the poles of a large magnet and is driven by an oscillator; the vibrations of the wire are miked at either end, amplified and broadcast in stereo. The thin wire is set vibrating four times at four different frequencies; what results is not the low drone one might expect from a long, vibrating wire, but a complexity of evocative, ethereal chords. First released on Lovely Music in 1980, Music on a Long Thin Wire is a classic example of Alvin Lucier's investigations into the physics of sound and the sonic properties of natural processes."

Artist:	LUCIER, ALVIN
Title:	Panorama
Label:	LOVELY MUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	LCD 1012

Consists of 1990-94 recordings, released in '97. "A gorgeous recording of works for trombone and piano, transformed by Lucier's electronics and oscillators. 'Wind Shadows' (1994), 'Music for Piano with One or More Snare Drums' (1990), and 'Panorama' (1993) -- were written for the Swiss musicians Roland Dahinden and Hildegard Kleeb, who play them on this CD. Also included: 'Music for Piano with Amplified Sonorous Vessels' (1990), which was originally written for Margaret Leng Tan."

Artist:	LUCIER, ALVIN
Title:	I Am Sitting In A Room
Label:	LOVELY MUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	LCD 1013

All-time classic release, restocked. One of Lucier's most iconic works and a cornerstone in the world of resonant frequencies. Performed by Lucier on recorded voice, tape machines, delay. "In this fascinating exploration of acoustical phenomena, Alvin Lucier slips from the domain of language to that of music in the course of 40 minutes and 32 repetitions of a simple paragraph of text. In I am sitting in a room, several sentences of recorded speech are simultaneously played back into a room and re-recorded there many times. As the repetitive process continues, those sounds common to the original spoken statement and those implied by the structural dimensions of the room are reinforced. The others are gradually eliminated. The space acts as a filter; the speech is transformed into pure sound. All the recorded segments are spliced together in the order in which they were made and constitute the work. I am sitting in a room was composed in 1970; This recording was made by Alvin Lucier on October 29th and 31st, 1980, in the living room of his home in Middletown, CT."

Artist:	LUCIER, ALVIN
Title:	Still and Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas
Label:	LOVELY MUSIC
Format:	2CD
Price:	$26.00
Catalog #:	LCD 1015

Double CD release of of a four-part work, initiated in 1972 and recorded as presented here in 1983/4 and 2001. This reissues 2 long o/p LPs on Lovely, with 4 added parts released for the first time. A series of mostly solo instrument works for the likes of: clarinet, marimba, viola, voice, xylophone, violin, flute, glockenspiel, cello, horn, vibraphone. Performed by: Thomas Ridenour, William Winant, Dan Panner, Rebecca Armstrong, Conrad Harris, Susan Palma, Gregory Hesslink, James de Corsey. An absolute masterpiece of "interference sound".

Artist:	LUCIER, ALVIN
Title:	Crossings
Label:	LOVELY MUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	LCD 1018

"1990 CD reissue of prime-era Lucier product, with works from 1982-85. Features 'In Memoriam Jon Higgins (for clarinet in A and slow-sweep pure wave oscillator)', 'Septet for Three Winds, Four Strings and Pure Wave Oscillator', and 'Crossings (for small orchestra with slow-sweep pure wave oscillator)'. Said slow-sweep pure wave oscillator produces slowly swept pure waves that oscillate (on separate occasions) a clarinet, three winds and four strings, and a small orchestra. Maximum beat frequency heterodyning, often at an audible pitch. Similar acoustic phenomena as Tony Conrad/Penderecki string work and just as aurally stimulating (for those with lazy ear-ciliae)." -- Hrvatski.

Artist:	LUCIER, ALVIN
Title:	Clocker
Label:	LOVELY MUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	LCD 1019

Another classic Lucier catalog item, a 45-minute recording made in 1991 of this piece that he first conceived in 1978. The piece is for: amplified clock, performer with galvanic skin response sensor and digital delay system. The sounds that emanate are beautifully shifting patterns of tock-collage that reveal dramatic sonic detailings. "I wanted to make a work in which a performer could speed up and slow down time, stopping it, if possible, simply by thinking. I bought a Westclox Silver Bell Monogram in a local store and ordered a galvanic skin response sensor through the Edmund Scientific Catalogue. A GSR is designed to measure differences in skin resistance caused by changes in emotional state. A small current is sent through the body, the response to which is amplified, producing an output voltage which can be used to control various devices...later I added a bank of fixed delays which, as they splay out from the voltage controlled delay, create multiple reflections that almost convince the listener that the room is changing size."

Artist:	LUCIER, ALVIN
Title:	Theme
Label:	LOVELY MUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	LCD 5011

New 1999 release previously unrecorded Lucier works from the mid-90s. Features: "Music for Piano with Magnetic Strings" (performed by Lois Svard, piano), "Theme" (Sam Ashley, Thomas Buckner, Jacqueline Humbert and Joan La Barbara, voices set to a poem by John Ashbery) and "Music For Gamelan Instruments, Microphones, Amplifiers and Loudspeakers" (performed by the Wesleyan University Gamelan Ensemble). "'Music For Piano...' is a work in which the strings of a piano sound by themselves. Several EBows (small electromagnets used primarily with electric guitars) are placed on the strings of the piano. The pianist works from a prose score which describes the process and suggests (s)he freely position and reposition five EBows on the piano strings, creating strands of sounds of varying density and texture. Much of the pianist's time is spent listening for harmonics, audible beating, occasional rhythms produced as one or more magnets vibrate against adjacent strings, and other acoustic phenomena. 'Theme' sets a poem of John Ashbery's to music. Lucier didn't want to violate the flow of the words of the poem by fragmentation or any other cut-up method. The stanzas seemed musical enough just as they were, and he wanted the audience to hear the poem more or less in its pristine state. So working intuitively and by ear, he wrote out the poem for four readers in the order it was written, repeating words and phrases, overlapping and superimposing them in various ways. To 'set' the poem, he inserted microphones into the mouths of various vessels, including a small milk bottle, a sea shell, a vase , and an empty ostrich egg, to pick up the words as they were sounding inside the vessels. The readers speak normally, allowing the pitches of their voices which match those resonances of the vessels to create musical sounds."

Artist:	LUCIER, ALVIN
Title:	Still Lives
Label:	LOVELY MUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	LCD 5012

"Three new pieces for piano soloist with accompanying pure wave oscillation. Titles: 'Music for Piano with Slow Sweep Pure Wave Oscillators' (performed/composed for Marilyn Nonken), "On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon" (performed/composed for Ryuko Mizutani), and 'Still Lives' (performed/composed for Joseph Kubera). All pieces exhibit Lucier's unique take on performance-environment concepts. Quiet, melancholy, rather soothing. Gaining age with grace I suppose." -- Hrvatski

Artist:	LUCIER, ALVIN
Title:	Sferics/Music For Solo Performer
Label:	LOVELY MUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	LCD 5013

"Sferics is the shortened term for atmospherics, natural radio-frequency emissions in the ionosphere, caused by electromagnetic energy radiated from nearby or distant lightning. These signals -- resonant clicks and pops, called tweeks and bonks by scientists -- occur in the audible range of humans and may be picked up by antennas and amplified for listening. They are best received at night, far from power lines. Occasionally, certain sferics get caught on and travel long distances along the magnetic flux lines around the earth, producing whistlers -- downward-gliding signals which may last up to two or three seconds. My interest in sferics goes back to 1967, when I discovered in the Brandeis University Library a disc recording of ionospheric sounds by astrophysicist Millett Morgan of Dartmouth College. I experimented with this material, processing it in various ways -- filtering, narrow band amplifying and phase-shifting -- but I was unhappy with the idea of altering natural sounds and uneasy about using someone else's material for my own purposes. I wanted to have the experience of listening to these sounds in real time and collecting them for myself. When Pauline Oliveros invited me to visit the music department at the University of California at San Diego a year later, I proposed a whistler recording project. Despite two weeks of extending antenna wire across most of the La Jolla landscape and wrestling with homemade battery-operated radio receivers, Pauline and I had nothing to show for our efforts. About ten years later composer Ned Sublette, who was interested in radio waves of all kinds, recommended a book by Calvin R. Graf, Listen to Radio Energy, Light and Sound, which describe a simple method of building a large loop antenna with which to receive these natural phenomena. Sferics was recorded by the composer on August 27, 1981, in Church Park, Colorado. The sound material was collected continuously from midnight to dawn with a pair of homemade antennas and a stereo cassette tape recorder. At regular intervals the antennas were repositioned in order to explore the directivity of the propagated signals and to shift the stereo field."
"Music For Solo Performer was first performed on May 5, 1965 at the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, with the encouragement and participation of John Cage. I sat on a landing between the two floors of the museum, electrodes attached to my scalp. The mono output of the alpha amplifiers was routed to the inputs of 8 home stereo amplifiers, the outputs of which were sent to 16 loudspeaker-percussion pairs deployed around the museum. During the course of the 40-minute performance Cage randomly raised and lowered the stereo amplifiers' volume controls channeling the alpha signal to various instruments around the room. In 1982 two versions of Music For Solo Performer were released on Lovely Music LP VR 1014. On Side A the composer superimposed eight pairs of western classical percussion instruments, as well as a cardboard box and a metal trash can. On Side B Pauline Oliveros recorded four versions, each with a separate world music percussion orchestra. For that version composer Nicolas Collins designed a number of voltage-controlled solenoids that were used as electric drumsticks to play various small drums and gongs. This recording of Music For Solo Performer was produced under the supervision of Wesleyan professor of music Ron Kuivila with the assistance of graduate students Ivan Naranjo and Phillip Schulze and undergraduate Forrest Leslie, at the Wesleyan University Experimental Music Studio, on December 8 and 9, 2007."

Artist:	LUCIER, ALVIN
Title:	Ever Present
Label:	MODE
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	MODE 178CD

Awesome collection of new, post-2000 works by Lucier. It's a been a long time since "I Am Sitting In A Room" for sure, but the dude clearly understands how to fill a room with sound as well as most anyone alive. "Alvin Lucier's (b. 1931) works on this CD, for solos and trios, continue to explore his unique sound world, exploration of microtones, and use of unusual instrumentation. 'Piper' is probably one of the few avant-garde pieces composed for the bagpipe. The piper is asked to walk slowly around the performance space, sounding his instrument as he does so. From time to time he detunes the chanters, creating beating patterns of slightly varying speeds and minor spatial disturbances (imaginary dopplers). In 'Fan,' four koto players play a long series of plucked tones over a 12-minute time span. During the course of '947,' four pure tones are sounded in all their combinations. In 'Silver Streetcar,' the player dampens the triangle with the thumb and forefinger of one hand while tapping the instrument with the other. Ever Present is inspired by Robert Irwin's garden at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. Four first recordings."

Artist:	LUCIER, ALVIN
Title:	Vespers And Other Early Works
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80604CD

"Alvin Lucier (b. 1931) is best known for his pioneering work in the mid-sixties in the exploration of sonic environments, particularly sounds that we would never perceive under ordinary circumstances. Vespers and Other Early Works restores to the catalog several of his key works from that time. In 'Vespers' (1969) performers with Sondols (sonar-dolphin), hand-held pulse wave oscillators, explore the acoustic characteristics of given indoor or outdoor spaces by monitoring the echoes of the pulse waves off the walls, floors and ceilings, as well as any objects or obstacles in range of the sound waves. Over time, the listener receives an acoustic signature of the room. In 'Chambers' (1968), battery-operated radios, tape recorders, and electronically powered toys of various kinds are hidden in paper bags, shoes, kettles, and small suitcases and other small resonant environments. As performers carry these small 'rooms' into larger ones, such as concert halls, football stadiums and underground cisterns, the sounds, already altered by the acoustics of the small environments, are altered a second time by the acoustics of the larger ones. This version was recorded in 2002. 'North American Time Capsule' (1967), for voices and vocoder, is described metaphorically by Lucier as a message to listeners who don't know about us. '(Middletown) Memory Space' (1970) is a reenactment of the composition called '(Hartford) Memory Space', for any number of instrumental players with recordings of environmental sounds. 'Elegy for Albert Anastasia' (1961-1963) is described as composed 'for electromagnetic tape using very low sounds most of which are below human audibility.' Liner notes by Robert Ashley."

Artist:	LUCIER, ALVIN
Title:	Wind Shadows
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	2CD
Price:	$30.00
Catalog #:	NW 80628CD

"The music on these CDs takes us into a new realm of music making, one that Alvin Lucier (b. 1931) has defined for us and one that demands that we start to listen anew. His work has been more often described in terms of science than of art as if it were a series of quasi-scientific experiments, but to put the emphasis here is to miss the point, for its purpose is never 'explanatory' (the goal of science) but, like all art, 'revelatory.' This is not to suggest that the composer has some spiritual agenda in the usual sense of this term. On the contrary, it is the physical behavior of sound itself that he so elegantly reveals, each work unveiling an otherwise hidden or ephemeral aspect of aural phenomena and allowing us time to witness its beauty. He achieves this by ruthlessly excluding any trace of self-expression, or indeed anything extraneous to the phenomenon itself. The Barton Workshop has been the only group to really work closely with Lucier in terms of doing 'portraits' of his work (the first in 1995), commissioning new works (40 Rooms, Bar Lazy J, and Q) and performing older/extant pieces. This 2CD set is the fruit of this long collaborative process. In Memoriam Stuart Marshall [bass clarinet and pure wave oscillator] (1993/rev. 2003), 40 Rooms [quintet and digital reverberation system] (1996), In Memoriam Jon Higgins [clarinet and slow sweep pure wave oscillator] (1984), Letters [clarinet, violin, cello, piano] (1992), Q [quintet and pure wave oscillators] (1996), A Tribute to James Tenney [double bass and pure wave oscillators] (1986), Bar Lazy J [clarinet, trombone] (2003), Fideliotrio [viola, cello, piano] (1987), Wind Shadows [trombone and closely tuned oscillators](1994)."

Artist:	LUCIER, ALVIN
Title:	Almost New York
Label:	POGUS
Format:	2CD
Price:	$19.00
Catalog #:	POGUS 21057

"Pogus is extremely delighted to release this 2 CD set of recordings of works by Alvin Lucier. He is one of the key experimental artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, and is one of my favorite composers. A unique and individual artist: No one sounds quite like Alvin Lucier. Lucier writes about the genesis of the works on this release: 'Since the early 1980s I have made a series of works for conventional musical instruments. Before that time I had been mainly occupied with the exploration of such phenomena as echolocation, brain waves, room acoustics and the visual representation of sound. Often these works required special equipment -- hand held pulse wave oscillators ("Vespers"), differential amplifiers ("Music for Solo Performer"), horseshoe magnets ("Music on a Long Thin Wire"). Then players began asking me for pieces. Now I needed to find a way of achieving the same poetry with acoustic instruments as I did with electronic means. One of the things I discovered was that players could create rhythmic patterns by closely tuning with electronically generated pure waves or with each other, producing audible beats. Often, to get continuous motion, I have one or more voices sweep up or down at various speeds against fixed sustained pitches. As a wave approaches a sustained pitch the audible beating slows down to zero when it reaches unison, then speeds up again as the wave leaves the pitch. Almost New York employs slow sweep pure wave oscillators, Broken Line, flute glissandi. In "Twonings" two different tuning systems collide and in "Coda Variations" slight variations in pitch are heard chronologically.'
Recorded by Charles Curtis, Joseph Kubera, Robert Dick, Danny Tunick, and Robin Hayward - some of the leading new music performers of our era, these works are essential additions to the Alvin Lucier oeuvre, as well as satisfying anyone interested in great experimental music."

Artist:	LUCIER, ALVIN
Title:	Nothing Is Real...
Label:	WERGO (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$22.00
Catalog #:	WER 6660

Performed by Matthias Kaul (percussion, voice & piano), recorded 2001. "The focus of the pieces by composer Alvin Lucier on this Wergo CD is the phenomena of resonance -- sympathetic vibration -- in many variations. 'Time and again, I find myself having to pare away any musical gestures in a work in order to uncover the true idea in a piece,' says Lucier. The composer knows which ideas he wants to liberate. But the process of causing the environment to resound is always a collaborative, interactive project. It needs someone who is creatively engaged, even obsessed, to make Lucier's music of ideas a music of the ears. Percussionist Matthias Kaul is just such a person, and this new disc, Nothing Is Real..., will open up many ears to Lucier's compositional brilliance."

Artist:	LUCIER, ALVIN
Title:	Old School
Label:	ZEITKRATZER (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.50
Catalog #:	ZKR 011CD

Alvin Lucier is one of the most outstanding American minimalists -- he could be called a sound physician and his compositions regarded as acoustic research settings. Often, his pieces turn inside-out the inner properties of the room they are played in and the instrument that they are played on. Zeitkratzer had the chance to work with the composer in Dijon, France in 2008, and continued to work on and to program his music in different places. The Philharmonie in Luxembourg turned out to be the ideal space for recording. On this CD, you can hear how Lucier enables Zeitkratzer to create sounds most people have never heard before. Ringing overtones, a singing piano, a thrilling concert triangle, pencils on little objects, and how irritating a violoncello, a viola and a piano can sound together, creating sonic interferences. This music is not only a physical phenomenology, but becomes inherently a sensual listening experience. Directed by Reinhold Friedl. Musicians include: Burkhard Schlothauer (violin, viola, objects), Anton Lukoszevieze (violoncello, objects), Uli Phillipp (objects), Reinhold Friedl (piano, objects), Maurice de Martin (triangle, objects), Frank Gratkowski (objects), Hayden Chisholm (objects), Matt Davis (objects), Hilary Jeffery (objects) and Ralf Meinz (sound).

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