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Introduction
Interviews with ...
Chris Mann
Jeph Jerman
Annea Lockwood
Stephen Vitiello
Alvin Lucier
NBA.
You are considered one of the seminal figures in Sound Art. Since the 1960s your work has challenged the fundamental ideas of what musical composition is and what music does. Do you draw a distinction between Sound Art and musical composition? Is there more than a semantic shift in these terms for you?
AL.
Arthur Berger, in his recent book, Reflections of an American Composer, states that Sound Art "...is not new in the sense of being a new stage in a long tradition, like serialism, for instance, but is new in the sense of being altogether a new art, based on sound but not specifically pitch, which is only one kind of sound." He goes on to reminisce, in a different part of the book, that while on Fulbright in the early Sixties my composition teacher Boris Porena led me to more and more dissonant music (I had been writing in the neoclassical style up to that time) until "...the experience makes one suspect that perhaps Lucier continued the process on his own until he finally arrived at the non-music genre that is sometimes called Sound Art."
Berger was only partially right. I came upon "Sound Art" naturally, as I developed an intense interest in the natural characteristics of sound waves. I lost my appetite for appropriating, extending or transforming previous or contemporaneous musical languages for my own purposes. In my Music for Solo Performer (1965) for enormously amplified brain waves and percussion, for example, I decided to jettison certain ideas of structure (which would have been based on previous musical thinking) and let the alpha waves flow unimpeded from my brain to an array of loudspeakers that exited a battery of percussion instruments deployed throughout the space. The speakers were directly coupled to the instruments -- gongs, drums, timpani and so forth -- acting as performers, drummers so to speak, causing the instruments to sound by the direct action of the speaker cones. I eliminated most of the musical vocabulary I had learned in school so that the phenomena could be perceived as clearly as possible. I did retain, somewhere in the work, the "musical" sensitivity, timing, and so forth, I had developed in years of more conventional composing. For several years I had a job as a choral director and was responsible for performances of the great dramatic works of the past.
I don't separate "Sound Art" from "music". I am one person; my ideas come from the same place. I get ideas, then execute them in the ways the material seems to suggest. In sound installations there are no live performers; a configuration is designed and set up, usually in an art gallery, then allowed to sound by itself. Performance pieces, on the other hand, require live players who must breathe, bow and strike their instruments in roughly the same ways they always did, from time immemorial. These works are usually presented in concert halls. In both genres I try to explore one or more characteristics of sound in the most beautiful way I can. I suppose that sound installations are closer to the definition of Sound Art and my performance works, written mostly for performers of conventional instruments, are closer to what is commonly thought of as music.
Sometimes an idea can be realized in two versions. Music for Bass Drums, Pure Waves and Acoustic Pendulums, for example, may be installed for long periods of time. The sweeping sound waves that excite the drumheads are recorded on compact disk and replayed indefinitely; or it may be performed by a player sweeping the waves by hand with an audio oscillator.
The reason I began composing works for players of conventional musical instruments (in the early Eighties) is simply because several of them asked me to. I have been delighted to do so. I am continually challenged to make performance pieces which explore sound in as poetic a way as my earlier, electronic works.
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