Alvin Lucier: I always try to start in a different way than I usually do. I always end up starting the same way. [Laughs]

Perhaps I should tell you a little bit of where I came from, because you all, in some way or another, are going through the same thing. No matter where you come from, you're on a quest or a journey to find out who you are in terms of what kind of music you will make. Aren't you going through that, discovering your style, if you want to call it that?

When I was in college, the masterpieces of music came from France, Germany and Italy. American music had no identity. We had jazz, but jazz was not part of the school system at all. Jazz was music that we played outside of school. I went to Yale, the same school that Charles Ives had attended, but we studied Ives's music very little. It seems strange, but in 1954, the school orchestra played one of Ives's symphonies, and that was a big event. My composition teacher said that Ives composed with one eye shut - meaning he didn't take care with his scores very well. They were messy and he didn't know what he wanted. His accidentals weren't consistent. Ives was interesting, but he was put aside. Most of my teachers had gone to France to study with Nadia Boulanger. I graduated from college and went to Rome to study with Goffredo Petrassi. (Actually, I ended up studying with an assistant of his, Boris Porena.) I thought that's where I should go. At the same time, however, composers like John Cage, Henry Partch and Henry Cowell were aimed away from Europe, more to the East. But we didn't know much about them. They weren't a part of our consciousness. I remember Cage came to give a concert in one of the residential colleges at Yale but I didn't bother to go. I thought it was a joke. Someone reported that he played music on a typewriter. So anyway, I went to Europe and went to all these music festivals, and was very impressed by what I heard and saw. But at a certain moment it dawned on me that this wasn't my music; it was someone else's. It had nothing to do with me. It was a cultural thing. I couldn't pretend I was interested in serialism. It was wonderful and frightening to find that out. I was pretty good at imitating this music. It sounded like that music, but it wasn't that music. So I came home, and got a job as choral conductor at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. But before I left Europe I went to a concert in Venice presented by David Tudor, John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Carolyn Brown.

Petr Kotik: When was that?

Lucier: Summer of 1961. I didn't know what, to make of it. I didn't know what it was. But it stuck in my mind.

I hope these stories are not too boring but you'll go through similar experiences. I came home and didn't have any ideas because all my preconceptions had been eliminated. I couldn't continue writing neoclassical music, which I had been writing earlier. We all loved Stravinsky. He was easy to imitate (badly). I felt terrible because I was supposed to be a composer and I didn't have any ideas.

Around 1964 I met Edmund Dewan, a scientist who was doing brain wave research for the United States government. He was an amateur organist and had a huge organ that took up practically all the room in his house. There were aircraft pilots who would black out at certain times when flying. The slowness of the propellers, particularly when they were landing, would catch the sunlight and lock on to some visual rhythm causing mild epileptic fits. He was asked to see if he could find anything out about that.

Dewan had a large brain wave amplifier, and he thought that by turning his brain waves on and off, he could control things like switches and so forth. Alpha waves are low-frequency signals that can get stronger if the person is in a meditative state. And if they're strong enough an amplifier can hear them, and the bursts of alpha can become audible. Everyone in this room has alpha.

At night I would go into the Brandeis Electronic Music Studio, in the basement of the Library, and I'd put electrodes on my scalp, turn the amplifier on and try to generate alpha waves. It was very difficult because there was noise in the room and in the electrical circuitry. Often I couldn't distinguish between electrical noise in the amplifier or my alpha waves. But by looking at the meters on the tape recorder I learned to distinguish between electrical noise and alpha waves. Alpha waves are beautiful, they fluctuate from about 10 to 12 cycles a second (Hz). They rise, fall, burst, get louder and softer. What kind of a piece of music could I make with them? I asked my new friends around school, and every single composer said I should record my alpha waves and go into a tape studio and make a tape piece. Then I could control and structure them. I thought about it and decided that that was a stupid idea, because you might as well go into a studio and generate electronic sounds and put them on tape, and splice the tape, and so forth. I thought that the real way to do this piece was to do it live, in front of an audience. [Laughs]. To sit there with electrodes on my scalp, shut my eyes, and make alpha comes out was not easy inn those days. The popular biofeedback fad had not occurred yet. I'm talking about 1965.

We had an art museum at Brandeis --the Rose Art Museum--which was very progressive. They had paintings of John Cage's friends Jasper Johns, Bob Rauschenberg, and others. I approached Sam Hunter, the director of the museum, and said, "We should have John Cage come here." I didn't feel as if I could ask the Music Department to invite John Cage. They would have thought I was crazy. Sam said, "That's great. Call him up." So I called up Cage. Years later, when composers from Europe would ask me how to get hold of John Cage, I'd say, "Try him on the telephone." "What? He answers the phone?" "Yeah, call him up. He always answers his phone." Cage didn't isolate himself like other great artists. So I called up Cage and asked him if he would like to come to Brandeis to do a concert. He said yes, on two conditions: that I invite Christian Wolff, who lived in nearby Cambridge, and that I do a piece. I said I didn't have a piece. [Laughs] And there was a silence on the phone. Then I said, "Well, I am working with a brain wave amplifier, but it doesn't work. [Laughter] I can't get the amplifier to work." And he laughed and said, "It doesn't matter if it doesn't work. What does it matter?" [Laughter] He didn't say that exactly, but this is what I always say: one concert out of millions that happen ever year, and one single piece doesn't work? What's the big deal? If it doesn't work, go out and eat at a nice restaurant after the concert and you'll feel better. [Laughter] I was making excuses. He said, "You have to do it." I said, "O.K."

Until the night before the concert, I didn't know exactly what the piece was going to be. You know, in those days, when you made experimental pieces, you didn't really fix them until the performance. Often there was no way to do that. When I was producing alpha in the studio I looked at the loudspeaker that the brain waves were coming through. We didn't have the grille cloth on; you could see the cone of the speaker. It was a KLH 6 loudspeaker. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, at that time, they were developing the first home hi-fi loudspeakers. (I sound like a dinosaur.) [Laughter] The acoustic-suspension speaker was being manufactured by AR and KLH for home use. And when the bursts of alpha came through the speaker, I could see the speaker cone moving, almost as much as an inch. So I thought, "The speaker is a performer." It's not just where the sound comes out, where the music comes out. It's a performer; it's doing something. It's doing work. So, because the alpha waves were so powerful and rhythmic I thought, if I put something up against the loudspeaker, right up against it, anything -- a gong, a drum, timpani, cymbals, a cardboard box -- the alpha waves could sympathetically vibrate a percussion ensemble.

I set up 16 acoustic-suspension speakers around the museum, all of them touching percussion instruments. I sat there without a mixer - we didn't have any mixers then the brain waves went through Dewan's differential amplifier, then into 8 stereo hi-fi amplifiers, one after the other in a cascade. There were 16 percussion instruments, including a piano, a cardboard box and metal trash container (the speakers were simply placed inside). As the alpha flowed through the speakers the instruments were physically resonated. Cage was my assistant [Laughs] I asked him how long he thought the performance should be, maybe 8 or 10 minutes. He said it ought to be 40 minutes! In those days, that was a really long time for a piece of music.

So I went to bed that night. I felt really bad. I was very nervous and anxious, because I thought, "I don't have a structure for this." I mean, I'm a composer; I should impose some kind of a structure, but then I thought, no, brain waves are a natural phenomenon. They should just flow out, and I will trust John Cage to move the sounds from one speaker to another.

You know, we talked about internalizing a system. And I was thinking about Cage with all his chance systems, the I Ching and all that. But if you allowed him just to play, he would play it in a free way, pretty much the way he would do it if it were a chance operation system. When he found something really good, he wouldn't raise the volume to make it louder. There wasn't any contrast; there weren't any climaxes. There are natural climaxes of course because, when you've got 9 or 12 speakers out of 16 sounding at once, you have the illusion of a climax but Cage didn't purposely make one. So, I felt good about saying to him, "You just do it." And he did.

That piece was really important for me because it meant that I could explore an acoustical phenomenon without imposing a structure that doesn't belong there. And it's made it possible for me to play that piece under many circumstances. On tour I've performed it with as few as 4 channels. Often I'd bring some extra little loudspeakers, attaching 2 onto one channel. I've never actually fixed the orchestration, although I usually use a western music percussion ensemble, including bass drums, cymbals, snare drums, gongs and timpani. I use instruments that you find mainly in the symphony orchestra.

A few years later, Dewan remarked that there was a professor at M.I.T. (that's the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) who was designing a new type of loudspeaker. His name was Bose. And the way he tested his speakers was to recycle sounds through them to see if there were any unwanted peaks, to make sure the speakers were flat. It was kind of an acoustical test. I just happened to meet Dewan in the hallway and he casually mentioned this fact. It wasn't a big deal.

So one night I got a couple of Nagra tape recorders--they were the best you could find at that time-- an ordinary Beyer microphone and a single KLH loudspeaker. I went into the living room in my rented apartment. It had a shag rug on the floor and drapes on the wall, kind of a dry acoustic. I thought I would experiment with putting sounds into the room, tape recording them, playing the tape recording back into the room through a loudspeaker, recording that, playing that copy back in, to see what would happen. We all know about room resonances, don't we? The length, width and height of a room plus whatever the room's made of, implies certain frequencies because of their wavelengths. Every sound has a wavelength. So that, if you have a room where, say, frequency x fits that room, it'll sound louder than a frequency that doesn't fit that room. Now, in a concert hall you don't want that. You want all the frequencies to sound equally. So, it was a way to explore the resonant frequencies of a room.

I sat in a chair in front of the microphone and asked myself "What can I put into this room?" I could use a poem. Then I thought, "I don't want to use a poem. I don't want anything aesthetic. I don't want anything artistic." I thought, "Poetry, grandiose." I didn't want something large. I didn't want to evoke anything. The thing maybe we don't like so much about opera is that it's grandiose; it doesn't feel right anymore. Maybe it's not right. [Laughs]

So I sat down and wrote a text right that night. I decided to say, in the text, what I was going to do. So, the content of my text was an explanation of the compositional process. There was a genre of pieces in the 60's in the United States in which you told the audience what the structure of the work was; you didn't try to hide it. Pieces like Steve Reich's early tape pieces, even though he doesn't explicitly explain them you know exactly what is happening; he's not hiding any technique. So I began: "I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now." (I knew the tape was going to be played somewhere else.) "I am recording the sound of my speaking voice. I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the frequencies of the room reinforce themselves, so that any semblance of my speech is destroyed. What you will hear then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by a speech." And so forth. I practiced a little, so the pacing would be right. I wanted time for the speech to go into the room. The reason I used speech was because it has so much in it. I could have used clarinet or piano or something. It has all this wonderful noise - shhh, click, ph, th, all those noisy sounds. And then it's got formants and fundamentals.

Participant: I'm assuming you monitored each time, so you got to hear the product?

Lucier: I could hear it, but I was always surprised by what was happening. I'll play you a little of that. This is another version; it's not the original.

[Plays excerpt from beginning of I Am Sitting in a Room.]

Lucier: It seems to me that in those days we invented a new little form in music--composers such as Steve Reich, Jim Tenney, Bob Ashley and me. I guess it came out of electronics, where you could get something started and it would just go by itself. But the formal idea that interests me - maybe I'm making a little bit too much of it - is that there isn't any form. There's just one gesture, just one thing that goes in a straight line. It doesn't rise, it doesn't fall, it doesn't go backwards. It's just one thing. I just repeated the same procedure. I didn't do anything else. I didn't make any changes, except to make sure that the volume was the same. Sometimes tape oversaturates, so I had to adjust the volume. But I didn't make any changes to improve it. I didn't do anything to make it more interesting. This is my basic idea. It might be a bad idea, but it's my basic idea - that you let one thing go without intruding on it. And then something exciting happens unexpectedly. So that it's not just one thing after all. What you think is one simple thing is not. In this piece the repetition of the recording is exactly the same, but the rate of change in the intelligibility of the speech is varied. It isn't linear. It moves in its own way, because it gets to a resonance, and then that resonance amplifies itself.

Kotik: I'd like to make a comment about this. Tell me when do you think it would be appropriate?

Lucier: Now is appropriate.

Kotik: I had a very important encounter with Alvin's music, which in some way influenced the way I think about art. It helped me to discover something very important. I hope I'm not embarrassing you.

Lucier: No, no. I'm not embarrassed. [Laughs] It's O.K.

Kotik: What want to say relates exactly to what you are saying and I thought that it would be a good idea to mention it and maybe [addressing the students] you'll find some use in it. It happened when I conducted Sweepers, the first orchestra piece Alvin composed for SEM. The piece deals with ideas, which he just mentioned: the concern is not about aesthetics in any way, not about one would connect with a piece of art. Alvin is interested in making the material work, the sound material, the musical material, not something one would describes as "musical" or "artistic." In the middle of conducting the piece, I am concentrating on the mechanics of the performance, keeping the piece together, the musicians focus on making the acoustical phenomena work, they focus on tuning, on doing everything correctly. Nothing else is on out mid. And suddenly, 15 minutes into the piece, at least for me -- it was a completely chilling experience -- it was as if a gate had opened -- the music sounded suddenly like we would play Wagner. I felt being in the midst of a very profound artistic experience. This emerged all of a sudden, unannounced. Where did it come from was a mystery. I am trying to say, it made me realized, that what is artistic in a piece (it can be a piece of music, or a painting, etc.) has to appear by itself, as if entering through the back door. It cannot be cannot pushed it, you cannot force it through the front door. If you do, it will falls on its face.

Lucier: Thank you. I don't think I've ever been mentioned in the same sentence as Wagner. [Laughter]

Kotik: Absolutely, when the tuba and the low French Horn comes in, in the middle of the piece, that's when I realized all this, it made a deep impression on me. I felt similarly during our performance onf Atlas Eclipticalis [by John Cage] in Carnegie Hall. There was a moment when all five French Horns and the three tubas played together with a large section of the orchestra, and it felt like being in the middle of Die Walkure! I talked to David Tudor [who performed with us] and he nodded his head, he agreed with me.

Lucier: [Laughs] let's go back to the piece for a minute here. Let's see where we are.

[Plays tape again] It's only at 15 minutes. The recording is about 45 minutes long.

Participant: Even with the best recorders you could find, was there not also a noise problem?

Yes, but the room acts as a filter. There was a German engineer who came to one of my concerts in Berlin, and he denounced this piece. He said, "These aren't the resonances of the room. These are the microphonics; the sounds are in the microphone." He said he could imitate this in his studio." And I had to call him on it, because I was embarrassed. I asked the great tonmeister in Berlin, Martin Süpper - he wrote a book on electronic music, and he's worked with "Room" a lot. He said, "No, no, that guy's wrong." Engineers are always saying things like that. There are characteristics in a microphone that add to it, of course. There are characteristics in a loudspeaker, too. But basically, I can hear the room tone on the first generation. I should have asked him to show me, in his studio. Because what engineers think they hear and what is actually happening may be two very different things. I've had engineers say, "Oh, I can do this. I could do this in one sweep." And the results are terrible.

When you say I wasn't interested in art, in a sense that is not exactly true. I spend a lot of time presenting my work in the most beautiful way I can. I timed my speech and the silences in between; I made the tape as clean and perfect as I could. I did all those things a musician would do that an engineer might not do. He or she is just interested in the phenomenon.

Kotik: What I meant was the fact that you don't ask the musicians, "Be musical, be artistic." You say, "Watch for the beating."

Lucier: Yes. I don't want to talk about this too much, but I learned that by doing one thing, if it's the right thing, interesting things happen along the way. So I thought, this afternoon, we would do James Tenney's beautiful piece for gong (Having Never Written a Piece for Percussion), which demonstrates this. I've asked Chris Nappi to procure a tam-tam, and we'll go into the hall after lunch, and he'll play Jim's piece. And also, Matt (Welch), if you have your bagpipes, we could do Piper, my bagpipe piece.

So anyway, this was a new form, I think, and it was inconceivable that it would occur here in Europe. European composers were interested in serialism and all those other things. And I think this is because when you deal with acoustics and sound, if you impose some other structure on it, your focus changes. There was a composer, a good friend of mine, who wrote a string quartet on the same program that I quartet was performed. My quartet was simply the four players tuning very, very minutely, playing simple bow strokes, tuning each pitch in impossibly small increments. That's all they did. After a few minutes, you start to hear the beating patterns. There's just nothing else to hear. But it takes time for you to focus in. It even takes me time sometimes. I know the beating patterns are there, but I don't focus in on them. There's something…I don't know, I hate to use the word psychoacoustic; I don't want to deal with psychoacoustics.

Participant: Overt cultural expectations.

So, it takes time to get into it, to actually begin to hear the music. This never happened in music before, I don't think.

Participant: A different kind of time.

Lucier: A different kind of time, but before you even perceive it. Sometimes they play something of mine and say it isn't working. And then I relax, I listen, and I discover it is working after all.

Participant: When you said you don't want to get into psychoacoustics, generally you don't deal in that, or do you say you don't want to?

Lucier: In general, I don't believe in it. I know it exists, but when someone says to me that the ear responds in such and such a way, so you should do this, I feel that's an oppressive idea.

Participant: Are you speaking [of a kind of] demystification?

Lucier: Well, I don't mind that, but it's fascistic in a certain way. If one plays a low B-flat, at a loud enough volume, it'll cause you to do something.

Participant: The difference between yourself and acoustical science.

Lucier: Well, I want to stay away from controlling the listener. Speaking about control, John Cage never liked my work, actually, after the initial brain-wave piece. He thought it had too much cause and effect. Cage's use of chance, in most cases, is precisely to get in the middle of cause and effect. But when you press a piano key down, there's cause and effect. So I said to him, "Well, I'm stuck with that. What I think is cause and effect often comes as a surprise." I never can predict what the effect is. These things are complex, so the effect is always different.

[Plays more of the recording] Just me and my little room. [Laughter]

Lucier: [People] said, "Why don't you do it backwards?" [Laughter] Or, "why don't you do a couple of rooms at the same time?" People are always wanting to improve it or make it different. But I don't mind that, because it means that their minds are thinking about it. A woman came up to me one day and said, "Can't you just do it without equipment? Can't you just do it?" [Laughter]

Participant: You said you [could not say] exactly what the actual outcome is going to be of these things?

Lucier: No, each room is different.

Participant: Yes. But any actual text, you see, to…quite clear idea of what's going to happen?

Lucier: Oh, with the resonances. Yes. But I don't know what it's going to sound like.

Participant: So did you do experiments prior to this in order to …

Lucier: You know, I didn't do much. I did one experiment in the Brandeis University Electronic Music Studio rather quickly. And then I did this version. I personally haven't made an effort to do versions in various rooms. I've moved on to other ideas. Steve Reich said to me once that I could make my career on this idea. I've made a few versions, for various occasions, but I haven't really made an effort to explore other rooms. A few years ago in Toulouse, several people recorded home versions in various languages. They were beautiful.

"I am sitting in a room" has a score in English prose. All my electronic works are written because there's no way to really notate them. I simply describe what to do. But then, you get a little anxious, so you ramify the instructions. You say it may be done in many rooms simultaneously, or in other languages, or you can go from room to room. You try to expand that idea, which maybe isn't a good idea. We did this at ZKM in Karlsruhe last year. We had eight separate rooms at the same time. Actually, everybody hated it. [Laughs]

Participant: It seems to me that part of the attraction, according to the listener, is figuring out how much richness and complexity finally comes out of such a simple source, so that if you multiply the source you're subtracting from that contrast.

Lucier: Yes. Good point.

Participant: One question with regard to your brain-wave piece. Were you thinking of something while performing the piece? Were you trying to control some of the…

Lucier: No. Alpha waves are either on and off. Theoretically, in a state of relaxation or meditation, they get stronger. And theoretically, you can control them. People that are paralyzed can use alpha to answer questions. On-off. But ultimately, I'm a performer, and the show must go on. So you do all the thinking you need to do to play it. Now I can generate alpha pretty easily. It's become a thing we all can do now, with little biofeedback amps and so forth. John Fulleman made me a beautiful little amp that's very powerful.

You know, it's so funny. Years ago certain colleagues suggested I use a square-wave oscillator, tuned to 10 or 12 cycles per second (Hz.). Does everyone know what a square-wave oscillator is? It's an oscillator that you can tune to produce periodic pulse waves. Why do people say such things? First of all, a square-wave oscillator is totally boring because it's periodic, bom-bom-bom-bom-bom. Whereas alpha waves go up and down, have bursts, sometimes they just drop for a little while, then burst through unexpectedly. Natural phenomena are more interesting than electronically generated periodic ones. The thing about synthesizers in the old days was, it was so hard to get something interesting because all the wave forms were periodic.

Participant: Has Tenney, or anybody, ever recognized the similarity between this piece and his Indigenous Song?

Lucier: That's very different, isn't it? A small ensemble attempts to create speech.

Participant: There's such an orchestration of the part…

Lucier: Yes.

Participant: …but it seems to me the idea is somehow related, no?

Lucier: Jim did write a piece called Saxony for saxophone and tape loops that also pick the room resonance up. I think Jim refers "Room" in his score.

Christian Wolff: Can I say another beautiful thing about the piece is the text itself. This morning I didn't pick it up. But also it's a very self-reflexive text. I don't know how to put this. I think it sort of bothered me for a long time. It's indulgent. It's self-referential, and rather solipsistic. But what happens then, is you take a completely suggestive self-reflexive situation, and you slowly but surely turn it into a natural object, or a natural process. You take something that's totally self-enclosed, and you turn it inside out. It becomes part of your world. I know…

Lucier: Yes, I've been a little bit concerned about my work. It's not social enough. When you were playing your pieces yesterday, I wish I had made pieces that were socially more interesting in the performance, where six people can get together and play, for example. It's hard for me to do that.

Wolff:The only different thing - I think I'll wait. I do have something to say about that. I've thought about it more. Let's break, before dinner.

Lucier: O.K. This is the last time I'm going to raise this point. [Plays continuation of recording] O.K. That's that piece.

Participant: How does it end?

Lucier: I make a cadence in C major… [Laughter] …like all good music. [Laughs] I did it for 32 times because I was making an LP, 16 generations per side. But it doesn't need to be that way. Then when I made the CD, I just spliced the two sides together. It's a little long, but that's the way it turned out.

Participant: Have you ever run it for a huge length of time?

Lucier: No.

Participant: What happens?

Lucier: Well, we did it in Karlsruhe using a Macintosh computer instead of a tape. But we never ran it a long length of time. Reinhard Oehlschagel, a German musicologist and radio producer, invited me to perform this piece live. It's wonderful when people suggest things that work. So I've been performing it live ever since. There's a tape loop across the stage. I have to measure it so that it fits the length of the speech. One tape recorder records it and then the other one plays it back, and there's a microphone in the room. It's very tricky because you have to set the levels just perfectly. In a live performance, you can see how things can get out of hand. I love doing it because I hear the tape loop as so old-fashioned. But it's beautiful. People watch the tape go by and the lights reflect on the tape. We did it in Vienna [Laughs] and a fly landed on the loop. I guess it went around. I'm not sure how it got off. [Laughter]

It can be done using a computer. That's O.K. too. But I don't know, something about seeing it being made in real time, and not hiding it, is nice. Although in this recording everything is hidden, because you just play the tape. But I explained what I was doing.

I guess I try to make electronic music personal. We're all caught in this electronic environment, so it is personal anyway.

Participant: I wasn't sure if I wanted to bring it up, but it's a long time since I've heard the piece. Can you comment on the difference in technical approach between this piece and Steve Reich's Come Out?

Lucier: Yes. Steve Reich's tape piece, Come Out. Do you know this piece? Let me say something around that, so I'm not just talking about my own work all the time.

In those early days, there were several composers who really radically used electronic equipment, went inside the equipment, into the personality of a tape recorder. When I worked in Milan, in the electronic studio, the tape recorder was a place to record sounds that you had made with electronic devices, and it was a splicing place.

Steve Reich was doing a film score. He had recorded a fragment of speech that he made into a loop. For some reason, he put one loop on one machine, and an identical one on the other. He was going to mix them somehow. By accident or by instinct, he started both machines at the same time, so you hear the two speech fragments simultaneously. It sounds like one recorder. But, due to the imperfection of any machine--one machine's a little bit faster than the other, just a little--after a few minutes, you hear the original loop and its twin loop delayed. You hear the loop in canon against itself. He just let the machines go out of phase. He developed phasing in that way. He didn't feel he needed to control the speed of the machines. He let the machines go by themselves. At a certain point, however, he divided the two into four, four into eight. He didn't just allow the process to go on, like I do.

So that was a radical use of tape recorders. At the same time, composers like Pauline Oliveros used the bias frequency on the record head as a found oscillator. She knew it was there, and tuned high frequency tones to it in order to create audible beating. Pauline, and Richard Maxfield, too, utilized the built-in technology of the recorder itself as a compositional tool. What was your question?

Participant: I really just wanted you to comment on this work in the context of other works for similar media.

Lucier: Yes. We were interested in tape recorders. We were interested in what they can do, and not just as storage media.

We're about 5 minutes from the end of "Room". [Plays conclusion of recording] [Applause] Would you like a little break at this point? Or I'll do another piece. I think we need a little break.

[Seminar resumes after break]

Participant: I'm curious if there was any kind of correspondence, as it were, between you and Bob Ashley?

Lucier: Oh, yes.

Participant: Because the concept of the piece first brought to mind She Was a Visitor, but then this kind of abstract, unpredictable, very warm beauty that comes out very much made me think of his Automatic Writing.

Lucier: But She Was a Visitor is a choral piece.

Participant: Choral? Do you mean, as in a chorus?

Lucier: Yes.

Participant: Are there different versions? I think I may have heard…

Lucier: No, there's only one version I know of. There's no electronics in it. It's just choral music.

Participant: I've got to be mixed up. Maybe I heard something different. There was one voice reciting, and then…

Lucier: The chorus members choose the sounds of a speaker and sustain them.

Participant: The recording doesn't even list performers. It's all electronics.

Lucier: It was the Brandeis Chamber Chorus, which I conducted. [Laughter] I am not lying to you. It's purely vocal. The engineer did put a little reverb on it, but there's no electronics.

Participant: What's the piece called?

Lucier: She Was a Visitor. I could talk about that too, and some of your questions. And Automatic Writing was vocal also. You also hear sound from the next room coming through the walls. Mine is recycling the sound into an acoustical space. It's a different idea.

When I went into music, it was because I loved classical music. When I was a kid, I discovered recordings of Beethoven at Nuttings, the local music store in Nashua, New Hampshire. I went into music because of that. But in these early days, we weren't in an environment where players were interested in playing new music. It was a very conservative performance situation then. It isn't as it is now; you've got wonderful players that can do almost anything.

So, we made our own electronic music. I've got to stress how important David Tudor and John Cage were to us. Most of my teachers were bitter. They were writing music that wasn't getting played. It was a terrible way to be an artist, to be totally disengaged from your society.

So, when John Cage and David Tudor came into to town they would play anywhere. All they needed was a couple of tables to put their electronic equipment on. They didn't have fancy equipment; they had very cheap equipment anyone could buy. Tudor would wire it together. They performed their own music. They didn't wait for the symphony orchestra to ask. That was inspiring, and enabled us to just go ahead and make our own work. But by the 1980's, performers started asking me to make them pieces. So I had to think up a way to make music for them that would still interest me in ways that I was interested in, in the natural characteristics of sound waves and acoustics.

Now, when I say "acoustics," I sound like a scientist or something. But it's my way of getting into making a piece. I don't think of language, rhythms, or melody. I think of some beautiful situation where sound can be explored, and reveal something, something you didn't know was there. That's just the way I work. It's been a special tool of mine.

I often put one or two things into motion, then a third thing occurs. You do one thing and something else happens. It just doesn't do it by itself. So I got interested in audible beating. In German it's schwebungen. What's the word in French? When you have one sound and another very closely tuned and you get bumps of sound.

[Discussion among participants about the French expression]

I just got interested in that phenomenon. I found it to be beautiful. It's physical. It's actually happening in space.

I have to credit the composer La Monte Young's early work with sine-wave oscillators. A sine wave is pure, it doesn't have overtones. It looks like this. [Illustrates] If you tune another one close, so it's a little out of tune, if it's out of phase it cancels itself. But you get beating when the waves coincide. If one is going at 400 cycles per second and the other at 401, there's a beat once every second. I found fascinating that tuning creates rhythm. How far apart the waves are determines the speed of the rhythm. So it interested me greatly that I could change rhythm simply by changing pitch.

In 1985 I was decided to write a clarinet piece. We had a wonderful player at Wesleyan, Tom Ridenour, who could hold a tone for one minute. I thought that if I could design a sine wave sweep - I guess a better word for you musicians is "glissando" - he could play tones across it. The sweep starts on the clarinet's low D and rises up to the high D, for the length of the piece The player either plays across the rising wave, starts in unison with it, or starts well before it and stops when unison is reached. If he plays across the sweep, the beats begin fast, then slow down to zero and speed up again, because as the sounds approach unison the beating slows down; when unison is reached, it stops. If he starts at unison, the beating starts at zero, then speed ups. If he starts before, the beating starts fast, slows down and stops at unison. So there were three things I could do: straddle the sweep, start at the unison, or start before and stop at unison.

I decided the sweep would rise a semitone every 30 seconds. [Laughs] That's slow, but in terms of beating, it's not so slow. If the clarinetist starts at A-220 and the sweep is still at A-flat- 208, you've got a beating pattern of 12 times a second, which is fast. As the wave ascends it slows down till the wave arrives at 220, then speeds up again.

Bob Bielecki recorded the sine-wave sweep; it goes from the lowest to the highest note on the clarinet. I had no reason to choose any other range. I just decided to use the whole clarinet range. These choices are simple-minded, you know. I made that decision.

Another thing that happens is that, because of standing waves - do you know what a standing wave is? It's when a sound wave reflects back upon itself and grows louder. If it comes back ou of synch, it's grows softer. You don't want standing waves in a concert hall or in a recording studio. That's why recording studios have irregular panels on the walls, to break up standing waves.

I might as well explain this as best I can. Each musical note has a wavelength. As this sweep is going up from low to high, the wavelengths gets shorter. They're going out into the room - my physics gets a little strange here - and reflect off the walls at different places. So, you get the impression that the sound is moving in the space, not electronically, it's not on the tape, it's in the room. Also, when the clarinet is tuned so closely to the sine wave, it's as if it's on the same pitch but not quite, it try to establish itself in unison with the sine wave. The sounds seem to spin. You'll to hear that. It's hard to hear, but it's there.

Let me just play the piece, because I could talk forever.

Participant: A short question. You just said that you don't believe in psychoacoustics. How does that statement relate to this piece? This piece was based upon very precise and very big knowledge of acoustics, especially those details for tuning the right pitches in order to produce schwebungen.

Lucier: Yes. I don't care what happens in the brain. I just care what I make. This is all external. The wave that comes out into the room. The clarinet player plays tones. I don't really know what's happening in the brain.

Participant: Yes, but the effect of beating is not an acoustical phenomenon. It's a psychoacoustical phenomenon. It does not exist outside of our ears, or brain.

Lucier: Well...

[Laughter]

Lucier: Can we not talk about that? Because it's endless. That's a huge subject which I don't know anything about. I was terrible in science in school. I couldn't understand anything. I was intimidated by the bright kids. But all I know is what I need to know.

So, this one channel has the oscillator sweeping. It's going 30 seconds per semitone. As it does so, the clarinet plays tones, in those three particular ways.

Participant: So it's oscillator and clarinet -- it's panned?

Lucier: Yes.

Participant: And was that important to your idea?

Lucier: Yes, I wanted the sound sources to be separate, the clarinetist on one side, without amplification, in a performance, and the oscillator coming out from the other side. Maybe on the CD there's a little bit of crosstalk, but that's not….

[Plays recording of piece for clarinet and oscillator]

Lucier: O.K. That's that. [Applause] Now, if you paid attention, you discovered that every pitch had a different quality. The beating doubles in speed at each octave higher. I get changes in speed and timbre without changing the speed of the sweep.

Participant: It seemed like you were choosing minor intervals to come through.

Lucier: Three times I had the clarinet step up or down at or above or below a unison.

Participant: Just a practical thing. Did the clarinet player finish by the clock or something when they performed this?

Lucier: No, he took an output from the amplifier and routed it to his electronic tuner that showed the pitch of the oscillator at any given point in time.

Participant: I was wondering if you've gotten the results of this piece (In Memoriam Jon Higgins) more consistent than, for instance, the room piece.

Lucier: Yes. Of course it depends on the player. There are very few players who can sustain tones a minute long. At the last performance the clarinetist just couldn't do it. So I suggested he take a breath half way through each tone. If did it naturally, and I accepted it, although I do like the uninterrupted tones better.

Participant: I don't know if I've asked this before. Did you ever investigate the phenomenon of wind and brass players doing something similar?

Lucier: Well, I've made a few pieces with acoustic instruments only. The beating is less vivid but you can hear it nonetheless.

I would like to play you a few pieces from a piano suite I wrote for Joe Kubera. He asked me to write him a piece a long time ago, then he forgot about it. I sent it to him, and he said, "What's this?" [Laughter] I called it Still Lives. It's an inaccurate title; I guess it should be Still Lifes, because it's called that in painting. One summer I just decided to sit down and write these pieces. I wanted to be like those composers who make a lot of pieces, like Benjamin Britten and Shostakovich. I wanted to act more like a composer. [Laughs]

I decided to write eight short pieces, which is strange for me, because usually my works are in one movement. I decided to use the sine waves again, too. But instead of single sweeps, I drew objects with the pure waves. I simply looked around my house. The first thing I saw was a diamond of sunlight that came in through the window onto the floor. So the first piece is called "Sunlight Diamond." Then I looked outside, and there were ferns growing in the garden. Then I saw was a bread knife with serrated edges. [Laughs] And there were - this is so embarrassing - chopsticks, as in a Chinese restaurant, lying on the counter top in the kitchen. Do you know that tune you play on the piano when you're a little kid, "Chopsticks." [Sings] One was lying across the other, something like that, random. I also looked at the floor and drew the tiles.

I chose eight images. Then I notated them, not scientifically, but more like free sketches. The pianist would play against the pure wave shapes. I discovered that because of the overtone structure of piano tones, or any instrument for that matter, there are three pitches that can make vivid beating: the near-unison, and because of the second and third partials, the octave and the twelfth below. So I had a choice of three notes for each chromatic tone contained in the sweeps. That enabled me to write a more conventional kind of piano piece. You see, I really want to be a composer. [Laughter] Like Chopin.

[Plays excerpts from recording of Still Lives.]

[Voice over music] Here's "Floor Tiles". I notate the piano tones directly under the pure tones, but the pianist can play them sooner or later, changing the speeds of the beats. He's got to hear them, so it's a little difficult.

Here's "Chopsticks". It's the last one.

Participant: Did you say that the sweep describes a drawing?

Lucier: Right.

Participant: You can't quite…it sounds like that, because there are two lines running parallel. How does that work?

Lucier: One goes like this; the other goes like that.

Participant: O.K., you've got two.

Lucier: I've got two.

Participant: O.K., fine.

Lucier: With the ferns, I've got five and six waves sweeping.

Participant: And in the case of "Chopsticks," we hear two oscillators actually cross one another?

Lucier: Yes, very slowly.

Participant: Because my ears didn't pick out the beating that we would expect as they approach one another. But it did?

Lucier: Yes.

Wolff: So the oscillators, just by themselves, are producing beating, as well as the….

Lucier: Only when they go approach unisons, octaves and twelfths.

Well, I could show something else, but we need to go to lunch, don't you think? I could play a minute or two of my orchestra piece. The title is Diamonds for One, Two or Three Orchestras. The strings in each of the three orchestras sweep up and down, describing a diamond shape. The violins go up and down. The violas, cellos and basses go down and up. They go at different speeds. String players don't like to do it, but if you ask them to do it, they'll do it. In the first orchestra, the violins ascend at 19 beats a semitone, and come down at 16. The low strings descend at 16 and rise at 19. In Orchestra II, the violins ascend at 20 and descend at 15. The low strings do the opposite. Each diamond is a slightly different shape. The strings of the separate orchestras move out of phase with each other; they play the same pitches at slightly different speeds.

As they do so, the winds and brass play long tones across them. They're not staggered. They play simultaneously with the chromatic semitones as they are reached by the sweeping strings I'll just play a little bit of it. At a certain point, I don't care about beating. It's simply a way to make a piece. It's like you don't care about C major. You don't care about a 12-tone row. It's a way for me to think about making a piece. I wrote the piece very fast; I just got the idea and executed it.

I'm like to tell you a little story. I can't quite figure it out. During the performance and on the recording I could never hear beating very vividly in the higher registers. But one day I played the recording in my wife's Subaru. The beating was beautiful! So I guess you have to listen to this piece in a Subaru. [Laughter]

Can you hear beating in the upper ranges? Can you hear beating between the oboe and the violins?

Participant: Yes.

Lucier: Thank you for saying so. I worry. At night I wake up and think, "This is stupid. What am I doing?" [Laughter] It's like the emperor with no clothes. Do you know that fairy tale, about the emperor with no clothes on?

I just started a piece for the Donaueschingen Festival. I'll just take a minute to explain it. In my backyard we have a beautiful oval table that my wife's great aunt Marcella gave us. It's made of glass. I look at it all the time. In the winter snow piles up on it. Then, when the sun comes out, the snow melts off the table, forming a second oval.

I took a measuring stick, and measured the table vertically at every inch along its length. It was exactly 72 inches long. It rises very fast at the beginning, but at the top it barely changes height.

The piece starts with 2 oscillators sweeping, drawing the glass table top. Seven wind and brass instruments play across the sweeping waves. Then, after three minutes, the strings come in and draw the snow oval. [Laughs] It's very difficult for them to do.

Participant: Initially, they're going in opposite directions very quickly? In that initial stage?

Lucier: Well, yes, it's an oval. There are two orchestras, in effect. I wrote it so that the table oval moves at 16 beats a semitone. The snow oval, being a little smaller, moves at 15 beats a semitone. At the top of its curve, it barely moves in pitch, about 3 cents every 15 beats. I thought it might be boring because the flutes and the basses hover for six minutes, repeating the same tone. But I decided, so be it. It's the way I measured it. Then I thought, I've got to make it interesting, so I staggered the player's tones. But as I was playing the piece over and over it sounded more boring because the instruments were alternating predictably. So I notated each pair of instruments simultaneously, creating lots of space. You hear the oscillators, then you hear oboe and horn, oboe and horn, eight times, for example. Then you hear flute and bass, flute and bass 13 times--the same interval. But of course, the beating patterns are slightly changing. I got nervous about my decision, so I invited Justin Yang over to my house and played him the first version, the "interesting" one; then I played him the second one. He advised me to use the second one. I've got the score here, if anyone wants to see it.

O.K. Thank you. Let's have lunch. [Applause]