Birds: memories and meditations
on Alvin Lucier
Douglas Kahn
Bird and Person Dyning LP cover (Cramps Records, 1976)
Editorial Note: In June 2021, the eminent historian and theorist — and long-term friend of Liquid Architecture — Douglas Kahn approached us proposing a substantial new piece reflecting his relationship to the profoundly impactful work of experimental composer Alvin Lucier. The essay would be ‘anecdotal, historical, musicological, and philosophical, addressed to engage a general readership, on the occasion of my teacher’s ninetieth birthday.’ We gratefully accepted, honoured to be able to publish a brilliant writer, on an equally brilliant artist. On 24 November, Douglas sent us a final draft of the essay, a moving and exquisitely insightful account of Lucier’s mercurial sensibility, but also the gifts, friendships and attitudes that informed his work, and that of those around him. On 1 December, word came through that Lucier had passed away, at his home in Connecticut. Upon hearing the news, Douglas asked that we keep the essay in its original form, but incorporate a short note acknowledging Lucier’s passing. We are privileged to publish this piece, and send our best wishes to Alvin Lucier’s family and friends, and all those who love his work. As an accompaniment to his essay, we have compiled a series of bird drawings that have been taken from Douglas Kahn’s drawing Common Bird (1975).
Memories
Alvin Lucier’s ninetieth birthday was celebrated around the world this year. My association with him began over forty-five years ago with fan mail that I sent after hearing his composition, I am sitting in a room (1970). I first heard it when the composer James Tenney played it in a music history class at Cal Arts, where I was working on an MFA in post-studio art. I was hooked. ‘I am sitting in a room, different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice…’ The I-think-therefore-I-am-sitting-to-be-or-not-to-be-in-a-room of modern composition. I sent him fan mail. The Citizen Kane of mantric earworm architecture. How could I not send him fan mail? If it was just fan mail, it might have ended there, but it included a gift: a bird.
Property cats taught me how to give gifts spontaneously. A property cat is a cat that comes with a rental house and lives off the land rather than out of a can. The first one was waiting for me one morning on the front porch behind a neat row of dead moles: ‘You like?’ A different cat at a boarding house gave me a series of gifts over a couple weeks of increasingly larger sized birds, carrying them up two flights to my attic room. I called a halt to the practice after I awoke one morning to the noise of a bird — who had seen better days — circling above my bed. It repulses me now; give me a bottle of overpriced olive oil over wildlife slaughter any day. You never know how gifts will be received. From Lucier’s point of view, because we had never met, the bird came out of the blue. We met a decade later, when I became his student, and I’m still a student of his work to this day, through this writing.
If you haven’t heard I am sitting in a room, it begins with Lucier reading a statement, as the score states: ‘Use the following text or any other text of any length.’1
I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now.
I am recording the sound of my speaking voice, and I am going to play it back into the room again and again, until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed.
What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech.
I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.
He has a stutter so you assume that’s what he means by irregularities. The text describes what he is doing and why. He records his recitation, then plays it into the room, records that and plays it back, etc. Inherence, anticipation, and inheritance are at play everywhere. Each time the room resonance is reinforced and assumes greater presence. Each time speech dissolves further towards a ringing resonance. Words become unrecognizable while other attributes like rhythm, cadence, and syntax persist in translucent states of a music no one could have imagined. As a word rhythm does not break down into syllables — it is coarticulation like a diphthong — but there is rhythm in his pronunciation that persists among the other rhythms. Somewhere along the line music dissolves into further music.
It provokes thinking about and being in all rooms differently. Rooms that do not repress their resonance are responsive. Cycling through recording and playback in an anechoic chamber would eventually expose the peculiarities of the equipment in a protracted slump toward its noise floor. Recording studios too are insecure rooms. They outsource their space to mikes that put the squeeze on voices and instruments. There is more architecture left in a lung. Lucier entered into a duet with the room, the bodily resonance of his speech coalescing with the furthest corners of a room inhaled into recording and exhaled. The chambers of his head and chest voice join in fracturing phonemes and phrases into a deep swing in the ringing as the piece progresses. Because ringing can, in this process, be coaxed from wood, plaster and glass surfaces, rooms are effectively low-density bells, that is, most buildings are carillons.
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Alvin Lucier, ‘I am sitting in a room.’ in Source: Music of the Avant-garde, 1966-1973 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 248-49. ↩
My fan mail consisted of a short letter and a Christmas ornament. It was a cheap electronic novelty item, a silvery plastic Rococo ball that plugged into the wall and made a chirping bird sound. I found it on sale at Kmart, one of America’s temples of mass consumption. I went to cool off there, not to shop. The area around Cal Arts got uncomfortably hot as summer approached, and most houses did not have air conditioners. On scorchers, whole families headed to Kmart to saunter through the aisles, an item or two in their cart, stopping at intersections to talk to their neighbours. In the heat, Christmas birds had seasonally migrated to the back of the store where merchandise goes to die, thrown unceremoniously into a large container, their last stop before landfill. The kitsch that this bird nested in never made sense to me. Where did it come from in the first place? Was this the species that woke everyone up at the manger the next morning? It had been a long night, birth of a globally dominant religion and all. Was a little shut-eye too much to ask? Birds back then had to be careful about where they perched. When God spoke to Moses through a burning bush, a wren was roasted. Birds evolved flight as God became talkative. I sent it by airmail.
It was an impulse buy. Surprisingly, here was a very cheap electronic music instrument of sorts at a time when synthesizers were expensive and difficult to access. I saw it immediately as a gift to Lucier; his name was written all over it. Giving him a synth in a bauble was a little joke. He was obviously not a synth person because I knew what synth people were. At Cal Arts, I tried to get into Morton Subotnick’s class but there was only one, maybe two synths, and music students had priority, so there was no chance for an art student walk-in like myself. My immediate reaction was, ‘fuck you synthesizers, one and all’. In retrospect, fate has been kind. I saved tens of thousands of dollars over the years and avoided the devastating crack of Eurorack. Therefore, buried deep in the unsaid of this gift to Lucier, if only from the sending side, was, ‘Here is a synthesizer that you don’t use. See what they’ve become? That’s why I love your work.’ I suspect only ‘I love your work’ managed to come through.
I had considered doing a sound installation for my MFA exhibit, an installation being a large container for art audiences much as an aviary is a large container for birds. Imagine dozens of Kmart birds hanging from the ceiling, almost falling like rain, incessant songs going in and out of synch with one another, patterns heard haphazardly, forming amid a general disorientation. There were to be wall drawings too, badly drawn birds so numerous and busy they’d seem to leap off the wall amid all the chatter. I was going to call it Dream Aviary because of the disorientation. It turned out to be just one of several discarded ideas. Many months later when the actual exhibition took place, the only birds that survived were in language-oriented drawings, and the only sounds were those of cut-up conversations from the radio playing back on a portable cassette deck. The wonderful poet/artist Vito Acconci was an assessor, smoking and rocking back-and-forth, saying everything twice, saying everything twice.
Douglas Kahn, Common Bird, 1975. Photo: Maja Baska.
Gifts live different lives. Olive oil is short-lived in a good way. I buried the moles in the field, since that is where they go to die at the best of times. I captured the bird circling above my bed in a blanket and let it out my window on the third floor. Unfortunately, it circled back into the side of the house with a thud and, perhaps fortunately, I couldn’t find it anywhere. I had forgotten about the bird ornament until, one day, I was reading Chambers, a book of interviews with Lucier, and came across a passage describing his composition, Bird and Person Dyning (1975).
…the bird piece as you say, I discovered by accident. It was given to me in various ways. The piece involves an electronic bird, the kind you can buy in stores for use as a Christmas tree ornament. It consists of a plastic ball with a loudspeaker and a simple electronic circuit inside, and it makes a kind of bird-like sound. You simply plug it in. It was sent to me by Doug Kahn, a young California artist whom I have never met. I guess he sent it to me because of some interest he must have had in my work; it came in the mail one day out of the blue. He said it was part of a ‘Dream Aviary,’ but that in my case he would call it a ‘Dream Alviary.’ I was delighted to get it; it was a very charming gesture for somebody to make. So the sound source of the piece was a gift.1
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Alvin Lucier and Douglas Simon, Chambers (Wesleyan University Press, 1980), 149-150. ↩
Still from the film NO IDEAS BUT IN THINGS - the composer Alvin Lucier (2012). Copyright: Viola Rusche & Hauke Harder.
Two other factors combined to generate the composition: binaural microphones purchased by the interviewer Douglas Simon, and the audio feedback compositions by Nicolas Collins, both of whom had been students of his. ‘It seemed to me that these things coincided in a beautiful way, the gift of the electronic bird, the binaural mikes which you could wear on your head, and my involvement with Nicolas Collins’ work.’ 1 This being before the epoch of instant information gratification, I did not know about the composition until I purchased a copy of Chambers in a bookstore in Middletown, Connecticut. I was in Middletown because I’d moved there to attend the World Music Program at Wesleyan University and study with Lucier. Previously two-parts student, one-part stranger, the bird composition became pure student.
There were only a few schools in the United States that offered graduate work in experimental music. Most were dominated by Western classical music with composition subsumed under the oxymoronic ‘contemporary classical’ or presumptuous ‘new music.’ In the World Music Program, experimentalism was on par with concentrations in jazz, Javanese gamelan, Ghanaian percussion, South Indian classical music, Chinese court music, the Western classical tradition, etc., as well as ensembles, classes, performances, and visiting speakers on many more. The term ‘multicultural’ didn’t do it justice because there was a status of ‘bicultural’ that was nearly unobtainable. The criterion was mastery of two traditions as acknowledged by their respective practitioners and publics. Jon Higgins, a singer in Western and Carnatic traditions, had done so. A car struck him down before I arrived, but his absence was in the air. Lucier composed a piece in his honour: In Memoriam Jon Higgins (1984), for clarinet in A and slow sweep pure wave oscillator.
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Lucier and Simon, Chambers, 151. ↩
A lesson in arithmetic
Once the school term started, I thought I had made a terrible mistake. Lucier didn’t seem to teach. His graduate seminar consisted of the few of us walking down the hall to the music library to pull an LP or two off the shelf, maybe a score, then heading back to the seminar room to listen and talk. It seemed extraordinarily casual. ‘I moved across the country for this?’ My problem was that I had never had this type of teacher. He was an exemplar rather than a mentor or deliverer of information. He taught through an accumulation of stories, small actions, opinionated asides, the way we learn from our friends, acquaintances, and communities. The originality, precision, and consistency of his ideas that one finds everywhere evident in his many interviews and writings were parcelled out in the facets of his conversation and comments. It helped that his own friends — such as John Cage, Pauline Oliveros, James Tenney, Gordon Mumma, and others — coincided with key twentieth century transformations in music and the arts.
Lucier was such a good teacher that it is still a test to describe his lesson. The best I can do is arithmetic: subtraction and addition, more specifically, minus some, plus one. Subtraction is familiar to people who make things: sculptors who remove what doesn’t look like a horse from a block of marble, woodcarvers who remove wood, sand, and then polish. Subtraction is at the core of the sciences that had captured his imagination in the mid-1960s. The reduction of variables in the scientific process lends itself to the removal of distractions in many aspects of life. In this respect, the ‘ornamentary and coloristic’ are clearly extraneous, so it was ironic that the Christmas ornament lived to see another day.1 The question is: reduced to what? For Lucier, it seemed to be the beauty of an idea, as he often mentioned in conversation, a reduction that enables things to move more fully into life. The opposite would be the paring down of neoliberal efficiency, a parasite that kills its host, or the reduction of variables in the life sciences where being a rodent is an occupational hazard. Lucier’s subtraction is an in vitro amplification.
There are always things to subtract, whereas Lucier had one thing to add: dimension. This was based on his understanding that:
Most of the music we know is two-dimensional in conception; it’s written on a page or moves from left to right in time. Now when you go from chant to polyphony, you have the illusion of depth, or another dimension, but it’s only an illusion as in a painting. You can paint in perspective, but it’s not really there; you’re still on a flat, two-dimensional surface. And I think it’s built into my work that I don’t succeed very well when I’m thinking in two dimensions; it’s always more interesting when I’m thinking in terms of three-dimensional space.2
This may seem odd since acoustical phenomena are seemingly nothing if not three-dimensional. Two dimensions are clearly inscribed in the left-to-right readings on the page of a score and the frontality of the stage, but it is surprisingly not that easy to shake conventions once sounds move into the environments of listening. Instead, for Lucier, music is not merely in a room, the room is in the music. Not all rooms are cooperative:
It’s getting hard for me to play my work in conventional auditoriums, where the seats are fixed and the audience is supposed to focus on something happening on stage. I find it almost impossible to work in those situations.3
Unlike the spatial insecurity of a recording studio, a symphony hall assumes a confident pride of place (architectural design, lighting, pomp and circumstance, etc.) while structuring attention along class lines: There is seating in this room, different prices wherever you are. Charles Curtis, cellist and expert performer of Lucier’s music, identifies it clearly:
In French Baroque theatres there was this one seat, which was called l’oeil du prince, the eye of the prince, the one place where the prince would sit or the king would sit, and everything was oriented around that location, for that beholder; and this has come to sort of dominate our sense of frontal music, as if everyone should have that same identical experience.4
Karlheinz Stockhausen only made matters worse. In his 1959 essay, ‘Musik im Raum’ (‘Music in Space’), he instructs that:
New halls for listening must be built to meet with demands of spatial music. My idea would be to have a spherical chamber, fitted all around with loudspeakers. In the middle of this spherical chamber, a platform, transparent to both light and sound, would be hung for the listeners. They could hear music, composed for such adapted halls, coming from above, from below and from all directions. The platform could be reached by a gangway.5
The control issues evident in this imperious fusion of a petri dish and carnival ride lend new meaning to command performance.
Instead of domineering feats of engineering, there is an upstream ecological ethic at work in how Lucier responds to the integrity of spaces as they present themselves. It was not uncommon for him to clap upon entering a room to hear its acoustics. The everyday spaces we inhabit are always performing in this way, thus, his clapping served as applause for what could happen. This is where Lucier’s subtraction and addition combine: the liveliness opened by the beauty of an idea that becomes populated with possibilities. They were phenomenal, literally and otherwise. The movement off the page into the room contained a momentum that summoned phenomena that were always there, and granted added dimension to such musical attributes as transpositions and scales.
I didn’t apply arithmetic to my own composing because I never really got started. My tape recorder was no longer up to the task of what I wanted to do, so I was hoping to go digital. I had worked as a word processor in offices for years and figured there was a way to fuse the two machines and write with sound, all of it. Unfortunately, personal computers at the time were incapable of handling the demands of recording. The only option was to steal small snatches from a timeshare computer at 3am a couple nights a week, which meant disrupting my days for very little reward. A decade earlier, music students bumped me from using synths; now as a music student I was bumped by the university’s scientists. It was no competition. A technological year or two later and my life would have been very different.
I pursued history and theory instead. Lucier, already a wealth of historical knowledge, brought what can seem larger than life down to human scale. If I applied his lesson outside composition, then it was in rhetoric rather than phenomena, paring down usage and then stepping back to examine context. What, in the experimental music discourse at the time, did people mean when they said sound or noise? That meant tracking down the early development of influential sources of the term to see how they were formed and responded to context. This was still a time when understanding outside circles of practitioners was not awfully sophisticated, especially in musicology, perhaps the most conservative of disciplines at the time. Looking back, I didn’t wander far from Lucier and his friends, eventually co-editing a book on Source: Music of the Avant-garde, where I am sitting in a room was first published, and writing on his friends Cage, Oliveros, Mumma, and Tenney. I hardly spoke to Tenney at Cal Arts but we became close friends in the course of writing on his work twenty-five years later. Putting I am sitting in a room on the turntable during class had come full circle. In 2002, I went from being Lucier’s student to being a student of his work, in reality, only a few of his works, in a book that took a decade to research and write. I last wrote about him ten years ago. Because our association nears the half century, decades become common units of measurement, as he nears the full century.
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Alvin Lucier, Reflections: Interviews, Scores, Writings, (MusikTexte, 1995), 246. ↩
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Lucier, Reflections, 182. ↩
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Lucier, Reflections, 184. ↩
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‘The Performance of Listening: Technique, Space, Interpretation: A Conversation between Charles Curtis and Anthony Burr,’ a lecture delivered at Universität der Künste, Zürich, October 2016, during Alvin Lucier 85th Birthday Celebration. ↩
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Karlheinz Stockhausen, ‘Musik im Raum’ in Die Reihe 5 (1959); trans. Ruth Koenig as ‘Music in Space’ in Die Reihe 5 (1961): 67-82. ↩
Meditations
Meditation is a word with two senses. One involves being still for long periods of not-talking and not-thinking, and the other involves long periods of not-talking and thinking. The word sets a tolerant tone between the two, and between music and language more generally. To meditate is also to ponder or to muse upon, with the Muses communicating in intuition, music and song. Lucier didn’t seem like the meditating type. Not once did I barge into his office and find him in a lotus position. Not once did I barge into his office. Yet, meditation was not only central to Music for Solo Performer (1965), the brainwave piece that he acknowledges as his first mature work, it was pivotal for his subsequent aesthetic.
Performing music while in a state of meditation, an activity forced on me by the nature of the material, was a memorable experience for me. It completely changed my conception of performance and led to the attentive rather than manipulative attitude toward materials which typified most of my subsequent works.1
Meditation emerged from possibilities of the technology, the task at-hand, and the beauty of an idea to which he always aspired; it was not something that he set out to do. The idea that music could be made with brainwaves, as well as the equipment to do so, were themselves gifts of a sort given to Lucier by the physicist Edmond Dewan, the same person who alerted him to the room resonance demonstrations of Amar Bose that became the basis for I am sitting in a room. Dewan had offered his brainwave equipment to other composers who thought his idea was absurd. One of Lucier’s unsung talents is to remain open to random influence without distraction.
As Lucier recalled, ‘Dewan described to me this phenomenon that had to do with visualization, that by putting yourself in a non-visual state, it would be called a meditative state now, you could release the potential of the alpha [brainwave state] that is in your head.’2 The brainwave oscillations are detected by electroencephalograph electrodes placed on the scalp, and then their signal is enormously amplified. Since alpha waves occur between eight and twelve hertz, and normative hearing range starts around twenty hertz, once transduced these brainwave signals would be subaudible. Instead, the mechanical movement of speaker cones or solenoids were used to create percussive sounds from objects and instruments positioned throughout a space. Sound is generated only when the performer generates alpha waves by sitting doing nearly nothing, not thinking about things too much; that is, only when not performing does the performer perform. Closing one’s eyes and relaxing into a meditative state creates alpha. As the score tells us,
It can be blocked by visual attention with the eyes open or mental activity with the eyes closed. No part of the motor system is involved in any way. Control of the alpha consists simply of alteration of thought content–for example, a shifting back and forth from a state of visual imagery to one of relaxed resting.3
Diagram for equipment set-up for Music for Solo Performer (1965)
Both senses of the word meditation have alteration of thought content in common, while awareness of environments differ. When you meditate upon a topic, the immediate environment is not that critical. However, in Music for Solo Performer, only when a performer hears sounds from the distribution of their cognitive processes in space do they know they are performing. They become aware of their self-perception at the same time as the audience, in everyone’s listening, rather than in a sequence of utterance and audition. In Gordon Mumma’s experience of performing the piece, ‘It was the (slightly delayed) responses of the resonating percussion sounds that I recognized — when I had that state of attention.’1
This period of time, before the first tapped brainwaves are detected to their resonant instruments, is really quite mysterious. After the sounds have begun, one [the audience] comes to recognize the coincidence of the soloist opening his eyes with the stopping of the alpha-articulated sounds. Closing of the eyes will not necessarily start the alpha again. The process of non-visualizing must occur. This is a specially developed skill which the soloist learns with practice; and, no matter how experienced the soloists has become, various conditions of performance intrude upon that skill.2
In live settings, audiences see performers move or otherwise gesture for music to occur, even if those movements are now at the service of screens. In Music for Solo Performer, effort is exerted in the near total absence of such activities, so attention is directed to what the performer may be thinking or not thinking. Action is decelerated to opening and closing the eyes, which would be languorous if there were not another task at hand once closed, that of a further non-visualisation. The absence and hesitance of sound coaxes an intimacy not usually encountered in musical performance. A singer’s voice will let you know how they feel, but you may not look upon them like you do loved ones who are asleep, wondering what they dream.
In Lucier’s three-dimensional music, the performer’s interiority becomes transposed to the room’s interior, and vice versa. Since self-perception circulates through cybernetic loops tentacled by cables and air through the space, a pinpoint source of the performance cannot be located anywhere, but itself takes on volume. ‘Atmospheric’ or ‘ambient’ comes nowhere near describing the distribution of subjects and phenomena. Individuals in the audience are also busy absorbing and reflecting sound and, if they think about it, they cast shadows within the formation of what they hear. A turn of the head turns them into a composer, just as it does at each moment in daily life, where millisecond differences between sound arriving upon each ear contributes to a sense of spatial location and movement in the composition of space.
There is one movement, one gesture, however, that appears to have influence upon the sounds in Music for Solo Performer. Every now and then, Lucier lifts his hand to apply pressure on his eyes near the bridge of his nose. Opening one’s eyes or thinking visually in mental images blocks alpha. Closing and gently pressing upon the eyes stretches the retina and produces phosphenes, i.e., lights produced in the eye (entoptic) that are something to see but not much to think about. It appears as though these physiological lights inside the body marginalise self-generated images of visual thinking, if the sonic bursts of alpha are any indication.
Alvin Lucier practicing brainwave control in the Brandeis Electronic Music Studio, in preparation for Music for Solo Performer, 1965. Image courtesy of Alvin Lucier.
Alpha takes place on a slippery slope between waking and sleeping, as anyone who has fallen asleep while meditating knows. Nightly routines and naps demonstrate that this transition terrain can be a busy place of sights, sounds, mathematics, words, haptics, and other feelings, both amid the onsets and exits of sleep and dreaming. Part of it is discussed in the literature on hypnagogia, in which some revel and others pathologize. Some accounts include an experience of visual patterns not dissimilar to phosphenes in their non-imagistic character; indeed, entoptic phenomena are commonly cited as contributory factors.1 Therefore, the entoptic lights created in a gesture of gently pained concentration may — these musings are purely speculative — assist in importing a rapt inattention. An unseen room of people watching and listening would help block the subject from falling fully into sleep.
Meditation and sleep onset might temper how closely some associate Lucier with technics. Such a reading is derived from taking the science, within which he gained his early compositional traction, as a foundation rather than a touchstone. His qualifications are explicit: in the spoken text of I am sitting in a room, he said his activity is more that the ‘demonstration of a physical fact’. Lucier was also fond of saying ‘no ideas but in things,’ so fond that makers of a very good documentary about him took it as their title, so fond that it is probably second only to ‘I am sitting…’ Indeed, ‘no ideas but in things’ is so famous a phrase in general usage that it has become separated from its source to mean many things. The line in isolation appears to exile ideas to being epiphenomena of a substantialist thingness, wherein ‘the beauty of an idea’ would be in secondary orbit. Restoring it means placing things back in conversation with dream states.
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Peter Schwenger, ‘Writing Hypnagogia,’ Critical Inquiry 34 (Spring 2008): 423-439. ↩
Still from the film NO IDEAS BUT IN THINGS - the composer Alvin Lucier (2012). Copyright: Viola Rusche & Hauke Harder.
The line, ‘Say it, no ideas but in things,’ appears in ‘Paterson’, one of the major works of twentieth century American poetry, written by William Carlos Williams. It appears near the beginning of the poem in the wake of the Great Falls of the Passaic River as a bulwark against power and torrential undifferentiation. The falls’ thundering sound fills the poet’s dreams and powers the city’s industrialization. For Williams, the river itself becomes a man who lies sleeping, the thundering of the falls at his head filling the dreams of the city, his spine formed by the banks downstream. ‘Eternally asleep his dreams walk about the city where he persists incognito. Butterflies settle on his stone ear.’1 If anything, the line, ‘no ideas but…’ is itself a thing that stands against a torrent of differences that eddies into images. In Lucier’s work, some phantoms are images, some are real. Sitting in a room motionless, opening and closing one’s eyes and suspending an onset of dreaming can thunder percussively in a room.
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William Carlos Williams, Selected Poems (New York: New Directions Publishers, 1985), 261. ↩
Detroit Publishing Co., Copyright Claimant, and Publisher Detroit Publishing Co. Passaic Falls, N.J. New Jersey United States Passaic River Paterson, ca. 1900.
Laurie Anderson was not performing when, for days on end, she sat in a room at a monastery of the Vipassana sect of Buddhism. ‘There was no talking allowed, as well as, basically, no thinking.’1 Being a word wizard, this did not happen without frustration. One of her inspirations, William Burroughs, worried that Buddhist techniques to quell the inner voice might cure the writer, by deprivation of the chatter that gets crafted on a page. It is a matter of emphasis, he conceded and, besides, you can get good copy out of anything, even meditation.2 Anderson got good copy in the form of an interview from 1981. Describing her engagement with Western Buddhist techniques, she contrasted psychoanalysis, the talking cure, with the energetics of Kundalini, raising the coiled serpent from the base of the spine. It was about locating various past pains and talking about them or releasing them physically. While depriving herself of pain she opened her eyes with a new sense fully onto the room in which she sat.
Vipassana… like many processes such as psychoanalysis, it’s based on pain and the storage of pain. Unlike psychoanalysis which says, ‘When did you feel this pain and didn’t scream? Let’s go back to that point and look at it.’ Vipassana takes a similar attitude towards the fact that yes, you did feel pain and you didn’t scream. You put it somewhere and now we’ll find it physically. So, this process is about locating a kind of spinal source of energy that relates, of course, to the teachings of Kundalini. For me, as an experience, it was a total revelation; it was like using a sense that I had not seen for all my life and then feeling some other kind of energy and a very fascinating sense of storage, because the coding of that kind of situation is basically sitting there for eighteen hours without moving your arm and it’s just about to fall off. It’s not just about your position, but it’s about this kind of storage area. One of the things I experienced after doing this for a few hours at one point was opening my eyes and I couldn’t believe what I saw. It was a room with a top and a back and a floor and everything seemed to have volume that it never had before and I thought boy, if this is what sculptors see, I really wish I was still a sculptor.3
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Laurie Anderson, ‘Bruce Barber, Kate Craig and Serge Guilbaut in conversation with Laurie Anderson’, (1981) quoted in Bruce Barber, Performance, [Performance] and Performers (Toronto: YYZBooks, 2007), 54-67. ↩
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Douglas Kahn, Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 320. ↩
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‘My first reaction was I wanted to show it to somebody. One of the things about it of course is that your eyes are just so relaxed that of course your peripheral vision is extremely extended and it’s not suddenly a vision of need. It’s not ‘I see that coffee cup; I want to drink coffee.’ It’s a vision of non-need and of real relaxation in which you’re able to see volume and see the space between objects.’ Anderson, ‘Conversation with Laurie Anderson,’ 54-67. ↩
Actual phantoms
Laurie Anderson was sitting in a monastery. She seemed speechless but eventually wasn’t, and I think I speak for many in being thankful for the copy. Similar to Lucier’s dedication to a three-dimensionality of music, an already existing space had by habits and presumptions been masked. It invites the question: what might sculptors hear?
Musical Sculpture
Sounds lasting and leaving from different places and forming a sounding sculpture which lasts.1
Simple versions of Marcel Duchamp’s acoustic sculpture are increasingly feasible, but elaborations would involve intergenerational discipline that makes weeks of meditation, in comparison, go by in a flash:
Develop: one could after training the listener’s ear, succeed in drawing a resembling and recognizable profile — with more training make large sculptures in which the listener would be a centre — For ex. an immense Venus de Milo made of sounds around the listener — This probably presupposes an aural training from childhood and for several generations. [on the side] … after the Venus de Milo there would be an infinity of other transformations more inte—2
Rooms reveal themselves, acoustically and temporally, at different frequencies. My friend, a young saxophonist sidelined by severe repetitive strain injury (RSI) and I attended the first performance of Lucier’s In Memoriam Jon Higgins at Wesleyan. At the far right of the stage sat Tom Ridenour, the clarinettist for whom the composition was written, and to the left a single loudspeaker emitting a continuously sweeping, slowly ascending pure sine wave. At set intervals, the performer sustained a note just above the wave, which would then rise slowly up to and through it. As it approached toward unison, the two pitches beat against one another, quickly at first, decreasing in speed until settling in concert with one another, and then vice versa, radiating in and out of unison into rhythms, melodies, harmonies, and three dimensions.
My friend leaned over and whispered impatiently, ‘I don’t get it, so what?’ He was new to experimental music; his RSI had motivated him to broaden his musical horizons, so Wesleyan was a good place to be. His trouble may have come from expecting the performer, the only human on stage, to demonstrate an expressive prowess, or at least musical language. Perhaps he thought the modulations were produced electronically. Whatever the reason, he was not impressed. All I said was, ‘Where’s the sound?’ A simple question. At that moment the sound was twisting slowly like a large cyclone throughout the entire concert hall. It was a kind of swarming. That was all he needed. He lit up, having opened a pair of eyes inside, and was intensely attentive to the volumes of the new room with a top and a back and a floor.
The physical principle of the actual phantoms in In Memoriam Jon Higgins was demonstrated by Lucier in class one day. In each stereo speaker, hard left and hard right, there was a single sine wave; the sound began to beat when he panned toward balance.
The interaction between the instrumental and the electronic sounds produce beating which, when it is slow enough, can be heard to spin in elliptical patterns through space. At faster beating speeds, the waves spin too, but you can’t hear the motion of the sound waves, they are simply going too fast. In both cases, however, the phenomenon is spatial, that is, the waves collide in space, in the actual performance space, not in any electronic circuity or panning device.3
A small gliding interval unleashes the dimensional. The waves are slower when closer, and the phenomena more detectable when slower, thus the phantoms grow tangible just off unison, in an aura of self-similarity. These are actual phantoms, real mirages, like those ships that float on shimmering horizons. Such acoustical phenomena are everywhere all the time but, being masked by the wild of the everyday, are usually too fleeting or small to detect. They don’t cease to exist because they go unheard. At what point do they appear and disappear in Lucier’s finely tuned situations called compositions, in their natural habitats?
In the three-dimensionality of Lucier’s music, transposition is itself transposed. The graphics of a score on the page when the interval does not go up or down but out into another dimension and other places. Small differences become capable of manifesting themselves as large spaces. Volume inhabits volumes, with amplification occurring in how the sound is reinforced and in how sound inhabits space in the first place. Performing sounds performs rooms even if their performances are not heard. This takes place at all times, so Lucier’s music not only leaps off the page, it leaps out of designated performance spaces. What we hear in his music can be transposed to wherever we are. It encourages what I have called transperception, which is no accident since I developed the concept to account for Lucier’s music and Henry David Thoreau’s observations on perception of distant mountains and sounds in a landscape.4
Lucier’s transpositional spaciousness provides a capaciousness in which a sound is never in itself, but always open to present and possible poetics, sociality, and ecology, the occupying space making room at other scales. In Memoriam Jon Higgins, constrained sounds might be ushered to the back corner near the ceiling, accompanied by emergent melodic and rhythmic strains; and then defaulted back to the stage. The clarinettist’s breath becomes architecture that moves like wind without a breeze. These were actual phantoms, yet at the premier of this work at Wesleyan there was another capaciousness at work. Physics could not be dissociated from the mourning of the loss of Jon Higgins, celebration of his presence, and gratitude for all that had happened in his association, the difference that he had made in the room.
Bird, Birds
Actual phantoms, ambiguous phantoms, and phantom phantoms are explicit in Bird and Person Dyning. They start with an emulated bird being heard in microphones that emulates a head, its separation of ears, that breed many birds. ‘All I have to have is the electric bird, two loudspeakers, two amplifiers, and the binaural mikes, and by simply moving to different points in space, I can produce a great complexity and variety of modulation of the original sounds.’1 There are already two birds in the title: one that a person dines upon and the other one that the performer ‘dynes with. Dyning refers to heterodyning, combining two proximal frequencies to produce a third, similar to the dynamics that operate within puns. One letter is off–i/y–self-similarity itself is reproduced then skewered, but no animals were harmed, no foul play, just words wounded.
Lucier was a seasoned practitioner of puns, so Alviary may have acted as a prompt to pun the title, but no licence was needed. Punsters never require license, just dignity. More importantly, he chose to explore the compositional possibilities of the ornament on Thanksgiving, a holiday on which many Americans dine on a bird. Not just any bird, but one that foretells its fate in the sound it makes: gobble. When Leibniz mused that music was unconscious mathematics, it was the tryptophan talking. An out-of-season ornament from the previous Christmas, takes prominence on Black Friday, heralding the holiday spirit of consumption, and looping the year in leapfrogging birds. In the Wesleyan University Electronic Studio:
…as I was standing in the middle of the room, feedback started to sound. Before I could get to the amplifier and lower the volume control I began hearing phantom images of the birdcall, which seemed to come from inside my head and at the same time to be located in various parts of the room. They were amazing.
…because of the disparity between the frequency range of the feedback and that of the birdcall, the phantoms must be some form of harmonically related beat frequency signal (feedback strand) and a search tone (birdcall). Whatever these phenomena might be called, including resultant tones, heterodyne components, or inter-aural harmonics occurring only in the brain of the listener, the results are spectacular. Listeners can hear them vividly. The piece is called Bird and Person Dyning.2
A feedback system is set up between binaural microphones and speakers. The way amplification and equalization are used to invite feedback sets up a tension in the room, a pitched acoustic humidity without the heaviness. The movements of the performer, slow and slight, invite expectation and provide identifiable change, and the fretful humidity makes a fine habitat for high-strung electronic birds.
The original sound of the bird was kitschy, a cheap cheep. I don’t know whether Lucier ever heard the sound in this way. The sound was retro when it was new and wasn’t new because it was already out of season, but no historical reconstruction could reintroduce its kitschy characteristics, especially now that the ornaments are effectively extinct, and their carcasses discarded. When I finally heard Bird and Person Dyning, its kitsch was moult, lost like whiskers on kittens, bright copper kettles, and warm woollen mittens in recordings of John Coltrane’s My Favourite Things.
In contrast to the simple tones in In Memoriam Jon Higgins, Lucier has said that ‘the sound isn’t a neutral one at all, it has a lot of information…It emitted endless repetitions of a downward glissando followed by a series of repeated chirps.’1 The bird is outside the system but feeds into the loop. That means it keeps singing among skewed versions of itself. What adds the effect is that the combined downward glissandi begin beating against each other. The bird becomes many birds, a phantom flock, with the beating of wings:
The performance simply consists of the performer moving slowly around the space searching for phantoms. When I perform the work I usually move through the audience, toward the birdcall and speakers, stopping briefly when I hear heterodyning. I tip my head from left to right, to fine tune the results and move them to various points in space. The spatial relationships between the binaural microphones and the loudspeakers determine the geographical locations of the phantom birdcalls. I relish the theatricality of the situation. Sometimes the results are vivid–transpositions and their mirror inversions occur. 2
In the spirit of being inside Lucier’s head in his hunt for alpha in Music for Solo Performer, audience members not only listen to Lucier’s listening in Bird and Person Dyning, his composing is in his listening.
When Lucier peripatetically searches for ‘geographical locations of the phantom bird calls’, tilting his head like a robin listening and looking for a worm, it is because this scale also works at geographic and planetary levels. Peaks and troughs fill the room and also migrate to other topographies. Transpositions of scales transport their own images at different steps of composition, and in the composition of listening.
There was an article recently in Scientific American about indigo buntings and how beautifully they orient themselves as they fly from north to south. They fly thousands of miles nonstop by looking upward at the constellations. It seems that they have some sort of timing device with which they can compensate for the rotation of the earth, which changes the relationships of the stars. These birds are just amazing navigators; they inspired one of my images, though it doesn’t really have much to do with the piece now, which was to move and turn such that the panning would change the relationships of the sound in the loudspeakers with respect to the static bird sound. Now it was just an idea; there’s no concrete way for me to use that, but it got me started, it got me standing up in the space.3
Scale fits in too, as a large container for actual phantoms at earth magnitude. High in the mountains of Colorado, Lucier used simple antennas to listen to the sounds of natural radio, signals mostly produced by lightning that are usually noisy, but sometimes resemble chirping of birds or form delicate glissandi called whistlers.4 At times, the signals are transported along magnetospheric flux lines that reach from one hemisphere out into space and back into the opposite hemisphere. A thunderstorm in the Pacific Ocean west of South America will be heard in Colorado. An enormous power of lightning flashing a billion volts, too powerful to be industrialised, and great distances traveled go into producing these delicate little sounds. Phantom glissandi from an electronic bird or a billion volts. More recently, Lucier followed the example of his friend Pauline Oliveros by bouncing things off the craggy surface of the moon, in his case, the intimacy of his heartbeats translated into the silk strings of a Qin (an ancient Chinese lute instrument with silk strings).5
In 2003, I returned to Wesleyan to participate in a celebration of the World Music Program. During a session on its legacy of experimentalism, each time someone mentioned I am sitting in a room, Lucier — who was sitting in the audience — comically crossed himself as protection from this creation that had stalked him for so long, biting the heels of a prolific and varied composing career. Please allow all other phantoms to prosper. ‘I am bouncing off the moon while indigo buntings navigate rotation, glissandi beat their wings, and other transformations more inte–’ These are the dimensions in which Lucier’s three-dimensional music is performed and teaches us to listen. These are the gifts we receive.
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Alvin Lucier, ‘My Affairs with Feedback,’ Resonance 9, no. 2 (2002): 24 quoted in Lucier, Reflections, 178. ↩
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Lucier, Reflections, 178. ↩
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Lucier, Reflections, 178. ↩
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Kahn, Earth Sound Earth Signal, 28. ↩
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‘Arachnophilia with Alvin Lucier,’ Arachnophilia, https://arachnophilia.net/on-air-with-concerts. ↩
Postscript
Below is an excerpt from Alvin Lucier’s text reflection on Bird and Person Dyning, titled ‘My Affairs with Feedback,’ Resonance 9, no. 2 (2002):
On Thanksgiving Day, 1975, with nothing better to do, I spent the afternoon in the Wesleyan University Electronic Music Studio. I began experimenting with panning the sounds of an electronic birdcall between two loudspeakers. I had recently received the birdcall in the mail from sound artist Doug Kahn, whom I had never met. The birdcall was actually a Christmas tree ornament, a baseball-size silver ball, containing a sound-producing circuit, a miniature amplifier and loudspeaker. It emitted endless repetitions of a downward glissando followed by a series of repeated chirps. Kahn said he thought I might find a way to use it in a musical work.
I had also just acquired a pair of miniature Sennheiser binaural microphones, designed to be positioned on either side of a dummy head or worn in human ears, in order to make realistic recordings. By moving my head back and forth rapidly I was trying to produce short time delays or, since that seemed unlikely, perhaps I would discover some other interesting phenomenon.
At one point, as I was standing in the middle of the room, feedback started to sound. Before I could get to the amplifier and lower the volume control I began hearing phantom images of the birdcall, which seemed to come from inside my head and at the same time to be located in various parts of the room. They were amazing. What I was hearing was heterodyning, a term in radio technology describing beat frequencies produced between two radio frequencies, of which one is usually a received signal-carrying current and the other that of an uninterrupted current introduced into the apparatus. In this case the phenomenon was produced by the interaction between continuous strands of feedback and the sounds of the birdcall, both within the audio range.
Often the resultant phantom shapes were simply lower transpositions of the original. At other times they were mirror images. If two or more strands of feedback sounded at once, double images might sound simultaneously.
It is difficult to pinpoint the frequencies of the birdcall exactly — the call is noisy — but careful listening puts the start of the swoop at approximately 880 cycles per second, the repeated chirps at 660. The feedback frequencies that produce the most vivid phantoms are in the range of 1750 to 3000 cps. The phantoms themselves sound in the lower mid-range, from approximately 250 to 700. I had originally thought that the images were simply resultant or difference tones. If the feedback sounded above the birdcall, as the birdcall swooped downward, the distance between it and the feedback grew smaller; the resultant tones were lower. If the feedback loop occurred above, the resultant tones slid upward, as the distance between the two sounds increased. But because of the disparity between the frequency range of the feedback and that of the birdcall, the phantoms must be some form of harmonically related beat frequencies caused by the interaction of a fixed frequency signal (feedback strand) and a search tone (birdcall). Whatever these phenomena might be called, including resultant tones, heterodyne components or inter-aural harmonics occurring only in the brain of the listener, the results are spectacular. Listeners can hear them vividly. The piece is called Bird and Person Dyning.
In numerous performances over the years I have developed a simple set-up consisting of the birdcall mounted on a mike stand and positioned in the front middle of the space flanked by two stereo loudspeakers. The birdcall sounds by itself; it is not mixed into the sound system. The binaural mikes are worn in the performer’s ears, routed by long cables through a mixer with compressor-limiters and amplifiers to the two speakers. Before the performance the performer, with the help of the sound technician, searches the space for room resonances whose sonic manifestations as feedback, cause heterodyning. During the search process the sound technician uses equalization to help bring out resonances in this frequency range.
The performance simply consists of the performer moving slowly around the space searching for phantoms. When I perform the work I usually move through the audience, toward the birdcall and speakers, stopping briefly when I hear heterodyning. I tip my head from left to right, to fine tune the results and move them to various points in space. The spatial relationships between the binaural microphones and the loudspeakers determine the geographical locations of the phantom birdcalls. I relish the theatricality of the situation. Sometimes the results are vivid — transpositions and their mirror inversions occur. At other times, however, the room just produces a few unwanted resonances. The performer accepts the task of finding the appropriate strands of feedback that create phantom images of the birdcall. The performance is not an improvisation.
Douglas Kahn is an historian and theorist of energies in the arts, sound in the arts and sound studies, and media arts, from the late-nineteenth century to the present. He lives on unceded Dharug and Gundungurra land. His books include Energies in the Arts (MIT Press, 2019); Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts (University of California Press, 2013); Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (MIT Press, 1999); Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of Digital Arts, edited with Hannah Higgins (University of California Press, 2012); and Source: Music of the Avant-garde, edited with Larry Austin (University of California Press, 2011).
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The editors would like to thank Douglas Kahn, Casey Jones for her editorial assistance, and filmmakers Viola Rusche and Hauke Harder for the use of film stills from their film, NO IDEAS BUT IN THINGS - the composer Alvin Lucier (2012). Douglas Kahn would like to thank the editors and Casey Jones, as well as Anthony Burr and Peter Blamey.
Notes