Lucier, Alvin

Almost New York [2 CDs]

Label: Pogus Country: USA

"Alvin Lucier is one of the key experimental artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. A unique and individual artist: No one sounds quite like Alvin Lucier. Lucier writes about the genesis of the works on this release:

"Since the early 1980s I have made a series of works for conventional musical instruments. Before that time I had been mainly occupied with the exploration of such phenomena as echolocation, brain waves, room acoustics and the visual representation of sound. Often these works required special equipment -- hand held pulse wave oscillators ("Vespers"), differential amplifiers ("Music for Solo Performer"), horseshoe magnets ("Music on a Long Thin Wire"). Then players began asking me for pieces. Now I needed to find a way of achieving the same poetry with acoustic instruments as I did with electronic means.

One of the things I discovered was that players could create rhythmic patterns by closely tuning with electronically generated pure waves or with each other, producing audible beats. Often, to get continuous motion, I have one or more voices sweep up or down at various speeds against fixed sustained pitches. As a wave approaches a sustained pitch the audible beating slows down to zero when it reaches unison, then speeds up again as the wave leaves the pitch. Almost New York employs slow sweep pure wave oscillators, Broken Line, flute glissandi. In "Twonings" two different tuning systems collide and in "Coda Variations" slight variations in pitch are heard chronologically."

Recorded by Charles Curtis, Joseph Kubera, Robert Dick, Danny Tunick, and Robin Hayward - some of the leading new music performers of our era, these works are essential additions to the Alvin Lucier oeuvre, as well as satisfying anyone interested in great experimental music."-Pogus

"Alvin Lucier (born May 14, 1931) is an American composer of experimental music and sound installations that explore acoustic phenomena and auditory perception. A long-time music professor at Wesleyan University, Lucier was a member of the influential Sonic Arts Union, which included Robert Ashley, David Behrman, and Gordon Mumma. Much of his work is influenced by science and explores the physical properties of sound itself: resonance of spaces, phase interference between closely-tuned pitches, and the transmission of sound through physical media."-Wikipedia