Alvin Lucier: A Celebration
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This small, striking book commemorates the career of experimental music composer Alvin Lucier, and features an interview with Lucier and curator Andrea Miller-Keller, essays by Nicolas Collins, Ronald Kuivila, Michael Roth and Pamela Tatge, and details of a symposium, exhibit and special performances of Lucier's work held at Wesleyan University, November 4-6, 2011. Lucier has pioneered in many areas of music composition and performance, including the notation of performers' physical gestures, the use of brain waves in live performance, the generation of visual imagery by sound in vibrating media, and the evocation of room acoustics for musical purposes. From 1970 to 2011 he taught at Wesleyan University where he was John Spencer Camp Professor of Music. Lucier performs, lectures and exhibits his sound installations extensively in the United States, Europe and Asia.
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Book preview
Alvin Lucier - Andrea Miller-Keller
ALVIN
LUCIER
A Celebration
with an introduction by Michael S. Roth
essays by Nicolas Collins and Ronald Kuivila
and an interview
with Andrea Miller-Keller and Alvin Lucier
Published in conjunction with the exhibition
Alvin Lucier (and His Artist Friends)
at the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University
November 4 through December 11, 2011
Wesleyan University Press
Middletown, Connecticut 06459
www.wesleyan.edu/wespress
Copyright © 2011
The Early Years: Excerpts from an interview with Alvin Lucier
Copyright © Andrea Miller-Keller 2011
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Alvin Lucier : a celebration / with an introduction
by Michael S. Roth ; essays by Nicolas Collins and Ronald Kuivila
and an interview with Andrea Miller-Keller and Alvin Lucier.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978–0–8195–7279–0 (pbk. : alk. paper) —
ISBN 978–0–8195–7280–6 (ebook)
1. Lucier, Alvin. 2. Composers — United States —
Biography. I. Collins, Nicolas. II. Kuivila, Ron.
III. Miller-Keller, Andrea.
ML410.L8973A65 2011
780.92 — dc23
2011039041
5 4 3 2 1
Editor: Andrea Miller-Keller
Design and typography: Catherine Waters
Production and press supervision: The Production Department
Printing and binding: The Studley Press Inc.
Back cover image:
Alvin Lucier, Rezonanzen Festival, Berlin, 1999
Photo credit: Michael Schroedter
Table of Contents
Introduction
Michael S. Roth
In Appreciation
Pamela Tatge
Symposium
with commentary
Vespers
Nicolas Collins
Alvin in Albany
Ronald Kuivila
The Early Years:
Excerpts from an interview with Alvin Lucier
Andrea Miller-Keller
Alvin Lucier Biography
Andrea Miller-Keller
Concerts
with commentary by Alvin Lucier
Alvin Lucier (and His Artist Friends)
Exhibition Checklist
Andrea Miller-Keller
Biographies
Acknowledgments
Alvin Lucier, Parshall, Colorado, 1997
Photo credit: Amanda Lucier
Introduction
Michael S. Roth
President, Wesleyan University
What a gift, what a pleasure to celebrate the musical contributions of Alvin Lucier, who has been inspiring students at Wesleyan since 1968. When he started teaching here, Alvin was joining a department that already had demonstrated a strong commitment to experimental and world music. John Cage had made Wesleyan a home away from home, and David McAllester, Bob Brown and Richard Winslow were bringing sounds from around the world (and the instruments that make them) to this quiet campus in central Connecticut. But perhaps quiet
is the wrong word. After all, revolutionary campus politics and avant-garde ideas were animating the Wesleyan culture when Alvin began teaching here. He, too, was open to revolutionary and avant-garde impulses; and he was also open to the possibilities for hearing things within the quiet. It turned out to be an enormously potent combination.
At Wesleyan, Alvin's anti-parochialism found fertile soil. There were always willing musical collaborators, and visual artists, too, found inspiration in his spirit and his practice. Disciplinary constraints make little sense to artists or to scientists, and at Wesleyan we have tried to cultivate a spirit of experimentation that responds to what is happening in the world—not to what is expected from convention.
Alvin Lucier's contributions to experimental music have continued to produce what we most hope for from the best forms of experimentation: opening us up to new ways of thinking/feeling and shaking up what we thought we already knew. Each year students have entered his classes thinking they know what music is, where it comes from and even what it might be. Without hectoring, without preaching, they are taught to think otherwise. What a gift! What a pleasure!
Alvin Lucier, Music for Pure Waves,
Bass Drums and Acoustic Pendulums, (1980)
Crowell Concert Hall,
Wesleyan University, 1985
Photo credit: Gary Smith
In Appreciation
Pamela Tatge
Director, Center for the Arts,
Wesleyan University
On behalf of the faculty, staff and students affiliated with Wesleyan's Center for the Arts, we are delighted to offer this catalog in tribute to the widely acclaimed Alvin Lucier, known affectionately to many of us here at Wesleyan simply as Alvin.
A liberal arts education is the opportunity to expand one's world-view, and at Wesleyan the arts are seen as an essential component of this exploration. Alvin's work on our stages and in our classrooms has played a unique role in this exploration. When the music department invited Alvin to join the faculty in 1968, they dedicated themselves to a curriculum that