Alvin Lucier, an influential experimental composer whose works focused less on traditional musical elements such as melody and harmony than on the scientific underpinnings of sound and listeners’ perceptions, died Wednesday at his home in Middletown, Conn., where he taught for decades. given. at Wesleyan University. He was 90.
His daughter, Amanda Lucier, said the cause was complications from a fall.
Unlike composers whose goal is to paint an aural image, evoke certain emotions, create a dramatic story, or explore carefully plotted rhythmic interactions, Mr. Lucier seemed to approach his works as experiments that could yield unpredictable soundscapes.
A finished work can sound like howling feedback, electronic crackling or – in the case of his most famous piece, “I Am Sitting in a Room” (1969) – spoken text that is repeatedly distorted and covered with reverberation until it is transformed into a symphony of dancing overtones.
And while his music was rooted in the physics of sound, variables such as the size and shape of the playing space or the alpha wave patterns an artist generates made his pieces sound different from one performance to the next.
Mr. Lucier started many of his projects by wondering what kind of sounds would come out of a specific process, such as tapping a few pencils or detecting brain waves. He would then reduce the variables to one focus.
“My main activity in composing is to eliminate many different possibilities in a piece,” he told the producers of “No Ideas but in Things,” a 2013 film portrait of him by Viola Rusche and Hauke Harder. “When I start out, I have so many different ideas about how to put the piece together, and I have to work hard and think until I get to the point where only the essential components are there.”
In “I’m Sitting in a Room,” Mr. Lucier quietly began to read out a short statement describing what he is doing. “I’m in a different room than where you are now,” the text begins. “I record the sound of my speaking voice and I start playing it over and over in the room until the resonance frequencies of the room amplify themselves, destroying any semblance of my speech, except perhaps rhythm.”
The acoustics of the room, as well as audio distortions that occur when a tape is recorded over and over, produces a gradually changing sound where after 10 minutes the narration is buried in reverberation and overtones, and unintelligible. During the last movement, high overtones melt into eerie, slow-moving melodies.
Other works are tempered by a wry sense of humor. In “Nothing Is Real” (1990), Mr. Lucier a pianist plays the melody of the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever,” spreading the song’s phrases throughout the piano range. The performance is recorded and immediately played back through a small speaker in a teapot, which acts as a sound-changing resonance chamber. Lucier then has the pianist open and close the teapot lid to further manipulate the tone of the recording.
Alvin Augustus Lucier Jr., was born in Nashua, NH, on May 14, 1931. His father was a lawyer who was elected mayor of Nashua when Alvin was 3. Alvin Sr. was also an amateur violinist who met his future wife, Kathryn, E. Lemery, when he filled in for a dance band in which she was the pianist.
The Luciers encouraged their son’s interest in music, but although he had picked up the principles of piano playing from his mother, he refused to take lessons and preferred to play the drums. His main interest at the time was jazz, but he became interested in contemporary classical music when he found a recording of Arnold Schoenberg’s “Serenade”.
“I bought it and it was shocking,” said Mr. Lucier in a 2005 interview with NewMusicBox. “It didn’t make sense, but there was something that held my interest. That’s when I decided I was interested in challenging things.”
He studied composition and music theory at Yale University, where he taught, among others, Howard Boatwright and Quincy Porter. There he received his bachelor’s degree in 1954 and his master’s degree in 1960 from Brandeis University, where he studied with Arthur Berger and Harold Shapero. During those years he composed in a neoclassical style, a preference reinforced by his studies at the Tanglewood Music Festival in Massachusetts with Aaron Copland and Lukas Foss during the summers of 1958 and ’59.
Lucier changed his mind during a two-year sojourn in Rome as a Fulbright scholar, from 1960 to 1962. While attending a 1960 concert of composers John Cage and David Tudor and choreographer Merce Cunningham at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice Lucier was initially outraged by the accidental trials Cage and Tudor were investigating. But as he reflected on the concert in the days that followed, he came to understand Cage and Tudor’s rejection of conventional music formats as both important and necessary.
“There was something so wonderful and exciting about it that I decided I wanted to get myself involved,” he told DailyExpertNews in 1997. “I was literally exhausted by the neoclassical style and I had some teachers who were at an impasse. They got bitter and they kind of lost their enthusiasm. And I was just at that age when I was ready for something new. But I didn’t know what to do.”
He found an answer in 1965 when he met Edmond Dewan, a physicist who had invented a brain wave amplifier. Mr. Lucier was then on the Brandeis Faculty and had gained considerable attention in new music circles by presiding over programs both in Brandeis and New York featuring premieres by Cage, Earl Brown, Christian Wolff and Terry Riley. dr. Dewan offered the use of his invention to Mr. Lucier, who explored its possibilities in what became the breakthrough work in his new style, “Music for Solo Performer” (1965).
For that piece, the performer sits in front of an audience with sensors around his forehead, closed eyes and a clear mind. The waves are amplified and sent to loudspeakers whose vibrating cones sound percussion instruments.
The brainwave amplifier gave way to other high-tech gadgets. Mr. Lucier created “Vespers” (1968) using echolocation devices – pulse oscillators used by the blind and others to determine distances. He had the mechanism operated by blindfolded performers moving around a room, the devices clicking at different speeds and intensities as they approached walls and other objects.
In 1966, Mr. Lucier founded the Sonic Arts Union with a group of like-minded avant-garde artists, including composers Robert Ashley, David Behrman and Gordon Mumma. The group toured the United States and Europe, with each composer playing their own music until 1976. They were sometimes joined by visual artists, including Mr Lucier’s first wife, Mary Lucier. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1974.
Lucier later married Wendy Stokes, a former dancer and psychiatric nurse. She survives him along with their daughter, Amanda. In addition to their Middletown home, Mr. Lucier and his wife had a studio apartment in Manhattan.
He joined the Wesleyan faculty in 1968 and taught composition there until his retirement in 2011. From the mid-1980s, he increasingly focused on instrumental and ensemble works. The Bang on a Can All-Stars, Alter Ego, Ensemble Pamplemousse and ICE are among the groups who commissioned works from him.
“I don’t really like listening to my own music,” Mr. Lucier told NewMusicBox. “But maybe it’s good, because it makes me think and it keeps me from getting complacent.”
Maia Coleman contributed reporting.