Am I Sitting in a Room Again
A Piece of Music Will Speak Once More. For 26 Hours.
"I am sitting in a room," Alvin Lucier's classic work of sound art, will be performed by 90 artists in honor of his 90th birthday.
It was a snowy night in March 1970 in Middletown, Conn. Merely the composer Alvin Lucier turned off the heat, wanting it serenity in his apartment. He sabbatum in his living room with two tape recorders, a microphone, a single loudspeaker and an amplifier.
Lucier, then 38, with a potent New England emphasis and a periodic stutter, pressed record and began to speak.
"I am sitting in a room unlike from the 1 you are in now," he said. "I am recording the sound of my speaking phonation, and I am going to play it back into the room again and again, until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves and so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed."
He and then did exactly that, and the consequence — called "I am sitting in a room" — has become 1 of the classic works of audio fine art. Lucier repeatedly played and rerecorded his taped voice into his living room. Each recording accumulated more and more of the resonant characteristics of the space.
After roughly nine repetitions of the text — and nearly xv minutes — Lucier's voice communication, including his stutter, becomes impossible to make out, and is somewhen overtaken by high-pitched tones, sounding somewhere between a bowed vibraphone and the creaking of a rusty swing set. By 23 minutes, speech has fully transformed into noisy drones.
At least that'due south what ane hears in that 1970 recording. Lucier's work has been performed and recorded many times since then, and every recording sounds different — because how the slice unfolds depends on the particular acoustics of a given infinite. This range of possibilities volition be on display on Thursday — continuing through Friday, Lucier's 90th birthday — when Effect Project Room in Brooklyn hosts a 26-hr streamed "I am sitting in a room" marathon, featuring 90 performers.
It isn't the only birthday commemoration. On Friday, the E'er Present Orchestra, an ensemble dedicated to Lucier's music, will premiere his "Adagio for Strings," streamed by the ZKM Center for Art and Media.
Paradigm
Lucier has long been historic as an essential innovator, but he has likewise remained a bit esoteric. "I really felt every bit if I had missed the boat in making work that was understood by a lot of the public, not a coterie of cognoscenti," he said in an email interview.
"One of my fondest compliments," he added, "was when our plumber, as he was leaving my house after having finished a chore at my abode, remarked equally he was walking out the door: 'Are y'all the guy who wrote the slice most sitting in a room? My kids love information technology. Yous are ahead of your time.'"
At 90, Lucier'south playful, searching spirit is stiff. "I must confess that I am executing crazy ideas I have had in my mind for years but never have had the courage to realize," he said, including a work inspired by the pianist and composer David Tudor'southward "luxurious eyelashes" and "a duet with a bat who lives in the tower of the Wesleyan Memorial Chapel."
Over 50 years ago, when Lucier began teaching at Wesleyan University in Middletown, he was already fascinated by environmental and bodily sounds, with works like "Music for Solo Performer" (for amplified brain waves); "Sferics" (for natural radio emissions acquired by lightning); and "Chambers" (for resonant spaces ranging from seashells to subway stations). Recording his own body, in his ain domestic space, was a logical next step.
One impetus to focus on his voice stemmed in part from his cursory stint interim in experimental films. "I've started paying attending to the characteristics of my speech communication which are original to my personality and don't sound like everyone else's," he told an interviewer in 1970. "You know I'm a stutterer."
Paradigm
For composers steeped in the mid-20th-century avant-garde techniques of John Cage, in which personality and self-expression were frowned on — and often actively avoided by using procedures of gamble — Lucier'south emphasis on his own voice was a bit taboo.
"Several friends told me they thought it was (too) personal," he said in the recent written interview. "They meant it as a criticism. You encounter, indeterminacy was supposed to go us away from such romantic notions. I of my friends confessed that he thought information technology was 'self-indulgent.'"
But the intimacy of Lucier'southward speaking voice helped ground the slice'southward abstract exploration of record techniques and acoustics, bringing information technology into dialogue with a broader accomplice of musicians who were exploring the musical potential of human speech and repetition around the same time: Steve Reich in "Come up Out," Robert Ashley in "She Was a Company," Pauline Oliveros in "One Word" (from her "Sonic Meditations").
For over two decades, "I am sitting in a room" circulated generally through recordings, the beginning issued in 1970 by the magazine Source: Music of the Avant-Garde; some other, from the label Lovely Music, came out in 1981. In 1995, Lucier fabricated his get-go try at performing the slice live, and, in the 2000s, began using estimator software to perform it more regularly.
A new box gear up of archival recordings, issued on the occasion of Lucier's birthday by Sound on Paper Editions, demonstrates how the music reflects the acoustics of the space in which it's performed — including a examination version made in a pocket-size, sterile-sounding room at the Electronic Music Studio at Brandeis University, in 1969, and a rich, reverberant functioning at the Church building of Saint-Merri in Paris in 2018.
Although the work has long been synonymous with Lucier'southward voice and personality, anyone tin can perform it: The marathon on Th and Friday volition characteristic members of his family, students and colleagues performing in diverse spaces, some of which have been office of the composer'due south life. The composer and performer James Fei, a sometime Lucier student, recorded at the Littlefield Concert Hall at Mills College in California, an establishment crucial to the history of experimental (particularly electronic) music and whose time to come remains uncertain. The composer Paula Matthusen performed the piece in a stairwell at the Heart for the Arts at Wesleyan.
"I decided to brand my own version that would not be like Alvin's version," said the composer George Lewis, who recorded in Berlin. "That's a very Afro-diasporic affair to practise. You sort of notice a style. Yous don't go with what happened already. You try to create your ain version."
The marathon will brainstorm with a 2017 recording by Lucier, wearing a Black Lives Matter hoodie and reading from his volume "Chambers." His voice is much softer than it was in 1970, and his stutter is nearly unnoticeable. In recent years he has begun to face up challenges performing because of his health.
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"I am losing my vocalization because of Parkinson's disease, which I was diagnosed with about ten or 12 years agone," he said.
For his almost contempo public functioning of "I am sitting in a room," in October 2019, Lucier arrived at the Skanu Mezs Festival in Riga, Latvia, seemingly unable to speak.
"We were really concerned," said Jan Thoben, the co-editor of the box set up, who was serving as technical assistant. "This piece without having a vocalism, just a whisper: I don't even know if it would piece of work."
Lucier recalled that, to fix for that functioning, "I had to warm up my vocalism beforehand. For some reason I felt strongly that night that I should accept my stiff vocalization and then that I could give the Riga audience a true version of the work, even though I realized that a whispered version would be authentic, too."
The Riga recording, featured on the box set, begins tentatively, with the composer quietly repeating the initial "I" in a whisper. After 20 seconds, his voice fills out and, afterward ane simulated get-go, continues. The ensuing recording-and-rerecording process reveals bell-similar upper frequencies that echo the rhythm of his spoken language, until the audio gradually smooths into resonant open intervals, sustained past airy, flutelike drones.
The recording is remarkable. And it is as well deeply intimate — and intimacy, a sense of being drawn into Lucier'south body and infinite, was always both the provocation and the enduring draw of "I am sitting in a room."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/11/arts/music/alvin-lucier-sitting-in-a-room.html