Music 109: Notes on Experimental Music

233 Pages·2012·1.35 MB·English

by  Alvin Lucier

music 109

M u s i c 1 0 9
Notes on Experimental Music
Alvin Lucier
Foreword by robert Ashley
Wesleyan University Press
Middletown, Connecticut
wesleyan university press
Middletown CT 06459
www.wesleyan.edu/wespress
© 2012 Alvin Lucier
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Designed by Eric M. Brooks
Typeset in Whitman and Calluna Sans
by Passumpsic Publishing
Wesleyan University Press is a member of
the Green Press Initiative. The paper used in
this book meets their minimum requirement
for recycled paper.
Sample of Drumming score by Steve Reich,
copyright 1973 by Hendon Music, Inc.
Reprinted by permission.
Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lucier, Alvin.
Music 109: notes on experimental music /
Alvin Lucier; foreword by Robert Ashley.
pages cm
Includes index.
isbn 978-0-8195-7297-4 (cloth: alk. paper)—
isbn 978-0-8195-7298-1 (ebook)
1. Lucier, Alvin. 2. Avant-garde (Music)
I. Title.
ml410.l8973a3 2012
780.92—dc23 2012008721
5 4 3 2 1
Again for
wendy & amanda
And for
susan & sue-ellen

contents
Foreword by Robert Ashley : ix
1 Symphony : 1
2 Studio Fonologico : 5
3 Indeterminacy : 12
4 Graphic Notation : 23
5 Town Hall : 27
6 Rose Art Museum : 44
7 Cage and Tudor : 56
8 Sonic Arts Union : 71
9 Bell Labs : 94
10 Lenses, Intervals : 99
11 Tape Recorders : 103
12 Repetition : 109
13 Prose : 126
14 The Piano : 128
15 Long String Instrument : 144
16 Recording : 150
17 Opera : 154
18 Words : 169
19 Voices : 177
20 String Quartets : 182
Author’s Note : 201
Index : 203

foreword
Music 109 is a thorough, modern history of a particular
group of composers and their work. This history begins in the
1950s and ends roughly in the 1980s. In colleges and universi-
ties where the history of contemporary music is part of the cur-
riculum, this book will solve many teachers’ problems about what
ideas, what composers, and what compositions are important
to understand from that history. What Alvin Lucier presents so
clearly here, with quotations from scores, will make a classroom
discussion of those ideas easy.
We are in the time of what young composers now speak of as
the music that has influenced their ideas. The study begins after
the time of Harry Partch, Conlin Nancarrow, Henry Cowell, and
Virgil Thompson. But even with its attention solely to the music
of the past fifty years, it takes us to composers and compositions
that for many younger musicians are almost legendary—compo-
sitions that everybody has heard, or heard about, but that in most
cases have not been studied.
As we read, we discover that many of these compositions and
the ideas under discussion have not previously been understood
as coming from a common purpose or shared idea. In this way, the
book is a serious academic history, but Lucier relates these ideas
to us in the form of stories, talking to us as he talked to his stu-
dents. He is never ironic about what he is doing. His enthusiasm
is clear and warm hearted; this music means something to him.
Many of the compositions discussed here, and the ideas they
represent, remind me of times I have spent with Alvin. I read