BEATS THAT CAN PUSH SUGAR

Alvin Lucier interviewed by Michael Parsons

27 May 1995

American composer Alvin Lucier has a unique reputation for work with the physicality of sound. In May 1995 he visited London to perform at the LMC Festival. Michael Parsons, composer, performer and longterm Lucier fan, interviewed him between soundcheck and performance.

Michael Parsons: Alvin, when I first heard that you were going to be in London and were going to do a solo performance, the first piece that I thought of was the piece that you're best known for, the one that uses enormously amplified brain-wave patterns, "Music For Solo Performer".

Alvin Lucier: Well you know, that's a very old piece, I did that in 1965, and that's really my breakthrough work I think. It's the piece that established for me a way of working and a way of thinking. And I performed it several times, and then for years I didn't perform it. But lately, the last five or six years, people have been asking me for that piece. Which is really interesting and wonderful because when you get a little older like I am, you begin to wonder about the length of time that your work is going to be interesting to people. And I play it maybe in situations that I shouldn't, that don't give me enough time really to set it up right. It's a fairly complicated piece, it has to have the right equipment and it has to be tuned right, you just can't arrive somewhere and do it.

MP: It's a very complicated set-up with all the percussion instruments...

AL: For those people that don't know this piece, I sit in front of an audience with little electrodes on my scalp which are routed to a little amplifier, which goes to several amplifiers and loudspeakers, which are directly coupled to percussion instruments, timpani, cymbals, gongs and all sorts of drums. If and when I produce alpha waves, which are one of an array of brain-wave patterns that we all have, low frequency sounds bump through the loudspeakers and play the percussion instruments.

MP: I think there's a lot of conceptually very interesting things about that piece which relate to your work in general. One, the idea of using technology in an unusual and creative way and transposing it into a different context, because you originally came across that technique of amplifying through medical contexts didn't you?

AL: Actually I made the acquaintance of a scientist who was doing brain-wave work for the U.S. government. It seemed that aircraft pilots were having mild epileptic fits at certain times when the speed of the propeller would be slow enough that it would lock into some visualisation pattern in the brain. He was asked to find out something about that. He offered me that equipment that can amplify one's alpha waves so that you're actually able to hear them, although they are below the audible spectrum. They do bump through the speaker cone and you're able to hear the frequencies. I started experimenting with that. The interesting thing was everybody I talked to said, "You know, you ought to record this, and then you could control it, speed it up and slow it down." To make a conventional tape-piece. I thought about it and it just struck me that that wasn't such an interesting idea...what would be terribly interesting I thought was to do it live. In those days the live electronics...like John Cage...all the electronic music he ever did was live, except a couple of tape pieces, and it's always more interesting to see somebody perform than to play a tape. So I elected to take a dangerous route, that is to sit there in front of an audience and try to produce alpha...

MP: That must be particularly stressful, because alpha is associated with this meditative state that you get when you're on your own or relaxing and to do it in front of an audience is a tense situation.

AL: Well you know the funny thing about these concerts is I'm usually tense preparing the concert but once it is ready I sort of relax....

MP: Once you know there's nothing more you can do (laughter).

AL: We just did a performance in New York, where I did the brain-wave piece at the Kitchen with a battery of percussion instruments, and simultaneously the alpha waves were sent over a phone-line to a performance space in L.A., and the alpha waves performed that piece on a duplicate set of instruments.

MP: So you were performing over a long distance...

AL: It was not a broadcast of that, it was that the alpha waves themselves were sent over to play percussion instruments.

MP: Your work in my mind has always been associated with inventive and creative uses of technology which was designed for completely different purposes. You seem to find ways of using technology which are quite different from the way they are normally used.

AL: I think it's the alpha brain-waves, someone's experimenting now on seeing if they could be used to control....in word processing or pattern recognition. It's conceivable that you could learn to control your alpha waves and make something happen in a computer. You wouldn't need to touch it. Actually the man that I was working with in those days had that idea also, so that if you were, for example, paralysed, you could answer questions with on/off switches, and you could unlock alpha and then lock it. You'd need to acquire that skill, but I simply took the E.E.G. situation which is happening all the time, you go to the hospital and you get electrodes put on your head, and some apparatus prints out the pattern. I simply did the same thing except I routed it through audio equipment.

MP: But you turned it into a live performance. Another theme that comes up is this interest in space, in making things happen over an extended distance, which takes it far away from the normal concept of music inside a concert hall. You've done pieces that have involved sounds travelling over miles, apart from the telephone line and playing in another city, long before that became possible you were thinking in terms of sounds travelling through spaces in a very extended way weren't you?

AL: Yeah, I mainly am concerned with that now in a concert hall because I have to be practical and I often find myself performing in an enclosed room. But what interests me is sound moving from its source out into space, in other words what the three-dimensional hall is. Because sound waves, once they're actually produced they have to go somewhere, and what they do as they're going interests me a lot.

MP: So it's not just the sound waves, for instance, between your mouth and my mouth, reaching our ears, it's bouncing all around the walls and picking up all sorts of resonances.

AL: If you (whistles)....where do those waves go? I've made some works with sound-sensitive lights, that would blink on and off when a soundwave passes by. I did a little piece in Amsterdam the other night, it's a little bit of a hokey piece but there's a sensitive flame from a gas burner, and I have a player, a violinist, play sounds whose waves would cause the sound to actually move, and jump around. And I wanted the player to be as far away as possible. If you put her up close, you'd say, well that's obvious, but what isn't obvious is if she's far away from the flame to show that sound travels across space.

MP: And then you're actually seeing the effect of a sound at a distance.

AL: The gas jet is sensitive, you see, to high sounds at certain frequencies. I'm not so interested in sending sound on a phone-line, I'm more interested in the physical actuality of the sound.

MP: So that brings us also to this question of resonances within a space. Through your music we become aware that each part of the space is unique, that no situation is exactly replicable, and that if we moved to the other side of the room we'd be in a different acoustic situation. When someone opens the door our voices change, because the resonance is different. All those things about resonance and acoustics one becomes aware of through your music.

AL: I've chosen a difficult task because sound is subtle. It is subtler than light or colour I think, because sound waves don't do what you want them to do. You want them to be palpable. You can take a colour and put it somewhere. It's a little bit harder to do that with sound. I've tuned some pure waves so that you can physically perceive standing waves in a space. You can go in and walk in the room, and walk in a trough of quiet sound, because of the way the sounds reflect off the walls.

MP: And you presumably have to design the waves exactly according to proportions of the space. Do you have to actually measure up the space?

AL: Not really. If you raise the pitch, that wave is reflecting in a different way. If you tune the low sound you get wide troughs. So I do it by ear. If I have a pair of speakers and the sound wave is coming out of both, I tune it and then I go empirically in the room and see what it sounds like. So I'm more of a practical person than theoretical.

MP: The theory comes afterwards. You make the practical experiments and then you go on thinking about the idea. So it's really like the way a scientist would work.

AL: You know when you go into a performance space there is no way you can tell what it's going to sound like. If someone said, "I'll send you the drawings of the room", I really don't want to see the drawings. I want to go into the room. Like today when we were trying to get the feedback to match the birdcalls, to create that third set of phantom images. I have to do that by ear. Every room is different. It's such an uncertain, fragile phenomenon that it's got to be done in a practical way.

MP: Let's talk about that, because that's one of the pieces you're going to be doing tonight. It's called "Bird And Person Dyning". And the 'dyning' is spelt with a 'y', like heterodyning isn't it?

AL: That was a wonderful accidental piece, you know Igor Stravinsky said, "I have all these happy accidents..." But anyway, I got this electronic bird in the mail once from somebody I didn't even know. It was a Christmas tree ornament, and you simply plugged it in and it made this birdcall. And I was just by myself in the studio and I had this idea to put binaural mikes in my ears and to hear that bird, and to move my head and pan the sound of the bird around in space. I had a mike in one ear and one in the other and I could make the stereo image move by turning my head. So I started the birdcall and I put the amplifier on, and I walked out into the room. And my volume was a little bit too high and I started to get feedback, and before I could run to the amplifier and stop the feedback I discovered that these beautiful interference patterns were occurring between the sounds of the birdcall and the strands of feedback.

MP: The feedback was an accident?

AL: It was an accident. And so then I learnt to control the feedback and to search for places in a room where the feedback is such that it does cause these beautiful phantom images.

MP: So what we're hearing as the audience is the sound of the birdcall itself from a certain point in the space, and then we're also hearing it through the binaural microphones which are in your ears. You're moving around and changing the position of your head, so it's as if we're hearing it from inside your head as well. The sound is being picked up by those microphones and then being transmitted.

AL: What's nice is, if the feedback is above the birdcall, the phantom image is upside down.

MP: So it's an exact reflection.

AL: Because it is a difference tone. So if the strand of feedback is higher than the sound of the birdcall, and the birdcall goes down, the particular distance between the birdcall and the feedback gets larger, and you get an inverted image. If the feedback is below, you get the same image but below it. It's still the same thing only it's below, because when the birdcall goes down it's narrowing the range between itself and the feedback. Now, if it could occur, you could have a pair of strands of feedback, one above and one below. So theoretically you could get the inversion at the same time.

MP: So that's why in the rehearsal this morning you were getting two pitches in the feedback. You wanted to have one very high and one...

AL: No, I wasn't trying for that, I was trying to tune the amplifier so that it would not play back very low sounds and very high sounds, which don't cause this third thing to...

MP: They've got to be within a certain frequency range.

AL: I tune it a little bit, yes.

MP: I notice you didn't specify any precise pitches. You could have theoretically said, "Oh, I want a high B flat there".

AL: Maybe I should have done that. I don't seem to do that (laughs).

MP: Maybe it's something to do with the actual space that you're in, that particular pitches work.

AL: I don't really trust that accuracy, I don't think it's going to work, because the audience is going to come in and things are so uncertain. So I trust the person at the mixer, if he or she understands what the principles are. You see an audience changes the whole acoustic. It's funny because people understand that, everyone in the audience seems to understand that.

MP: You really make it a live situation. You thrive on that degree of uncertainty. A more conventional composer would want to control, or specify the pitches for example.

AL: And I'm not an improviser either you know, it's not an improvisation...

MP: It's a very specific task which you...

AL: Improvisation, it seems to me, has to do with your particular personal idea of how the piece should go, and making it happen, making feelings happen and expressing yourself. I want to express the physicality of the headphones. It's an objective task but it's not inexpressive. I'm trying to make a definition of experimental music - I've never been able to articulate it exactly right. I had a German student who tried to figure out why what we were doing was very different to what the German avant-garde musicians were doing. I was talking with a young person from a conservatory in Germany who said, I made a piece based on your "I'm Sitting In A Room" - that's a piece where speech is recycled through a space many times, reviewing the particular characteristics of that space. And he played me this piece and it didn't sound that way at all, and I said, "What did you do?", and he said, "Well I did the recycling and then I added something", I said "What!", and he said, "I needed a second level of structure" (laughs).

MP: It's not enough for them is it?

AL: That is a totally different idea. To add a second layer of structure.

MP: That's a compositional idea.

AL: Yeah, I find I'm spending a lot of my time rejecting those ideas in my own work. Each time I make a piece I have to do it again, over and over, and I never learn. Or I have to learn it again.

MP: The other characteristic, which is probably related to what you've been saying about this quality of experimental music, is that your music always seems to take place as a process, something which is happening at that moment. It's never in the form of a fixed object which is going to be reproduced exactly upon another occasion. You seem to have a very particular sense of the unique time and place, the here and now of any particular occasion.

AL: I think a lot of that is foisted on me. I just made a piece with a pianist using a E-bow, you know that? It's a little battery-powered magnet that rock-and-roll players use on the guitar. As the magnet gets closer to the string it causes all these effects. I made a piece for a pianist where she puts five of these in the strings of an acoustic piano. It's similar to my piece "Music On A Long Thin Wire", which uses a wire and a magnet. So, I thought here's my chance to really compose this and choose various pitches...I worked and I worked and I wrote pitches, and you know it just

didn't make any sense. Because each piano responds a little differently to the different pitches, and not all the pitches of the piano respond to these magnets, only about an octave and a half. So I finally gave the player the E-bows and we went over it and I said, "You should do this and that...there's not a score yet for that piece", but she plays it the right way. There was no appropriate way to write a score for that .

MP: So does that mean you ask her to participate in choosing the pitches to which the magnets are going to be applied?

AL: Yeah, it isn't even a question of choosing them, it's....

MP: ...finding them perhaps...

AL: Yeah. I say, "Put the five of them on the strings and walk in on the stage and simply put your foot on the pedal. Of the strings that are freed, that cluster is going to sound. And see what happens." Often interference patterns occur. A fifth is a slow beating pattern. I have a funny idea now, which is that, my pieces, the less they are composed and the less they are played, the less they're performed, the better they are. So she doesn't need to do much you know. The more she does...it doesn't really help. So I say, "Well, wait and listen". It's mainly a question of listening, rather than making it happen. I say, "Listen and then remove one if you want."

MP: It's the skill of knowing what not to do.

AL: It's the skill of plucking it off the string without a sound. And then, remove another one and put it some other place. Just do that slowly. But you want to listen more than work at it.

MP: If you want to do that as a performer you have to rid yourself of all the usual energy and impulses...

AL: I don't do it as an aesthetic thing, I do it as a practical thing. If you know the sounds so well you discover what you have to do to make the piece work. Sometimes she puts the E-bow on a string and it doesn't sound for some particular reason. Sometimes she will remove one and that one she just put on will sound. The more she sits and listens, the better the piece is.

MP: So performing a piece like that is really discovering as you go along. You can't know in advance how it's going to sound.

AL: There's no way I could accurately notate that. Now this piece I'm playing this evening, which I wrote for Aki Takahashi: "Music For Piano With Slow Sweep Oscillators". She's a more conventional player and wanted something a little more fixed, so I drew an asymmetrical diamond shape, and I programmed two sine-wave oscillators to draw that shape in space, taking about sixteen minutes. One takes about eight minutes to get up to the top and eight minutes down and the other one takes twelve or nine, so that it's not really symmetrical. So her task is to play single notes against those waves causing interference patterns. And since the piano doesn't sustain sounds for a long time, I had her play a pair of notes for each one. So she could slide whether she played them, earlier or later, to cause interference patterns of different speeds. I notated them exactly, symmetrically underneath and halfway between, so she's got to hear that and decide when to play those pitches. So it's accurately written but it's imprecisely played. And I enjoy doing that, because I was trained to write notes on a page when I was in school, and there's a very pleasurable feeling about putting them...

MP: I've often been curious about the relationship between your musical training in your early pieces and what you're doing now. By the way, one thing I very much liked about that piece in the rehearsal this morning was the way in which, right at the very beginning, before you even play a note, the two oscillator sounds themselves create a beating effect as they drift apart, which gives the audience a clue as to what the piece is about.

AL: When the notes of the piano are played, do you think that everyone in the audience will know that it's the interaction between the piano pitches and the oscillators, or will they think that something else is happening?

MP: I think everyone's in a learning situation, you hear something unusual, and then maybe they'll talk about it afterwards...

AL: The idea in my work is that the experience of perceiving the piece is the experience of being aware of yourself perceiving it. Not receiving a message from the piece, that whole Beethoven symphony...you are really not aware of yourself perceiving a Beethoven symphony, you're aware of what Beethoven is doing, but in this situation I hope you are aware of yourself going through the particular process of hearing. Somebody said once that instead of climaxes in this work, the climax is that moment where you discover what is happening.

MP: So to answer your previous question, different people will realise at different points what is happening.

AL: I like that idea. Because the sound waves, as they are moving and sweeping, they move through the audience at different places. So each place in the hall is a privileged place.

MP: Also you make the listener very creative in your pieces, in that the listener has to learn a new way of listening, and to be attentive and patient.

AL: You know, one always thinks one should amplify the piano, in this piece for example, if the piano isn't prominent enough, but that would spoil it, because the sound of the piano is then coming not only from the piano itself but from the speakers. It's easy to make interference patterns between the speakers and the oscillators in the speakers, but there isn't any magic in that. It's more effective if the piano sound is reflecting off the piano lid, and those interference patterns are happening in the acoustic space, not in the mixer or in the amplifier. Once the note of the piano is played, the interference patterns happen in the ear. There's something magical about the sounds in the ear.

MP: The third piece is based on the Beatles' song "Strawberry Fields", which you say was also for Aki Takahashi.

AL: All of a sudden I wrote a pair of pieces for her, she's a wonderful player and she is a champion of modern music, she did John Cage and Morton Feldman. She was asked by a record company to record a CD of Beatles songs. So she said if I could ask various people to write arrangements, that would interest me more. So she invited John Cage and Pauline Oliveros and Jim Tenney, and I thought what am I going to do with a Beatles song - to me there's such nostalgia there and I don't want to deal with that. So I asked her to choose the song she wanted. And it was curious, she chose Strawberry Fields and I said why, she said the line "Nothing is real" reminds me of your work. But I think my work is very real because soundwaves are very real. Now one remembers where they hear certain songs, so I thought, well what I can do is to put it somewhere (laughs), for me that would be composition, so I decided on a teapot. I think I was thinking of the fact that Japanese people drink tea, but not exactly...it's a beautiful environment.

MP: It's a resonant space which everyone has one of in their houses, but they don't normally think of it as an acoustic space.

AL: So I simply play the piece with one hand, because that's about as much as I can do on the piano, and I hold one pedal down and I make these clusters - you play a phrase, you let it sustain and you can hear the overtones moving. So I make a little recording while I'm playing, then I rewind that tape and play it back through a loudspeaker in that pot. Every once in a while I lift the top of the teapot, and it's like enormously changing the size of that pot. I can get the overtones to recreate and finish the phrases, I can add to the phrases, it's like the sequences in chant, isn't it? where they would add notes onto the end of phrases. And I discovered that by accident too. Now I don't like to amplify that either, because it is in a little teapot. So the audience has to deal with very quiet sounds. Now that piece is accurately written.

MP: So you're not improvising when you're lifting the lid?

AL: No, I do it each time in the same way.

MP: Does it have to be just that teapot?

AL: I'm embarrassed, I don't know what the parameters are. I've used other pots that just don't work, I think they're smaller. I think there's an optimum size for the resonances. I just had a wonderful experience in Holland with the Barklan Workshop, which is an ensemble of players who have recreated a piece I made in 1972, "The Queen Of The South". I don't know if I like that title any more, but anyway - if you put sound into a surface, and if you sprinkle sand or something on the surface, the sand will migrate, showing the resonances of that particular surface. And I made some performances where I'd used a directly coupled speaker, they used to have these audio transducers that could make a material vibrate; and I did it with electronics, I did it with synthesis, it never worked very well. But we tried it in Amsterdam and it was quite wonderful - we got two students from the art school who were interested in the visualization of sound, and they came up with the idea of canvas and sound. So they had two, one was white and one was black, canvases on stretchers. And we had coffee and sugar. And instead of these weak, inept audio transducers we had these 8 inch speakers, ordinary speakers. We had a bass player, a cello, a clarinet, a trombone, playing into this pair of speakers. And lo and behold, the piece worked just perfectly. We decided that they should play a single pitch.

MP: So were the speakers underneath the canvases?

AL: Yes, so these players become very sensitive. I said "Don't do much, don't play too much, play solos, play by yourself". So they would play a single pitch and they would detune the notes a little bit, and they would cause these beats that could push the sugar, and they could see what was happening. The idea is that what they are making becomes a score for them, a score in real time.

MP: And you're showing them on video screens...

AL: And the piece really worked, I was so happy after twenty years of one's work, you get an idea and you think it isn't any good any more, and somebody says gee, I'm really interested in that idea. And I was a little embarrassed, I said I don't know, am I still interested in doing a piece that old? And yet they want to do it. Now there's a way that I can NOT accurately score; except I did say let's choose one pitch, because if you get into thirds and fifths...also there's a lot of material in a semitone, that's become a very wide interval, really.

MP: Like looking at something under a microscope.

AL: Then you see at the end of the piece these beautiful patterns. One of the canvases had a very interesting geology; it could be a map of a planet, a detail of the planet Mars, it was uneven, there were sand dunes...

MP: Thinking about conceptual pieces...there are works of yours like "Gentle Fire" where you suggest possibilities of transforming one sound into another, and you have a whole list of sounds.

AL: That has never been played.

MP: That seems to me to be a very conceptual piece, in the sense that you can do it yourself in the imagination. It's probably a very difficult piece to realise, because you've got to transform the sound of, say, crunching ice into the sound of barking dogs.

AL: Oh, did I say that? (laughs)

MP: That's one possibility amongst thousands which you've got there. You've got your two lists of different sorts of sounds, and you say that the transformation from one to the other should be achieved by some means or other. I think you also suggested it could be something you do mentally, inside your own head.

AL: I forget about that...

MP: Another thing you say in that piece is that there is somehow a universal sound of which all these sounds are part, or that one sound contains another. For example, I remember when going camping in the countryside and sleeping beside a waterfall, in the sounds of that waterfall you hear all kinds of sound, you hear barking dogs, slamming doors, people talking, it's as if in that sound your ear picks out whatever images you have in your own mind.

AL: You know, I went to a summer camp when I was a boy, up in the mountains, it was owned by a remarkable man called Arthur Evans. In August, when the boys were particularly noisy and raucous, he would ring the bell in the dining room, and he would say, "OK, now we're all going to exit the dining room one by one at 30 second intervals, and I want you all to walk back to your cabins by a route that you have never taken, take a path that goes through the woods. And I would like you not to talk until you get back to the cabin, and I would suggest that you listen to the sounds around you". And you know, I remember taking a path up around the forest, and you'd see fellas - for a few minutes of their life - not talking and not doing something. Listening to the sounds of nature, the beautiful birds, these thrushes, and frogs and toads, and creaking wood, the trees and so forth. And looking back on that, this was the 1940s, that was quite a remarkable idea.

MP: How old were you at that time?

AL: Nine. And there was a pianist there at the camp, and when camp was over one summer I stayed on to help put the beds away and do that kind of work, and we pushed the piano out onto the porch of this lodge overlooking the lake. And we all sat down on the beach and he played the piano, Ravel, French impressionism... but I remember hearing that piano from a distance, and there was a cliff up on the side...

MP: And so you got the resonance of the landscape...

AL: And I could hear reflections and time lines. And I never thought about it until I started working in this way.