Chambers: Scores by Alvin Lucier

by Alvin Lucier

Chambers is a virtually complete collection of composer Alvin Lucier's major works from 1965 to 1977, interspersed with twelve interviews with the composer by Douglas Simon. Each score is written in prose and may be read by musicians as instructions for performance or by general readers as descriptions of imaginary musical activities. In response to Simon's searching questions, Lucier expands on each composition, not only explaining its genesis and development but also revealing its importance to the vigorously experimental American tradition to which Alvin Lucier belongs.

Many of his compositions jolt conventional notions of the role of composer, performer, and listener, and the spaces in which they play and listen. His works are scored for an astonishing range of seashells, subway stations, toy crickets, sonar guns, violins, synthesizers, bird calls, and Bunsen burners. All are unique explorations of acoustic phenomena - echoes, brain waves, room resonances - and radically transform the idea of music as metaphor into that of music as physical fact.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, Art

190 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1980

Reviews

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely fantastic collection of his scores, together with interviews with him about the pieces.

[Evan Pincus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Saw a performance of Lucier's work titled "The Science of Sound" last week, and borrowed this book of scores from a friend. Lucier professes to be interested "in the poetry of what we used to think of as science" - The Science of Sound is a damn good title for a program of his most compelling pieces, which the night of music I saw wasn't quite. Despite his self-described interest in (paraphrasing here) the metaphor of music becoming the fact of music, he has a slight tendency towards subjective material that can't help but rankle me a bit - the most perceptive thinker the medium has ever had on the pure building blocks of sound who repeatedly talks about a single-minded exploration of those pure qualities still writes pieces that involve discussing your relationship with another person, recalling your childhood, introducing recorded birdsong into an otherwise "objective" "experiment." His thinking is lucid and brilliant, his prose scores are lovely to read, but there are little notes of "hey, wait a minute, this contradicts your stated ideals for your work" that frustrate me a bit. But hey, this is art, not politics, and artists are allowed a bit of self-contradiction - can you imagine a perfectly self-consistent artist? Would probably be unbearable! Who'd want that?