by Alvin Lucier
Then you ask, “Well, what about the paint job?” And he says, “Well, me and my brother, we just, like, do this, and then this, this, this.” And what I had imagined would be a brilliant discussion of technique, you know, on the order of Schoenberg or some guy who wins the Nobel Prize—I’m in the presence of what I consider to be a rather extraordinary piece of art, and the guy can only just shrug his shoulders and say, “Well, that’s what I do.”
When I was enthralled by European technique, when I was reading Stockhausen, Boulez, Nono—brilliant composers whose music I loved—when I read their descriptions of their techniques, I was embarrassed because I didn’t have a technique, and nobody I knew had any techniques. I always thought that I had the idea that American music was—American music meaning me and Alvin, but, yes, I mean Leonard Bernstein too—I had always thought that American music was primitive in the sense that the composer had a very limited historical perspective and an enormous command of detail by virtue of cultural isolation.
That’s what primitivism is. If you cut any human being away from their society so that they have no externals—nobody telling them anything—then their obsession with the symbolic materials that they live with everyday, whether it’s a quilt or cooking or music or, you know, whatever … Watts Towers becomes an example of a huge mastery of detail without reference to the outside world. This has been the story of American music. We see it in Charles Ives. We see it in Harry Partch. We see a beautiful remnant of it in John Cage. You probably see it in Alvin. You see it in me. You see it in all of my friends.
It’s like Eskimo baseball. We see the example of people who have an idea of something that exists outside them. But, they didn’t have any contact with the idea so they just started making it out of what they had around them. I thought that was characteristic of our music and that I was, how should we say, deprived or that it was sad that I was outside the historical mainstream. I thought the historical mainstream went from Vienna to Paris and that, since I was in either Michigan or California, it was a long way from the historical mainstream and that the mainstream would just go on as it always goes on. And I would just still be out there, and everybody would still be out there with me.
Having talked to the lowriders, I think I might have been wrong. I think I might have just changed my mind this weekend. I think I might have had a huge cultural conversion, which I would like to explain to you. I think that, in having said what I just said, then, I can just offer a few opinions. I think there is actually no cultural mainstream.
Maybe it’s because of television. Maybe there was never a mainstream. Maybe we made it up. Maybe the whole idea of the mainstream is just an illusion. We have every reason to see that, for instance, Beethoven, to take a good example of a mainstream composer, comes at the intersection of wars, you know, Jesus, all that stuff! It’s possible that he’s just as primitive as I am. It’s just that, for some other reason, he’s interesting to us.
In my age group, I have been surrounded by, fascinated by, and obsessed by the actual facts of people living in North America who have no cultural contacts to what I consider to be mainstream. They have absolutely none, and they continue to make things. They will always continue to make things. I had just set them aside. You’ve probably all heard about Watts Towers. Every night this guy comes home and brings three tin cans, a pan, and a couple of pipes. He welds them together and makes a tower. Now that is not unusual. There was a time fifteen or twenty years ago when I was totally fascinated with this kind of American culture. I knew dozens of examples of people who made amazing sculpture, people who made amazing poetry, amazing music that nobody ever saw or heard. The only reason everybody saw Watts Tower is that Watts grew up around it. In the middle of Wisconsin—bang—a guy makes a totally amazing piece. I knew dozens of those examples and thought I was one of those examples. Maybe I am.
I have been trying to develop a technique that, in the context of European music, and in the context of American music, and in the context of Asian music, and in the context of everything is just totally my own. Idiosyncratic. Not my own because I want it. But it’s not my own because I don’t know anything else to do, and I’m not interested in anything else.
I’ve been trying to figure out how to make music that follows the rules of speech and that comes from all of the parent rules and conditions of speech. I start by speaking, instead of going into a room and playing the piano with some imagination of what that particular act is going to result in. Instead of imagining that it is going to be played by a great jazz ensemble or a great new music ensemble or a great orchestra, I go into the room and lock the door and talk to myself. And I keep on talking to myself until the music of the talk takes over. Until there are rules operating—for lack of a better word I call musical rules—until there are rules operating that govern the sounds that are coming out of my mouth. Tonight is not a good example. When that condition is satisfied, that’s what I call composing.
As a result of having done that practice I know the tune, as it were. I know it backwards and forwards. I could write it down, or type it, or put it into a computer. I allow its manifestation on the page to be effectively a score. Now, that’s not hard to understand for a composer. I mean, you can look at pretty much anything and analyze it visually, and you can use that as a metaphor for some sort of action.
And, as you all know, that metaphor can be more or less interesting depending on how seriously you take it. In the case of John Cage, the I Ching, or some other weird thing. The result can be grand or it can be not so grand depending on how seriously you’re willing to go along with it, how deep you’re going into it spiritually. So among composers, the question of using any particular manifestation, any particular form, is not a problem.
The obvious factor of what I see on the paper or on a computer screen or what I hear myself saying can be translated as any of the dimensions of music that we could name—pitch, duration, or any of the newer ones. I’ve been trying to allow this template, the notion of a plan, the notion of a three-dimensional or four-dimensional plan, a template that will give you back exactly what you put into it as in a machine template. I’ve been trying to get this so it will control the other aspects of the work, that is to say, the visual and the narrative aspects.
I found the notion of a technique at the beginning of these searches of mine fifteen years ago. I found the notion of a technique because I was coming from a relatively tame suburban Californian environment to New York City, but I wasn’t staying long enough so that I could get immune to it. I was visiting New York a lot and, as a result, I was stunned and attracted by the number of people on the street who talk to themselves, who rant. I decided that I would try to learn how to do that. I know that there are a lot of prejudices against people who rant.
I recognized in myself a slight structural tendency to rant. I recognized that I had a very low level of Tourette’s syndrome and that, either in addition to Tourette’s syndrome, or as an embellishment to Tourette’s, I had the tendency to repeat myself. I recognized that the tendency to say everything twice was actually the beginning of ranting. So I thought that was a good place to start. New York is full of people who are Nobel Prize winners in ranting. They are the Olympic athletes of ranting. I’ve never seen anything like the excellence and the high quality of ranting that you see in New York. New York has some of the greatest talkers in the world.
So I decided I would learn to rant. I practiced the state of mind that allowed me to rant. I actually got to the point, because I’m such a good musician—because I’m so obsessed with this idea—where I could actually rant. I didn’t show off, but I got to the point where I could actually do it. And after three or four years of very serious study, I decided I would test it for myself to see if I was actually doing what I thought I was doing. I had access to the studio at Mills College one summer. I set the thing up so that all I had to do was push one button, and it would record anything that went on in the room. It would record it at very low leve
ls. I knew how to do this. I left it there for two days while I went home and got in the mood to rant. Finally one evening, it seemed to be time. I went into the studio and I punched the button and I ranted. I actually allowed myself to make music.
The problem with why you can’t play the piano is because, as you start playing, you get distracted by something outside you. Whatever that distraction is—in this case it could have been the distraction of a schedule; I could have worried about whether the tape was running out. I ranted for exactly forty-four minutes. Then I played it back and, indeed, it sounded just like what I thought it was supposed to sound like. I played it for my friends, and they were embarrassed for me. I was embarrassed for myself because I had actually practiced.
One time I was on an escalator in the San Francisco airport and right ahead of me there was a Chinese family—a man, his wife, and three or four kids. I just couldn’t resist ranting. When they heard me, they actually ran. So I knew that I had something going. I knew that I could do it.
The trick is that what I had always imagined was happening in other people’s ranting— happening in the way that you can see the larger scale of things by just looking at a little detail— when I had heard these people ranting, I knew that there was something going on that you could analyze just like technique. I decided that I would use this particular tape in combination with some other structure that I won’t even bother to tell you about now but that was sort of electronic ranting. I decided that I would use this to illustrate a performance on videotape. In other words, I wanted to try it out in the world. I had somebody transcribe it for me who didn’t know anything about the idea. I just said, “Please write it out. Write all the parts of the words, all the dot-dot-dots. Write everything you hear because I’m going to give it to a friend of mine to translate into French.” When I got the transcription back, it was more organized than Webern. I’m not kidding you. It was more organized than Webern.
There were four themes. There were four incantations that were repeated. One of them was “You guys are all …”; I had noticed it when I would be at a party, when I was feeling the old Tourette’s syndrome. I would go into the bathroom and say, “You guys are all, you guys are all …” for a few minutes, and then I would go back out to the party. Classic Tourette’s syndrome. “You guys are all …” I’ve forgotten what the other three are. Each of them had four syllables. The forty-four minutes was in four parts. It was a suite. Maybe it was a sonata. I don’t know. It was in four movements.
Now you understand that I was not doing this. You have to believe me that I was only ranting. You have to believe me. The four movements could be organized, could be analyzed around a module unit. I’ve forgotten what that unit was now. It was something like four minutes and twelve seconds or something like that. Each of the four movements had a theme that was repeated incessantly, which was made up of four syllables. Each of those four syllables, each of those four syllable themes, had a different accent pattern. “You guys are all …” is one. That’s like ba-dum ba-dum. Each had a different rhythm pattern. Each of the four had a subsidiary theme, which was made up of two, four, or eight syllables and a bunch of other things. It was as organized as Webern, I am telling you.
I knew I was onto something. So I’ve composed music like that ever since. That’s the way I do everything. I rant. I ranted Perfect Lives. Perfect Lives consists of seven half-hour episodes. Two of them I wrote in one sitting. I ranted them for a few days, a few weeks. Chu-ka, chu-ka, chu-ka, chu-ka, chu-ka, chu-ka, chu. Out it comes. A few of the other ones I did in two or three separate parts. If I had the time, I could go in and rant. I could actually write a big piece. I could actually say a big piece in the same way that a great jazz pianist could improvise a piece. So let’s quit.
4
MARYANNE AMACHER
November 7, 1995
ALVIN LUCIER
Neely Bruce reminded me that it was 1980 in Minnesota at the New Music America Festival where Maryanne Amacher inhabited the Victorian house of Dennis Russell Davis. The house was filled with the most extraordinary sounds one had ever heard. One of the characteristics of these sounds was that they were extremely loud, at least we thought they were loud then. I remember too that Maryanne had installed a series of petri dishes that had some sort of agar or culture in them. Nobody knew exactly why they were there. Was it simply the image of growing biological material? David Tudor once said that, sooner or later, we would be able to grow our own electronic equipment, you wouldn’t need to manufacture it. A composer could use biological engineering techniques to grow his or her own amplifiers, for example. I think Maryanne had that image somewhere in mind as a possibility. It was that far out, futuristic.
I remember everyone standing outside the house that was bursting and exploding with sound. If you were brave enough, you’d go inside. It was like a steam room in a sauna; you would see how long you could stay in. People would say, “I was in for ten minutes.” Another would counter with, “Well, I was in there for fifteen.” Some people claimed they were in there the whole time, but I don’t believe it. Stories went around that the police came and closed it, but I don’t think that’s true. For the past several years, John Cage has asked Maryanne Amacher to supply him with sound environments for various pieces. You’d go to a performance of Cage’s Lecture on the Weather, for example, and hear the most miraculous and magical mixing of sounds. Somehow, with her, the sum of the mixing is much greater than the parts that go into it. A third thing occurs that is in a realm that is hard to articulate and understand. And that’s one of the reasons why I’ve invited Maryanne Amacher here tonight, to see whether she might articulate in some way her wonderful, magical work.
MARYANNE AMACHER
Thank you very much. I should tell a story about Alvin. Alvin is one of the few people who has been intimately involved with the experiential aspects of music, rather than notes without ears. His experimental work is about how we perceive things, and how we hear them is very important now. But first, to get to my story. I remember at the Lincoln Arts Center, the Performing Arts Center Library, I heard this wonderful piece of Alvin’s where he was going around the room along the walls—it must have taken about forty-five minutes. And for some reason, through the years, I thought it was some manifestation of his brain wave piece. But tonight he described to me that it was vibration amplification, bringing sounds in from outside. It was really an exciting experience for me at that time, just when I was studying music, to be able to witness this kind of activity going on. So I appreciate very much being here, and, as I said, in terms of the direction of our work with perception, I feel you are very fortunate to have such a man here to be able to study with him.
We have grown up in a time when we can actually discover so much more about how we hear, which of course in earlier music you could not do. When I began, I had tape recorders and loudspeakers, and I could observe how sound affected me not out of an interest simply to write notes but to discover aspects of it. We have always been able to do that, even in the analog world. Now, with much finer sophistication, there is so much to be discovered. Is the sound close or far away? Is it hitting your elbow, vibrating your whole body? Is it something you seem to see? All these things are really perceptual modes, or what really captures the experience and how you create it. You don’t create it with notes or sounds; you create it when you’re making immersive worlds and constructing these aspects of our perception. Recently, there was a symposium at Mills College on John Cage. There were many theorists involved and it lasted for four days, and a good bit of it dealt with wanting people to talk about his influence in different areas—writing, art, music. It was very important for him to have been at Wesleyan when he wrote his book, Silence. He was twenty-five years old in 1937 when he wrote his Credo on music and described how, more and more in the future, people would be dealing with noise. He asked incredible questions. He was always paying attention to what was going on. In 1937, Cage wrote about defining parameters of sou
nd electronically in the future. In 1942, he quoted two acousticians about the different kinds of electronic instruments that might be possible. He was aware of what was happening in terms of acoustics and sound at that time, as well as just writing his music and being happy with that. The environment that he came out of must have been incredible. He was born in 1912. Women were still wearing long skirts. Suddenly, he’s in this world of music where conservatory students are practicing Beethoven and Mozart, and here this man comes up with a million questions. He was thinking about how to develop this music twenty-five years from then. It’s practically sixty years since he wrote that. Just last week I read a review of Sonic Youth, and the big headline was: “It’s the Noises That They Want.” Normally, with similar groups, it’s the first chords they relate to, but here, with Sonic Youth, it’s the noise that they and their fans relate to. John, at that time, was fascinated by sound effects. Radio stations had all kinds of sound effects used to make the early radio shows. He described how, with all of these sounds, we would have the whole world at our disposal. We now have this in sampling. He was a liberator in the sense of freeing people’s minds from this whole music thing, which was patriarchal and habituating. If we could do cybernetic simulation of John’s kind of thinking right now and imagine ourselves projected fifty years from now … It’s not so different. We’re in such an extraordinary time with developments in technology. It wasn’t that different in his time when all of these things were just about to begin. Now they’re about to turn over in an incredible way again. He wrote about composers no longer having to deal only with musical notes on a page and the reality of having the whole world of sound and/or noises. We now have that. There are many questions now in the area of memory. In ten years, things will have become so small, and the memory in computers will be so large that there will be tremendous implications on how we think about time and form in music. There is an optical form of memory. Physical objects the size of a quarter could contain eight days of music. There are forms using quantum logic for memory that would increase by a hundred-fold what we have now. Also, we can think of creating characters that might exist for five minutes now and for ten hours two weeks from now. This is where time comes in. You could actually create sound for five minutes; then there wouldn’t be anything for two hours—people would have this in their house—and suddenly something would come in like some strange act, coming from out of somewhere. All the limitations we’ve been under for doing these kinds of pieces with time are really something to think about.