Eight Lectures on Experimental Music

by Alvin Lucier

  I was very interested in cutting through the habitual pattern of going to see something, having a cup of coffee and talking about it, then forgetting about it. That’s the usual ritual of going to a performance. I was trying to make something, for example, that would start on one day, continue a month after that, then a month after that, so that memory became a part of it. Part One of Juice started at the Guggenheim Museum, but you bought one ticket for the three different parts. In the Guggenheim there were about nine main cast people along with the chorus. Four of them were painted red from head to toe and were stomping around in big red combat boots. They were only one part of the huge tapestry in the Guggenheim. A month later, you focused more on those four people. A month after that, you went to a gallery and you saw the eighty-five red combat boots that were from the Guggenheim part. You saw the costumes and all the elements that had been in those other two parts, but you could go very close to them. Yet at the same time, the four main characters were on video, so you saw their faces very close, but there were actually no people there. The whole three-part piece was like a giant zoom lens of attention and perception, but, ironically, in the third installation part you got farther and farther away from the people.

  I was working very much with these different notions of distance, time, scale, and the relationship of audience to performer. Sometimes I would present performances in the morning or outside in parking lots in New York. I still try to do those site-specific works as much as possible. I did a piece a few years ago on Roosevelt Island where we bussed the audience from one part of the island to the other and worked with a fairly large group of people, including some of the people from the hospitals there.

  That’s been one strand of my work. The other has been musical theater pieces and opera. I’ve always called my big pieces operas because they include all these different forms. I did compose an opera called ATLAS at a real opera house for the Houston Grand Opera, which was a very interesting experience for me. I worked on it for five years. Part of the process was the rehearsal period, when I taught my way of working to singers who came from a classical background, and I soon realized that rhythmic articulation and complexity as well as working with the voice in different ways was not part of their experience. I had to figure out what I could do for them. I chose people who were open minded and willing to play and were not too rigid in their ideas of what singing was about.

  So basically, this is what I’ve done all these years. I keep on moving along from one step to the next. For about the last fifteen years I’ve done a Buddhist meditation practice that has been very helpful for me in many ways. The first thing is how I work with other people and learning about their vulnerabilities. Over the years, I’ve had a wonderful group of singer-performers. In the early group, most of them came from acting and dancing backgrounds. I composed very simple music for them and sang the more complex material with the organ or piano myself. Then, at a certain point in the mid-1970s, I wanted to work with more complex musical textures, so I started working with people who came more from a singing background. I had a wonderful ensemble throughout the ’80s. We played all over the place—in clubs, in churches and concerts halls. Then, with the opera ATLAS, a new group came in. I’m still working with them to this day. I’ve always had such wonderful luck. I have tried very hard to choose people not only for their artistry and musicianship but also for their generosity and spirit and the kind of radiance that they have as people. We’ve always had a wonderful playful spirit of working on this music.

  I feel that my work is only a pretext to offering experience of the radiance of these people. I have an idea of a particular piece, and I work very hard to perfect that form but, in fact, that is only an armature; it’s really more about these people’s energy. I’ve been lucky enough to work with people from all over the world of different ages and backgrounds. That’s been a strong part of my work.

  That’s probably as much as I want to talk about right now. I’d like to sing a little; then you can ask me questions and I will answer them. The first thing I’d like to sing for you is a piece called Porch, which I wrote very early on—I think it was around 1967. It’s basically a piece that has a repeated melodic pattern, but is very much about working with different colors and textures in the voice within a simple melodic structure. [Sings].

  Now I’d like to do a song from a series called Light Songs, which I wrote in the late 1980s. I think of these as duets for solo voice. More than one thing is going on at the same time within one voice. Some of them are like dialogues. In others, more than one layer is going on at the same time. This one is called “Click Song #1.” [Sings].

  Next I’d like to sing a few songs from the Songs from the Hill series. They were all pieces that I wrote sitting up on a hill in New Mexico in the mid-1970s. My sister was living in Placitas, and I would go out to visit her in the summertime. I had been working with keyboard and voice for a few years and hadn’t done much a cappella work for a while. My goal was to sit in a particular spot on a hill that I had chosen and compose one song a day. I wrote sixteen of them, or at least started most of them, and then came back to the East Coast and put the ideas into musical forms. I was influenced by the landscape, the magic of New Mexico. I don’t feel as if I was imitating what I was hearing, but sitting there, I’m sure that that incredible atmosphere of that place and the desert influenced this music. [Sings].

  Now I’d like to sing a few different ones. These are all songs that are inspired by nature and space, but each one also plays with a particular aspect of the voice. This one is called “Wa-lie-oh,” consisting of just the syllables that I’m singing. [Sings].

  Now I’d like to do three kinds of animal songs from Songs from the Hill. The first one is called “Insect,” the second one is called “Descending” (it really is another insect piece), and the third is called “Bird Code.” I’ll sing one more a cappella song, from Light Songs. It’s called “Click Song #2.” [Sings].

  I’d like to end this set with a little instrument called a jaw harp, or Jew’s harp. I’ve been playing this pretty much from the late ’60s and find it a wonderful instrument for singers. There’s a wide range of sound that can be found within it, and so I’d like to share this with you. [Plays and sings].

  Thank you very much. Now I would like to continue with some of the pieces that I have written for voice and piano over the years. I’d like to start with one of our earliest song forms and an early piece of mine—a lullaby. Probably this was the first song form because a mother had to find ways to calm her child. Over the years I have worked a lot with the idea that there are archetypal song forms. Within every culture there are lullabies, love songs, marches, laments, and work songs. I like to compose my own manifestations of these song forms that transcend culture. This one is called “Gotham Lullaby.” [Sings].

  This is also another of my early pieces. It’s called “Traveling,” and it comes from Education of the Girlchild. It’s a dance and a journey in 5/4. [Sings].

  This next one is actually part of the track of a feature-length film that I made in 1988 called Book of Days. I’ve always been interested in layers of time. Many of my pieces are about time travel. Book of Days dealt with the Middle Ages and our time now. It examined the Middle Ages through our eyes, through the filter of the twentieth century. But at the same time, it was looking at our time through the eyes of a young girl from the Middle Ages. She has visions of our time, but she doesn’t really know how to explain them to her family and the people who live in her little village. So she’s very lonely. It’s really a film about a visionary. The one person she can talk to about it is an old madwoman who is actually a seer herself and lives outside the village. The girl tells the madwoman about her apocalyptic visions, like a city that might be burning up and consumed by a plague. There are a lot of parallels between, for example, AIDS and the plague and how certain people were and are blamed for it. Many aspects of human nature seem to stay the same throughout time, and yet each period that
we live in is different. The madwoman, after she hears the little girl’s vision, answers her with a song about looking at all of time, nature and human nature from an aerial point of view. It sees the folly and beauty of human beings—love, passion, war, violence—from the perspective of nature, the way that nature always renews itself and continues. It’s looking at things with a kind of sadness for the world and, at the same time, a kind of compassion and equanimity. This is “Madwoman’s Vision.” [Sings]. Thank you very much.

  QUESTION

  Does improvisation play a part in your compositional technique, or even in your performance itself?

  MEREDITH MONK

  Well, it certainly plays a part in the beginnings of many pieces. My discipline every day is to work vocally or at the piano generating small pieces of material. I find different ways of working with that. It’s almost like intuitively coming up with little nodes of music, and then I start seeing how some of these ideas or phrases go together. So, right from the beginning, yes, of course I am working, playing with my voice, working improvisationally to start. Then, little by little, as I start seeing the world of each piece—I think that each piece is a world—I like to dig deeper and deeper into it. Another analogy to some of these forms is a tree with branches, in that the forms—if you listen to some of the Songs of the Hill, for example, over the years, you would know that they are the same pieces, but within those forms I have little places where I could branch off if I’m inspired. There are these certain parts of the form where the form branches off. I can play with that material because I always come back to the trunk again.

  So, the forms—the beginning, middle, and end—are quite precise. They’re very rigorous, yet at the same time there’s always room to play. It’s the same with the ensemble too; the forms are set, but within them there are some places where we can really play and work with the moment.

  QUESTION

  I’ve noticed in your vocal technique there are sounds from all cultures, from all over the world. Did you develop them yourself, just through trying things out, or, in your musical travels, find them and then incorporate them?

  MEREDITH MONK

  I have always worked with exploring my own voice in my body; that has been my method over the years. I think of the process as developing a vocabulary, built on my own instrument. A lot of people, right from the beginning, started to associate some of what I found with sound that came from other cultures. The way that I try to explain it is that I think that when you work very deeply with your own instrument, there are sounds that transcend culture. If you work with a glottal break, for example, one that has the sound of a yodel (I came upon that as I was playing with my low and upper registers and what it could do, how it could go back and forth), that sound exists in cowboy music, in Swiss yodeling, in some African music, North Carolina hollerin’, and many other cultures. So it’s really more phylogeny and ontogeny, that just by working with my own instrument with as much honesty as I can, of course within my vocal instrument, I’m going to find different sounds that might make you have associations with other cultures, but the beauty of the human voice is that each of our voices is unique, and at the same time we are part of the world vocal family. I’ve never been interested in going to a culture, taking something, and using it.

  Alvin and I were just talking about that. I was lucky enough to have received a MacArthur grant. They have wonderful meetings and conferences during which you exchange information with other MacArthur fellows. Last week, they had one on animal sounds. They knew I’d be interested in that. There were scientists present (a lot of these MacArthur people are scientists), as well as composer-anthropologist Steven Feld, who has recorded a number of beautiful songs and sounds from Papua New Guinea. Alvin and I were talking about how disgusting it is that sometimes those recordings get into the wrong hands, and then they’re totally exploited for commercial gain. That is a cultural imperialist point of view that’s not been at all interesting to me over the years.

  QUESTION

  Do you actually notate your pieces?

  MEREDITH MONK

  Keyboard works can be notated pretty accurately and some of the things for large choruses are pretty cut-and-dried … well, nothing of mine is really cut-and-dried. Actually, it doesn’t look very good on the page, the page doesn’t really show the principles behind the notes—it’s hard to convey that. I believe more in the oral tradition, in a certain way. Like passing it on directly while I’m still alive. But, at the same time, I’m trying to stay very open-hearted to people who want to perform my music. Some of the singers in my ensemble want to perform it, and from time to time there have been other choruses that want to do some of my choral works. So I’ve been struggling with notating so that other people could be able to sing the music. And I’m still in the midst of this struggle, of how I really feel about this, whether that would be a really good way or not. So, the compromised position is some of the stuff is on paper, but I say that while I’m still alive, I or somebody from my group comes and teaches it to the performers. There have been choruses that don’t want anything to do with that; they don’t want to bring in a person from outside. In that case I just say no, I’m not interested.

  QUESTION

  Do you rigorously practice every day?

  MEREDITH MONK

  Yes, I vocalize every day about forty-five minutes to an hour. When I did the music for Merce Cunningham, I noticed how dancers could go all day long. They take class, and then they do their performance. They’re raring to go, whereas most singers that I know, after a certain point, have to rest. You can’t sing hour after hour.

  My perfect day—if I have a perfect day—is first to do a physical warm up on the floor. Then I vocalize. I take a little break, then compose and work on something. When I go to artists’ colonies, I have perfect days. I try to keep my voice exercised every day unless I feel like I need to rest my voice. Then I do.

  8

  PHILIP GLASS

  November 10, 2000

  ALVIN LUCIER

  It seems like only yesterday that we would be in a downtown loft in New York. Philip Glass and his ensemble would be playing to a small audience. The music was different from anything we had ever heard. It was so loud as to obliterate any sense of being present in a real space. It was repetitive, the same phrase heard over and over, shifting downbeats and accents, abrupt shifts to another succeeding phrase so that there was no sense of time either. We knew the musicians, too. We weren’t receiving music from a symphony orchestra that was playing music from someplace else. We weren’t being told that what was great and wonderful came from another culture: Brahms, Mozart, and Beethoven. This was music made by our friends, and we didn’t know quite what it really meant at that time. We did know that something wonderful was happening.

  And it seems like only yesterday that we were sitting up in the balcony of the Brooklyn Academy of Music listening and watching the Philip Glass–Robert Wilson opera, Einstein on the Beach. Five and half hours long, repetitious, long images, beautiful music. At the time, we thought to ourselves, “Could this be opera?” If you had asked me if there were a future for opera at that specific moment, I would have said no. Except for a few operas by Berg and Stravinsky and Benjamin Britten, the contemporary scene was barren. Then Einstein came along and changed opera forever.

  Philip Glass has had an astonishing life as a composer, having made works in every genre—dance, film, opera, world music, solos, and symphonic works, you name it. The Philip Glass Ensemble is still very much in demand, playing his revolutionary repetitive pieces of the 1960s and ’70s, such as the three-and-a-half-hour-long Music in Twelve Parts. He has achieved a popularity unparalleled by a composer of experimental music.

  It’s a great thrill for me to introduce Philip Glass.

  PHILIP GLASS

  We have about an hour. I thought I would speak for about forty minutes and then I’ll try to answer a few questions. To talk about music from the angle of theater—that’s
what Alvin and I decided. We could have talked about a lot of different things. But this is a topic that I happen to know more about than anything, and I think this is a good thing for me too. Theater is something that you really can’t learn much about in school. You really learn through living your life in it. And so the kinds of information that I have are things that you might not be able to find so easily.

  People have always asked me what kind of music I write—that’s always the question: what do you call your music. There have been different labels; you know how newspapers and academic people love to have a name for your music. I hated all those names; they were never the names that I called it. But now when people ask me what kind of music I write, I say I write theater music. That answer has the virtue of being absolutely and completely truthful. More than three quarters of my work has been theater work in some way.

  When I began as a student, some of my first pieces were theater pieces. I wrote my first one when I was twenty and I started. All the years that I was in music school, I was writing music for dancers and film. When I was twenty-eight, I became a fellow member of the theater company Mabou Mines, and I stayed with them for about twenty years. A lot of the early music that I did was formulated in the context of that company.

  In my generation, I was probably the one most committed to working in the theater. And there are a lot of interesting things that happened because of that, a lot of interesting ways of talking about contemporary music and modern music in terms of theater.

  Let me go back a little bit and talk about what I actually mean when I say I’m a theater composer. I mean the word in a fairly specific way. For me, theater exists—and I don’t just mean theater on a stage; it can be film, it can be dance, it can be various kinds of combinations of film and opera. I look at it this way: I see the four elements that I work with as being text, movement, image, and music. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. It’s like earth, air, fire, and water. Those are the elements, and everything comes out of some combination of these.