R.I.P. composer Alvin Lucier 2021-12-02 by ZIG | 8 Comments | Alvin Lucier, the groundbreaking American composer and educator, died Wednesday at his home in Middletown after a long illness. He was 90. Lucier changed the way we think about sound through monumental works like I Am Sitting in a Room, Music on a Long Thin Wire and Music For Solo Performer. He was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease a little over a decade ago; NPR.org confirmed the news of his death with Amanda Lucier, his daughter.
Lucier was born May 14, 1931 in Nashua, N.H., to a musical family, an environment that, in time, led to his studies in music theory and composition at Yale University and later Brandeis University. Studying under Aaron Copland and Lukas Foss, Lucier initially favored a neoclassical style, but discovered the avant-garde works of Luigi Nono, Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen while in Rome on a Fulbright Fellowship. And once he saw performances of John Cage and David Tudor, Lucier knew this was not only the music he was meant to make but the sound he was made to study, alter and explore.
Surely his most famous work, I Am Sitting in a Room (first recorded at Brandeis in 1969, then again in his Middletown, Conn., home in March 1970) is a study in resonance, decay and time. On it, Lucier recites the following monologue as its instructions and score:
"I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice, and I am going to play it back into the room again and again, until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed."
It's a piece of music, sometimes called sound art, that reinforces its premise not through repetition but experience. Each subsequent playback of his taped voice degrades in texture, acclimating and fighting against the space into which it exists.
To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
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Tagged: Alvin Lucier
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I am sitting in a room, different from the one you are in.
RIP to the composer of some fascinating and indelible music
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WHOA...HUGE RIP. I love this man. What an incredible artist
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rip 
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oh damn rip
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rip
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RIP
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RIP
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𝙍𝙄𝙋
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