Walking toward the archives in the Music Library on the third floor of Olin Library, one might notice a glass case filled with an assortment of items: several records, article printouts, lecture collections, and a few books, many of them paired with photos of curious-looking gadgets that would look at home next to Doc Brown from “Back to the Future.” What all of these items have in common is the name that adorns their surface: Alvin Lucier. Lucier was the longtime John Spencer Camp Professor of Music, teaching from 1968 until his retirement in 2011. He died on Dec. 1, 2021, at the age of 90, in his home in Middletown, Connecticut.

A seminal figure in the field of experimental music, Lucier pioneered the use of various technologies within music, such as brain wave detectors, echolocation devices, and room acoustics as a part of composition. As a professor at the University, he expanded students’ understanding of how music can be conceived in “Intro to Experimental Music” (MUSC109).

Lucier’s music pushed the boundaries of musical notation and interaction between the score of a piece and its performer. His first major electronic work, “Music for Solo Performer,” is performed using brain wave detectors that are converted into sound waves. He always emphasized the performer’s role in the music. In a 2014 interview with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Arts, Science, and Technology, Lucier was asked why he chose to use a brain wave detector rather than computer-generated sounds.

“Who wants to hear that?” Lucier responded. “Alpha waves, they’re imperfect, they rise and they fall, they’re natural phenomena. They’re much more interesting.” 

In Lucier’s music, the performer’s imperfections were never a flaw; instead, they were part of the music by design. In another acclaimed composition, 1969’s “I Am Sitting in a Room,” the performer reads a text which is then fed back over and over until the words are overcome by the natural resonance of the room. The unique rhythm and timbre of the performer’s speech become an integral part of the composition.

However, Lucier wasn’t always the pioneering experimental composer that he became. After graduating from Yale University in 1954 with a somewhat spontaneously decided degree in music, he attended graduate school at Brandeis University to study composition. In 1960, Lucier was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to study music in Italy. While there, despite having an exclusively neoclassical background in music, he attended a concert by John Cage and David Tudor, two essential—and sometimes controversial—figures in the experimental music world.

At the time, Lucier despised the music, which consisted of drumming on the underside of the piano, tuning into a radio, and using the whole theater to make sound. Chair of Music Ronald Kuivila ’77, an old student of Lucier’s, recalled Lucier’s response.

“He booed a lot of the time; people were booing with him,” Kuivila said.

Lucier describes the concert in his book, “Music 109: Notes on Experimental Music.”

“People were furious,” Lucier writes. “I was flabbergasted…. I guess you could say that concert blew my mind. I stopped writing music for a year.”

Despite Lucier’s initial reaction to Cage and Tudor’s music, he began to speak with various composers involved in experimental music during his time in Italy.

“He began to get interested in the whole approach,” Kuivila said.

After spending some time as the Director of the Chorus at Brandeis, Lucier was hired as a visiting professor at Wesleyan University in 1968. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1972.

Lucier’s presence at the University was no coincidence. By 1968, the University already had a history of support for experimental and world music that few other institutions could match. John Cage had been in residency just a few years earlier, and Richard Winslow ’40, a professor of music at the time, had pushed the Music Department to explore more unconventional forms of music.

At the University, Lucier began teaching MUSC109, a course that later shaped his book of the same name. The class is still taught to this day.

“The class very much evolved from the music he was interested in, from his friends, and from his own personality,” Kuivila said. “He kind of knew how to get people to things with very simple devices…. He was very much about distilling things to a core idea, and then working only from that core idea.”

Lucier made sure that his teachings went beyond lectures and demonstrations so that students were always an active part of the music.

“He wouldn’t really be interested in talking about a piece until you were ready to perform,” Kuivila said. “And then sometimes within a week, he would pull you aside and have very specific things to say. And he wasn’t about telling you not to do this or that, so much as giving you little taps to open up possibilities.”

“He was a wonderful storyteller,” Kuivila continued. “He would tell stories about the pieces, play the pieces…. It was a great show.”

During Lucier’s time at the University, he sought to bring practicing artists to campus to showcase their work and developments within experimental music. Through his role, he invited several notable experimental musicians to lecture and perform in his course, such as La Monte Young, Robert Ashley, and Steve Reich. These lectures can be found in the book “Eight Lectures on Experimental Music,” published by Wesleyan University Press.

Always looking to expand the presence of music beyond its traditional bounds, Lucier endeavored to involve other parts of campus with the Music Department.

“He did a very charming festival, where he wrote pieces for colleagues, and all these faculty members performed,” Kuivila recounted. “And that was very, very lovely.”

Lucier’s retirement in 2011 did not prevent him from remaining an active part of the music community at the University; he made an effort to continue to visit and discover what current students were up to.

“He made a point of staying active in students’ lives and work,” Professor of Music Paula Matthusen, an old student of Lucier’s and current instructor of MUSC109, wrote. “He came to concerts. He wanted to know what people were working on. He asked students to participate in and test out works he was developing. Every year I taught 109 until his passing, he would make a special class visit.”

Lucier left the Music Department—and campus as a whole—transformed by his presence. His insistence that students be an active part of teaching the class, his desire to push the boundaries of how we understand music and sound, and his continuous effort to involve the University with the greater music world were instrumental in creating the legacy of experimental music that exists here today.

His influence on the broader world of experimental music was no less significant. His experimentation and attention to detail, as well as his devotion to the imperfect, human element of performance, will continue to leave a lasting impact on subsequent composers.

“[Experimental music] will always only be to the taste, I think, of people who are really actively devoted to listening,” Kuivila said. “But that’s an important group of people. And the ideas and possibilities that it exposes end up leaking into the general culture in profound ways…. Alvin is a great example of that.”

 

Leo Bader can be reached at lbader@wesleyan.edu.