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Alvin Lucier

Alvin Lucier’s pieces like “Nothing is real” and “I am sitting in a room” are quite different in style if looked at from a perspective of an ordinary listener. If the first one could be described by just a few words these would be: mysterious, almost dark, deep and eye-opening – a soundtrack of life, which is always unpredictable yet full of excitement that keeps you on the edge of your seat; the second one is more theoretical, scientific and aims to show us the physics in the music, the patterns of sound that we never think of and the way silence operates.

I think what Lucier wanted to pay special attention to in “Nothing is real” that I’ve noticed after listening to it again at home and which I didn’t notice in class while listening the first time were the pauses that are supposed to fill the silence while the artist is not actively engaged in playing the instrument and the teapot. Every second of the piece has a meaning and the moments of silence are filled with noise and sense, sometimes even more than the times when the music is played. Therefore, we need to pay as much attention to the silence as we do to the noise in order to get the full sense of the pieces.

The most fascinating part of Lucier’s work is how he tried to capture the nature in every sound and show that everyone and everything is sound. There is for sure rhythm and plan in his pieces, but as for example in the case of “Nothing is real” the listener believes, that almost the whole piece is an improvisation and this is exactly what Lucier’s goal is, to my view. He was not a fan of artificial and rehearsed as it seems, he enjoyed hearing the clear sounds of nature and the unique sequence they could create in the same piece every time it was played. It is important to perceive sound as it is in its natural state.

It seems that Alvin Lucier enjoyed capturing sounds in space and rooms and exploring the ordinary objects. And this interaction of music with physics such as in “I am sitting in a room” is truly amazing, revealing us different possibilities of how the essential components of sound work together. 
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