The Future of American Music

  Alvin Lucier's 1969 composition "Sitting in a Room" is a significant piece of experimental music. A recording of Lucier's voice is played back and re-recorded in a room, creating a resonant feedback loop that gradually emphasizes the space's acoustic properties. The recording begins with Lucier's speech explaining what he hopes to achieve with this activity. The first thing I notice, aside from Lucier's voice, is the hiss or crackle of the recording. I am also aware of his stuttering. On the second playback, the recording has a slight reverberation. On the third playback, the echo becomes more intense, as if he were speaking through a pipe or something similar. The crackle is still perceptible, and the irregularities in his pronunciation can still be heard. Each subsequent recording of his speech sounds increasingly tinny and muffled. After the fifth recording, his speech becomes increasingly slurred and the tinny sound becomes more pronounced. I almos...

  Alvin Lucier is an American composer that was interested in new music and tape compositions. The play “Nothing is Real” (1990) consists of Lucier playing fragments of the Beatles song “Strawberry Fields Forever” on the piano while recording it on a mini tape recorder. The play starts with very slow and deep piano sounds and then step by step gets higher and faster regarding the sounds. Towards the middle of the play, Lucier closes the roof of the piano and distances himself from the piano. He then begins to use the mini tape recorder to play his recorded sounds. The mini tape recorder is in a teapod which is positioned on the piano roof. By changing the positions of the teapot lid and by picking up and putting down the teapot from the piano, Lucier is able to create a variety of different sounds. The Beatles song “Strawberry Fields Forever” is deconstructed and eventually recreated by using new styles of music making. In my opinion, it is a brilliant idea to record some...

  Author: Julia Ranft B.A. American Studies (HF), English Studies (NF) Email: s0173273@stud.uni-frankfurt.de Matrikelnummer: 7485864 The Future of (American) Music Prof. Dr. Bernd Herzogenrath Listening Report 2 Alvin Lucier - Nothing is Real             Alvin Lucier's Nothing is Real, eight minutes long, is a live performance of an extraordinary version of Strawberry Fields Forever by The Beatles. Half of the piece plays exclusively on a black grand piano until it changes to an amplified teapot, which makes the whole thing seem very unusual. By lifting and reflecting the lid, the tones are created, which later represent his own interpretation of the piece. With this piece and his own interpretation, he makes extensive use of the grand piano's sustain pedal, which creates an unusual mood, especially in such a large concert hall, but at the same time conveys a calming and warm feeling.    ...

  “I am sitting in a room” by Alvin Lucier takes ordinary speech and transforms it with the help of “the natural resonance frequencies of the room” into a smoothened high-pitched pattern of sounds. Practically, I think this means that he used loudspeakers and microphones to stack the slightly changed tracks on top of each other. A process that is nowadays easy to replicate with computer programs, but without the natural resonance of spaces. Lucier, the producer, and speaker persists in the fact that this is “not a demonstration of a physical fact, but to smooth out any irregularities his speech has.” Everything, except the presence of rhythm, should be “destroyed”. Besides the smoothen out of his tonal voice, I think the fact that there is a slight stuttering in his speech could be part of his intention. Most of his words get unrecognizable between the fourth and fifth rounds of overlapping sounds. Lucier’s voice gets altered with more echo and reverb. It sounds like a distant ...

  The recording “I am sitting in a room” by Alvin Lucier plays with an again and again resumed sound/voice on tape. In the following I will try to showcase my thoughts during each replay. This will look now a bit experimental, as it is, but maybe it helps to understand what I thought while listening. My comments are the ones in blue. Replay#1: 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. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have. (- 01:36 min) Replay#2: I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in...

  This piece of music with the interesting title Nothing is real puts me in a sad and melancholic mood at the beginning. Somehow, I immediately tend to sink into my thoughts, and I am absorbed by the dark atmosphere evoked by the deep sounds. The title alone gives me a depressed and gloomy feeling; it makes you question life and your existence in general. The short sounds of the keys feel to me like fragments of unfinished pieces of music that have been put together like a puzzle or a collage. As if the individual parts don't really belong together, but Alvin Lucier wanted to put together a variation of different sounds from a piano to cover as many tones as possible. Even though we had talked during the seminar about the fact that this piece is based on the Beatles' Strawberry Fields Forever, I did not have it in the back of my mind when I listened to it again at home. Despite the murky feeling that the piano piece gives me, it is fun to listen to. The melancholic melody s...

  Prof. Dr. Herzogenrath The Future of Avantgarde-Music Blaha, Malte C. Matrikelnummer 7509502   Listening report – Alvin Lucier Lucier’s music sounds like a journey into the unknown, a so said sonic exploration that invites the listener to enter a world of pure sound. His composition Nothing is Real actually plays with the original idea of what we as humans conceive as music. Firstly, Lucier plays the piano in a melodic and rhythmical way. The listener does not know whether the device that is used next to the piano is some sort of loop-station or a synthesizer. After the pulling out of a teapot, it becomes obvious that it must have been a loop-station. Lucier starts to mimic the soundwaves and the actual sound of the piano by closing and opening up the teapot. And then, it is comprehensible. Nothing in this piece is real. There is the conception that everything can be the starting point of a sound, but the sound itself never comes from the very instrument that see...

  Maria Alighourchi 7489718 The Future of American Music   Listening Report 3 Alvin Lucier Nothing is Real (1990)   In Alvin Lucier’s interpretation of the song Strawberry Fields Forever (1967) by The Beatles, he   uses only a piano and a teapot. The two instruments used are solely physical, one of which is not even an instrument. However, this does not matter to Lucier since he confidently uses the teapot, in which parts of the Strawberry Fields melody seeps out, in the perfectly planned tunes Lucier scripted. Generally, Alvin Lucier experiments with sounds that physical objects make and intertwines these, or often re-records the already created sounds on top of each other, creating an chaos of tunes. Naturally, people would assume that the overlaying sounds and his experiments are mere chaos but having in mind that Lucier does not rely on accidental music but scripts his work, his art opens a new dimension towards what we human define as music an...

  Melanie Diehl (6887890) Prof. Dr. Bernd Herzogenrath Winter Semester 2022/2023 The Future of American Music Independent Study – 21.02.23 Alvin Lucier: Nothing is Real It took me a few replays and a few other covers of understanding how Lucier’s amplified tea pot theory works. I was baffled that a teapot could even do that. I thought it was converting the same sounds played on the piano then transported into the teapot? What? How? I know we are not supposed to ask questions in an essay, but I did not understand it. So, it took me a few replays. I went on to search for any covers of Lucier, and there were a ton, some even explained it. Then I got it. Should have come to class that day, I guess. I started to research on Lucier and I t did not take me long to realise that he was inspired by John Cage and Pierre Schaeffer. During my time in the seminar, I studied that all the composers we have discussed are linked, intertwined, and inspired from each other’s. Since Cage,...

  Alvin Lucier – Nothing is Real This was just weird to listen to and watch. I don’t know what to make of it, really. It started with this elderly guy, Alvin Lucier, playing on the piano. He played some parts from the Beatles song “Strawberry Fields Forever,” but in different octaves. Sometimes normal, then very high or very low. All of this was not very cohesive, as he took breaks between each individual sequence of notes. Then after a while, he just stood up, closed the piano, and took out a teapot. All of this in such a slow manner, I was not sure if this was part of the performance or due to the fact that he is just old and needs a little longer. The teapot seems to be connected with a cable, to a device where he recorded the piano earlier. He then starts opening and closing the teapot slowly, again, I am not sure if it is supposed to be that slowly, but I guess this time it may be. He has a sheet laying on the piano, possibly with musical instructions on when to open or ...

  Patryk Merci The Future of American Music Matriculation number: 7613841 Dr. Herzogenrath WS 22/23   Listening Report of Alvin Lucier’s “Nothing is Real”   Lucier’s „Nothing is Real” does not reveal much about the nature of the piece before it actually concludes, as the piece starts and continues through the use of a piano. However, the truly futuristic trait is revealed at the very end, when Lucier steps down from the piano and replicates its sounds by the use of an amplified tea pot.   The piece starts with fast paced high notes, which almost serve as a warm up for the composer before he starts going deeper into the sounds, as the following rhythm is created by low notes which are much slower and create a sad atmosphere. This sad aura then turns into an ominous and threatening rhythm, but it suddenly stops and leads the listener back to the high notes, which prevent the emergence of a depressive atmosphere. Those new high notes are much hap...

Reem Zedan 7711552 Prof. Dr. Bernd Herzogenrath The Future of [American] Music 02 February 2022   Alvin Lucier ’s Nothing is Real             In the beginning of the video, Lucier is seen recording and playing the piano. At first I thought he was playing snippets of different classical music, but later realized it was the melody of ”Strawberry Fields Forever” by The Beatles. The pop song is played in segments that are connected by frequent long pauses. These pauses emphasize sections of the melody and change the dynamic of the song. The sections end up having their own identity and become separated from their collective identity, which is the song. Another aspect to be noticed is the frequent use of the piano’s foot pedals to create a reverb sound effect. After playing the segments, Lucier utilizes a teapot for further production of unique sounds. He views the teapot as a room and the lid as its rooftop, moving th...

  “I am Sitting in a Room” is an experimental musical composition created with the recording and playback of the short text read by Alvin Lucier. In the first three minutes, the repetition of the text is quite clear to my ear, while with the echo in the room’s acoustic that the piece was recorded, the words sound as if he is slowing down. In addition, the repetition of the first recording brings his stuttering of some consonants forward. Following three minutes and about twenty seconds, the echo becomes moderately noticeable; however, the text is still understandable. With the increasing clanging formulated by the iteration of the playback, Lucier’s voice becomes unrecognizable while the rhythm remains unchanged. In the last five minutes of the piece, the voice and the spoken words get caught up into the unintelligible and hypnotic resonance. The evolution of the sound texture from the recording of a short text to a degrading rhythm is quite impressive. Through the instrumentalit...

  Sarah Kumar Dr. Bernd Herzogenrath The Future of (American) Music 05 Mar. 2023 Listening Report on Alvin Lucier’s Sitting in a Room             Sitting in a Room is a recording of Alvin Lucier’s speech in which he shortly talks about his intent behind it. He is recording himself and playing his voice into the same room over and over again. In his speech, he says that “any semblance” of it “with perhaps the exception of rhythm is destroyed” ( Sitting in a Room 0:54). This is not yet observable in the first minutes of the recording; however, as the recording progresses, so do the overlays of speech over speech – voice over voice. The static keeps growing and becoming louder and the voice hollower and more mechanic sounding. The stutter that was so easily recognizable in the beginning seems to have vanished, or rather, been engulfed, as the recording progresses.         ...

  Alvin Lucier´s piece “Nothing is real” is made up of two distinct parts: Starting off, the piece begins with a classical piano piece, almost reminiscent of a classical orchestral performance. It was certainly unexpected, as it wasn´t exactly what I imagined under experimental or Avantgarde music. At the same time, it was in no way unpleasant to listen to, on the contrary, it was a slow and relaxing but decidedly pleasant experience. The second of the performance is Lucier creating different sounds using nothing more than a tea kettle, slowly opening and closing it´s lid to control the sounds emanating from the kettle. The sound itself, while certainly unexpected at the start, doesn´t exactly sound too foreign. It reminded me of a few different sounds I had heard before, for one the sound of blowing on bottles, and on the other hand, it sounded quite similar to different kinds of synthwave I have heard in the past. The entire piece, and especially the second half played on the...

  Alvin Lucier's Project 76, "Nothing is Real," is a composition that uses spoken works and electronic processing to explore the nature of language and perception. It is based on a recorded spoken sentence – Nothing is Real – that is gradually processed and distorted. It creates a series of echoes and reverberations that slowly transform the original sentence into a surreal and otherworldly soundscape. I found the piece quite disorienting and unsettling, as the distortion of the spoken words created a sense of uncanny or even a weird, surreal detachment from reality. After the first recording got played into the room (recording and replaying every replay (cycle)), the creation of an echo and its reverb with the distortion of the voice got creepier and, with every repetition, more unsettling. Frequencies changed depending on the pitch and echo the recording created. With each recording (replayed), the voice got more and more distorted and pitched to the point of no coher...

 Alvin Lucier's 1969 composition "Sitting in a Room" is a significant piece of experimental music. A recording of Lucier's voice is played back and re-recorded in a room, creating a resonant feedback loop that gradually emphasizes the space's acoustic properties. The recording begins with Lucier's speech explaining what he hopes to achieve with this activity. The first thing I notice, aside from Lucier's voice, is the hiss or crackle of the recording. I am also aware of his stuttering. On the second playback, the recording has a slight reverberation. On the third playback, the echo becomes more intense, as if he were speaking through a pipe or something similar. The crackle is still perceptible, and the irregularities in his pronunciation can still be heard. Each subsequent recording of his speech sounds increasingly tinny and muffled. After the fifth recording, his speech becomes increasingly slurred and the tinny sound becomes more pronounced. I almost...

  I can really hear how much Cage has influenced Lucier in his life. Especially the teapot on the piano piece heavily leans onto John Cage’s works. Of course, Alvin Lucier experimented further as well. His piece "I Am Sitting in A Room" was very interesting to listen to. We listened to the whole thing in class, and I have to say, by the end, my ears were ringing from all the screeching sounds.   Now, that might have been because of the speakers in the room. When I listened to it again at home with my headphones, it wasn’t so bad. Now that I could actually concentrate on the words being said and experience the meaning behind them, I find it really fascinating. On the track, Lucier says that everything except rhythm is destroyed. And that's exactly what happens. With every loop of the sound being played back into the room and recorded again, the speech in the empty room becomes more and more fluent – literally. So, as his stutter slowly fades into the waves of high and ...

  In the song “ I am sitting in a R oom “ by Alvin Lucie r a male voice is speaking to the listener in which the speaker constantly repeats the following sentence: “ 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. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have. “ Alvin Lucie r pretends in his recording to speak to the listener directly as if he and the listener are physically in the same room. The piece shows Lucier recording himself while narrating the text, playing the recorded piece back, re-recording it, and con...

  Alvin Lucier is not only a composer, but also a sort of scientist of sounds: almost all of his works have been influenced by science, in fact he loves to explore the physical properties of sound itself like resonance of spaces, phase interference between closely tuned pitches, and the transmission of sound through physical media. Unlike the other artists analyzed, who focus more on the nature of sounds and their artistic capabilities, Lucier plays with the sound, trying to understand which properties it has and what it can potentially and tangibly do. His most famous experiment is without any doubt I am sitting in my room (1969) , in which Lucier records himself narrating a text, and then plays the recording back into the room, re-recording it: the effect is that certain frequencies are gradually emphasized as they resonate in the room, until eventually the words become unintelligible, replaced by the pure resonant harmonies and tones of the room itself. Despite this, I found t...