Eight Lectures on Experimental Music by Alvin Lucier

Eight Lectures on Experimental Music by Alvin Lucier

In this brilliant collection, path-breaking figures of American experimental music discuss the meaning of their work at the turn of the twenty-first century. Presented between 1989 and 2002 at Wesleyan University, these captivating lectures provide rare insights by composers whose work has shaped our understanding of what it means to be experimental: Maryanne Amacher, Robert Ashley, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, Steve Reich, James Tenney, Christian Wolff, and La Monte Young. Collected here for the first time, together these lectures tell the story of twentieth-century American experimental music, covering such topics as repetition, phase, drone, duration, collaboration, and technological innovation. Containing introductory comments by Lucier and the original question and answer sessions between the students and the composers, this book makes the theory and practice of experimental music available and accessible to a new generation of students, artists, and scholars.

ALVIN LUCIER was born in Nashua, NH, and attended the Portsmouth Abbey School, Yale, and Brandeis. He lived in Rome for two years on a Fulbright Scholarship. He has performed extensively in the United States and Europe in solo concerts and with the Sonic Arts Union, which he co-founded with composers Robert Ashley, David Behrman, and Gordon Mumma, and with the Viola Farber Dance Company. He has taught and lectured at Harvard, the University of California at Santa Barbara, the Center for Music Experiment at the University of California at San Diego, and from 1962 to 1969 was on the faculty of Brandeis University. He is currently professor of music and chairperson of the music department at Wesleyan University.

Lucier has pioneered in many areas of music composition and performance, including the notation of performers' physical gestures, the use of brain waves in live musical performance, the generation of visual imagery by sound in vibrating media, and the evocation of room acoustics for musical purposes. In collaboration with electronic designer John Fullemann, he recently created a completely solar-powered sound piece in the foyer of the City Savings Bank in Middletown, Conn.

He has also made music for the theatre, including the Broadway production of John Roc's Fire! and the American Shakespeare Festival production of Henry V. Several of his works can be heard on CBS Odyssey, Mainstream, Source, Cramps (Italy), and Lovely Music records.

DOUGLAS SIMON earned both a B.A. and an M.A. in music at Wesleyan University. He has composed music and sound for summer and off-Broadway theater productions. He owns and operates Studio Consultants, Inc., a New York City firm engaged in the acoustic and electronic design of recording studios. He conducted these interviews with Lucier during the period (1968-78) in which most of the scores included in Chambers were composed.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780819577634
ISBN 10	0819577634
Title	Eight Lectures on Experimental Music
Author	Alvin Lucier
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Wesleyan University Press
Year published	2017-11-14
Number of pages	160
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable