Alvin Lucier, an innovative composer and a scholar of modern music, has died at age 90.

On 12/2/21 3:16 PM, number_six wrote:

> Alvin Lucier, an innovative composer and a scholar of modern music, has died at age 90.

I heard "I Am Sitting in a Room" back when I was in college. I thought
it was pretty cool (if one is allowed to say in this newsgroup that
something is pretty cool). I also own a CD of "Music on a Long Thin Wire."

On Thursday, December 2, 2021 at 4:08:45 PM UTC-8, Tatonik wrote:
> On 12/2/21 3:16 PM, number_six wrote:
>
> > Alvin Lucier, an innovative composer and a scholar of modern music, has died at age 90.
> I heard "I Am Sitting in a Room" back when I was in college. I thought
> it was pretty cool (if one is allowed to say in this newsgroup that
> something is pretty cool). I also own a CD of "Music on a Long Thin Wire."

Other expressions come and go, but cool abides.

On Friday, December 3, 2021 at 5:16:56 AM UTC, number_six wrote:
> On Thursday, December 2, 2021 at 4:08:45 PM UTC-8, Tatonik wrote:
> > On 12/2/21 3:16 PM, number_six wrote:
> >
> > > Alvin Lucier, an innovative composer and a scholar of modern music, has died at age 90.
> > I heard "I Am Sitting in a Room" back when I was in college. I thought
> > it was pretty cool (if one is allowed to say in this newsgroup that
> > something is pretty cool). I also own a CD of "Music on a Long Thin Wire."
> Other expressions come and go, but cool abides.

He was a major force in immersive and experimental music, and by all accounts a super man.

Two new recordings were released quite recently, his swan song, and I love them. Both have a similar structure. You have sustained electronic tones interfering with each other in juicy ways, and a traditional instrument, voice or piano, in counterpoint. They’re immersive of course so you have to be in the mood for that, when I am they do the trick - total immersion!

The records are Music for Piano XL and So You . . . (Hermes, Orpheus, Eurydice)

I took a course from him while at Wesleyan University shortly after he began his remarkable 40+ years of teaching there. I was privileged to have heard "I am Sitting in a Room" shortly after its creation when Lucier played it for us on a tape recorder. Incidentally, many descriptions (including the NY TImes obit yesterday) perhaps refer to a revised version (or are just wrong). For that piece, Lucier read a one-minute narrative (complete with his charming stutter) into a tape recorder. He then played the tape on another machine and recorded the playback, repeating the process 50 times. The original I heard did not simply play the 50 takes in order (as many descriptions claim) but rather the master reel was assembled with the odd-numbered takes in ascending order followed by the even ones descending (ie: 1, 3, 5, ... 47, 49, 50, 48, ... 6, 4, 2) so that the words become increasingly indistinct and progressively sink into the mechanics of noise, circuit resonance and tape dropouts, and then reconstruct themselves as the process reverses. I recall that Lucier was especially pleased when his wife created a visual analogue by making copies of copies on an early Xerox machine.

On Thursday, December 2, 2021 at 7:08:45 PM UTC-5, Tatonik wrote:
> On 12/2/21 3:16 PM, number_six wrote:
>
> > Alvin Lucier, an innovative composer and a scholar of modern music, has died at age 90.
> I heard "I Am Sitting in a Room" back when I was in college. I thought
> it was pretty cool (if one is allowed to say in this newsgroup that
> something is pretty cool). I also own a CD of "Music on a Long Thin Wire."

On Friday, December 3, 2021 at 2:26:42 PM UTC-8, peter gutmann wrote:
> I took a course from him while at Wesleyan University shortly after he began his remarkable 40+ years of teaching there. I was privileged to have heard "I am Sitting in a Room" shortly after its creation when Lucier played it for us on a tape recorder. Incidentally, many descriptions (including the NY TImes obit yesterday) perhaps refer to a revised version (or are just wrong). For that piece, Lucier read a one-minute narrative (complete with his charming stutter) into a tape recorder. He then played the tape on another machine and recorded the playback, repeating the process 50 times. The original I heard did not simply play the 50 takes in order (as many descriptions claim) but rather the master reel was assembled with the odd-numbered takes in ascending order followed by the even ones descending (ie: 1, 3, 5, ... 47, 49, 50, 48, ... 6, 4, 2) so that the words become increasingly indistinct and progressively sink into the mechanics of noise, circuit resonance and tape dropouts, and then reconstruct themselves as the process reverses. I recall that Lucier was especially pleased when his wife created a visual analogue by making copies of copies on an early Xerox machine.

Great reminiscences; thanks for posting.

I used that technique once (n-generation photocopying) to redact, in effect, the end product.