the music of our own ears
by Douglas Messerli
Ever Present Orchestra with Alvin Lucier, at REDCAT (the Roy and Edna Disney / CalArts Theater / March 26,
2019, I saw the performance with Marjorie Perloff
Born in 1931, Alvin Lucier was one of the
central composers (along with Robert Ashley, Gordon Mumma, and David Behrman)
of what was called the Sonic Arts Union, comprising works that dealt with
acoustical properties of music and highly structured compositions which are
manipulated through computers and the relation of acoustical variances of the
instruments involved, which, in last night’s REDCAT concert, consisted of
electronic guitars, glockenspiel, saxophones, violins, and piano.
Lucier’s work requires a closely knit gathering of musicians, each of
whom must work in tandem and simultaneously to echo and reverberate the sounds
of the others, or, in the case of the first work of the evening, Ricochet Lady (2016), where player
Trevor Saint (for whom the piece was written) works with the ricocheting sounds
of the wall against which the instrument is placed.
The group, the Ever Present Orchestra, founded by Bernhard Rietbrock in 2017 (and consisting of Oren Ambarchi, Jan Thoben, Trevor Saint, Charles Ng, Valentine Michaud, Joan Oliver Arcos, Vera Weber, Christina Moser, Beatrice Harmon, Kris Rahamad, and Rebekka Thies), brilliantly bring to life a tonal tonic.
To
listen to Lucier’s music one must have patience and an ear for subtle shifts of
harmonics created by the other players. For this composer no sound is pure; it
lives in an environment of rooms, other players, and distortions of air,
artificial machines, and our own eardrums. Somewhat like Cage—yet using almost
the opposite tactics of Cage’s renowned “silence”—this composer reveals how the
listener has a major role in creating the music—no matter how precisely
performed—is perceived. Even a cough, a yawn, or an exiting audience member
alternates what we hear. Fortunately, the mostly young and enthusiastic crowd
in the filled theater sat raptly, clearly enthusiastic to hear the orchestra’s
West Coast premiere.
While Saint’s glockenspiel playing as surely an early crowd-pleaser,
repeating 3 and 4 note chromatic changes along with the wall’s reverberations,
my favorite piece of the evening was the third piece, Two Circles from 2012, wherein four electronic guitars span a range
of 18 ascending and descending semi-tones, creating, as the program notes
suggest, “audible beating at speeds determined by the closeness of the players’
tones and those of the sweeping waves.” The beats occur when the instruments
differ slightly in their harmonics, and the waves are produced by unison
passages which, alternating, create the title’s “two circles,” almost as if
recreating a slightly oppositional and communal antiphon, the music pulling at
moments apart to then return to modulate once more.
In
many respects Two Circles is related
to the other two works presented here: Braid
from the same year, and the more recent Semicircle
(2017). In the first, the interchanges occur between the electric guitars
whose tones rise and fall in a four-strand pattern, what musicians describe as
a “braid.” But as in Two Circles a
tension (a harmonic and rhythmic beat) arises through the introduction of three
wind instruments. Once again, the further apart of the musical score, the
greater the “beating,” which playing in unison quickly resolves.
But, obviously, Lucier’s work is a cerebral experience, a great demand
for a somewhat elderly man late at night.
The last piece, one of his most famous, makes that cerebral requirement
quite clear. Lucier himself performed his 1969 work, after the intermission, I Am Sitting in a Room. In this famed
piece the composer speaks into a tape recorder, simply explaining his process
and intentions:
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 the physical fact, but more as a way to smooth
(here the composer stutters the first letters of smooth, s-s-s-s) out
irregularities my speech might have.
Apparently Lucier sometimes stutters in his everyday life. But the
lesson of this rather amazing work, once again, is how sound travels, and how
we perceive it, particularly, as in the old telephone game of information
passed from one to another and another and another, when repeated again and
again. By the end of this work, quite obviously, the message has been lost, the
network that we all rely upon for comprehension broken simply through the
process of our abilities to hear and assimilate it. Inflections, rhythms are
all we have left to make sense of the message.
The
simple statements spoken into a tape recorder before us become near gibberish,
and we are left with the fact that meaning is simply transitory. A story told
to us by a friend will never be the same story we tell to another friend or
what that friend tells to another, and so on. Sound is immediate; but, of
course, it never truly is that either.
Los Angeles, March 27, 2019
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (March 2019).
