Extended Spaces – Resonant Bodies: A festival dedicated to the work of Alvin Lucier

[Extended cut of a review appearing in The Wire’s November issue.]

Extended Spaces – Resonant Bodies: A festival dedicated to the work of Alvin Lucier / 12-22.09.2024 (Various Locations, Berlin)

 

Curated by Michael Rosen, the programme of exhibitions, concerts, and a concluding symposium takes place across multiple venues across two separate weeks. Given the range of activities, I only caught a portion of the festival. Three concurrent exhibitions ran at the Aufbau Haus am Moritzplatz, the Patrochialkirche, and Projektrum Kunstquartier Bethanien: in the first, installations by Lucier, Yutaka Makino and Hugo Esquinca, in the second, Lucier’s Music on a Long Thin Wire. I caught the installation in the old Bethanien Hospital, spread out over five small rooms. Empty Vessels operates on feedback from resonating glass jars: ordinary vessels, dirty, not fully cleaned, some cracked. In Lucier’s world, anything can be an instrument and anyone can ‘play’ them, altering the sound as they move across the room. In Directions of Sounds from the Bridge, by contrast, we see a ‘real’ instrument, a cello ‘played’ by a sine-wave emitting transducer, which in turns sets off sound-sensitive lights on the floor, like a low-key disco, somewhere between stasis and alarm. In Sound on Paper, speakers behind framed sheets of paper cause the sheets to vibrate like the surface of a drum. The sounds can be heard only when very close up, offering the spectacle of guests placing ears as if listening to a painting. It’s this kind of subtle play, not only with spatial but with social rituals that I appreciate in Lucier’s work, mitigating the somewhat austere scientism that can characterize commentary on it, including the composer’s own. 

The only piece not by Lucier, Hauke Harder’s Half n’Half, is for two e-bowed zithers playing the same interval, one in and one out of tune. As with Directions of Sounds, there’s something eerie about seeing an instrument producing sound without human interface: at once distanced, even alienated, and weirdly intimate, an aeolian cradle song. Harder also helped realize the installations: his and Viola Rusche’s film No Ideas But in Things after William Carlos Williams offered a portrait that, per Lucier’s wishes, focused on ideas rather than emotions, but with less surreal austerity than Robert Ashley’s conceptually-oriented 1971 ‘TV opera’ Music with Roots in the Aether. “There are real resonances”, Lucier remarks at one point: “they’re not poetic, they’re physical”. Lucier’s students at Wesleyan say he teaches them that simplest solution is invariably the best. Lucier talked about paring away the musical gestures in a piece to arrive at the idea, but, of course, in their sonic unfolding in time these studies in acoustic phenomena become music all over again. Above all his gift was for simplicity in concept and richness of audio effect—albeit one that often relied on the unpredictable and the unforeseen. 

The organisation responsible for the festival is entitled ‘Singuhr’, the singing clock, and that name captures something of the kind of play that goes on in Lucier’s work, its exploration of time in its manifestations.  The work in itself does not contain the emotion, but it does serve as a kind of container for what the listener brings to it--and this openness in turn belies the singular idea of the listener for listeners, plural. Interviewed by Ashley, Lucier’s long-time friend David Behrman, Lucier’s collaborator in the Sonic Arts Union, talked about making “music with a very private feeling”, yet one communicable to a wide audience. In his own interview, Lucier noted that, when writing a piece: “if I feel there’s some kind of feeling there that I have to match or supply [...], I invariably fail. [....] If I thought about putting an emotional feeling in, it wouldn’t be right for me. The piece would be wrong. [...] But you could look at it this way, that in whatever a person is doing, there’s a feeling about it [...] When I see anybody do anything there’s an emotional feeling.” Emotion here can be as much to do with the conceptual as the affective; likewise, the concept in itself, easily digested and summarized in the medium of dry fact, is made rich and strange by the affective dimensions of the way it unfolds in time: the way we live, the way we age, the way we die and survive. 

Perhaps nowhere was this more apparent than in the opening concert on the Thursday at the Parochialkirche, in which we heard Lucier’s classic Music for Solo Performer realized by the now 87-year-old Behrman alongside Slices, performed by Charles Curtis with a pre-recorded, 53-person virtual orchestra, and a tribute by percussionist Robyn Schulkowsky, played alongside Joey Baron. There was an added poignancy to hearing the first work, performed many times by Lucier himself onstage, by one of his collaborators after his death. The piece translates the rhythmic patterns of alpha waves—produced only when the brain is in a relaxed state—to percussion instruments. The performer doesn’t realize their—or the composer’s—Romanticist intention, nor does the piece illustrate anything per se, but, in a sense, this opens it up all the more for an individualized, and potentially highly affective personal response from each person in the room. As Lucier once remarked, there was an irony in the fact that he, Behrman and others of their generation spent so much time devising pieces based on ‘objective’, scientific processes, when those pieces were in fact often very personal. Behrman performed in the same Black Lives Matter top that Lucier wore in his own late performances, his age adding a poignancy, as we heard waves and rolls of sound from the instruments placed around the church, like a kind of ghostly drum troupe, somewhere between a lullaby and a call to attention. In Slices, the cello plays through each pitch in a 53-note orchestral cluster: with each tone, an instrument is removed from the cluster, before the process is reversed. This happens seven times. As with many of Lucier’s pieces, the description of process is simple, but the way the piece is experienced adds immeasurable richness. I found it extremely moving: the building up and taking away of support, the way the melody carries on despite itself, a patient, dogged beauty. Schullkowsky’s tribute once more found sound-making devices dispersed throughout the space: seated at a kit on one side of the church, Joey Baron set up a continuous cymbal roll, somewhere between rhythm, pulse and wave, while Schullkowsky moved between other, larger drums, activating cymbals placed on their surface, the two calling to each other and enveloped in a subtle electronic treatment. As Schullkowsky moves around, the audience move too, the crowd suddenly dispersed, multiple. In her programme note, Schulkowsky asks whether “active listening” might “move us together, or apart or even transform the situation altogether”. As in Lucier’s own music, the performance reconfigures the way we think about the hierarchies of performance, of spacing and seating in quietly radical ways. 

Sunday saw a double concert at the Kunstquartier Bethanien featuring the Ever Present Orchestra, founded specifically to play Lucier’s later music written for instruments. In the first concert, Alberto da Campo, Hannes Hoelzl, Jiawen Wang and Anne Welmer perform Six Strange Thing Theories, inspired by Lucier and by Sun Ra’s Strange Strings, in which the Arkestra played exclusively stringed instruments, most of which they had never played before. Each performer charted a different course along feedback-generating strings suspended from the high, white walls of what I believe was the old hospital chapel. A balloon is blown up and burst, setting off a swelling drone. A candle is slowly carried along the length of the wire, the flickering flame causing gentle, vibrating swells. Horsehair pulled across sets off metallic rustles and shrieks. The piece perhaps lacked the conceptual precision of Lucier’s own work, illustrated by the contrast with the classic Vespers, in which the performers use echo-location devices to find their way round the darkened space, setting off a symphony of clicks. In the second concert, the ensemble gave renditions of Lucier’s Three Cardboard Boxes, Two Circles, and Titled Arc. Bowed glockenspiel, lap steel guitars, violins, clarinets and alto saxophone gave richness to a series of pieces similar in effect and outline, explorations of beating effects from playing instrumental tones against fixed or slowly changing sine waves. The music is in constant, but extremely slow motion. Tones swoop and slide in a kind of serene wail, between uneasiness and comfort, landing and return, a kind of serene wail or queasy lullaby. Three Cardboard Boxes exemplifies Lucier’s interrogation of what we think we already know: in this case, the interval of a perfect 5th, slowed down and distended to reveal worlds within. Perhaps the most impressive item on the programme was the final piece, Titled Arc, in which the larger ensemble at times seemed like a glacial chamber version of Sonorist-era Penderecki or Ligeti, the beating tones particularly intense, reverberating inside the head. One by one, the instruments dropped out, leaving just bowed glockenspiel and clarinet, the music, one could swear, still ringing in the ears even after it had stopped. Sounds die, but perhaps, in their afterlife, they go beyond death. For sound, too, has a life.