Work of the Month #6: Alvin Lucier - "I Am Sitting In A Room"

John wrote: »

I've often thought of taking the first utterance of Lucier's speech from the recording and trying it in different rooms, i.e. start with his first recording and seeing what different spaces sound like after the same number of recording repetitions.

Much of Lucier's vast output has explored the movement of sound through space. Intrigued by this most elemental auditory phenomenon, he has constructed an endless variety of settings in which to study how sound waves interact with one another and with their spatial environments. Cavernous halls, institutional stairways, railroad boxcars, domestic rooms, milk bottles, sea shells, glass vases, ostrich eggs - all have served as laboratories for his humble yet profound and poetic audio art. "Thinking of sounds as measurable wavelengths instead of as high or low musical notes," Lucier remarked in 1969, "changed my whole idea of music from a metaphor to a fact and, in a real way, has connected me to architecture." This fascination with sound in space and in resonant environments of all sorts quickly led him out of the concert hall and away from any sort of traditional music composition.

...In the spring of 1970, Lucier moved to Middletown, Connecticut to take up a position at Wesleyan University, a hot spot for ethnomusicology that, under his tutelage, has since become a key coordinate in the landscape of American experimental music and sound art. Newly settled in a rented faculty apartment replete with wall-to-wall carpet and thick drapes, he recorded the piece that, in so many ways, has become his signature, I Am Sitting in a Room. In his typically modest yet earnestly investigative style, he recorded a short text that simply described the procedure of the piece: "I am sitting in a room different to 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."

Like Music for Solo Performer, the piece is beautifully simple and bluntly scientific, yet also marvellously transformative. The text is read into one tape recorder and then repeatedly played back into another - 35 times in the available recording, a 1980 version issued by Lovely Music. Over the 45 minutes of the performance, Lucier's voice - and particularly his characteristic stutter (fittingly manifested in the key words "rhythm" and "smooth") - gradually becomes engulfed by the space. After ten cycles, speech has become a surging wash of metallic tones, like a slow, distorted steel drum routine. After 20 cycles, it has become a distant carillon dirge; after 30, a nervous, Ovalesque drone. What began as a personal confession in a domestic space gradually becomes pure, anonymous sound that overwhelms and abolishes the performer's personality.

This commitment to anonymity and purity is, oddly enough, characteristic of Lucier's musical practice. Like Cage and many post-Cagean experimentalists and minimalists, Lucier wishes to reduce self-expression in order to get at the acoustic phenomena themselves. For Lucier, this is what distinguishes properly 'experimental' music from 'improvisation'. "If you improvise," he contends, "it's your past and your personal preferences and your ideas about what sounds should or can be that you're thinking about." Reflecting on Vespers, he continues, "I am satisfied not to compose terribly much but to let the space and the situation take over. In other words, I don't intrude my personality on a space... I just bring a very simple idea about a task that players can do and let the space push the players around."

...Lucier focusses on [...] nature and natural phenomena in all their magnificence. Not surprisingly, then, his inspiration frequently comes from the physical sciences. "Scientific experiments have often given me ideas for pieces," he grants. "Sometimes I do little more than frame them in an artistic context."

...This combination of scientific investigation and aesthetic sensibility led to Lucier's discovery of the wonders of feedback. In the autumn of 1975, writer and sound artist Douglas Kahn sent Lucier a package containing a peculiar Christmas tree ornament: a baseball-sized silver bird that repeatedly emitted a mournful electronic chirp. Lucier spent an afternoon in Wesleyan's electronic music studio emperimenting with the birdcall and a pair of binaural microphones designed to be worn in the ears to aid in the production of realistic recordings. "At one point," Lucier recalls, "feedback began to sound. Before I could get to the amplifier and lower the volume control I began hearing phantom images of the birdcall, which seemed to come from inside my head and at the same time to be located in various parts of the room. They were amazing. What I was hearing was heterodyning, a term in radio technology describing beat frequencies produced between radio frequencies. In this case, the phenomenon was produced by the interaction between the continuous strands of feedback and the sounds of the birdcall, both within audio range." Inspired by his discovery, Lucier decided to take this oddball set-up to the stage under the title Bird and Person Dyning. He mounted the chirping bird on a microphone stand flanked by two loudspeakers. With the microphones in his ears, Lucier would slowly move through the performance space, tilting his head to orchestrate strands of feedback and looking for sweet spots where he could capture ghostly twitters.