1.  Shelter (1967) for vibration pickups, amplification system and enclosed space.

In Shelter, Lucier offers the sounds of outside the auditorium translated through it’s very walls. The auditorium itself becomes the Shelter, and the activity outside the room enters  the loudspeakers within it.  By strategically placing contact microphones on walls, doors and doorframes that separate the auditorium space from the outside world, it is possible to capture the transmission of sonic energy through the very structure of the building.  The entrance and settling of the audience, the air conditioning and power systems, lighting and the musicians playing in the rooms outside are reduced to vibrations picked up by sensors that are equalized and amplified What you will hear are the sounds filtered by the physical characteristics of the building.

 2.   Carbon Copies (1989) for saxophone, piano and percussion and playback

In this work, performers prepare a continuous recording of sounds from their environment as a continuous piece. In the performance, they are required to attempt to play exactly what they have recorded, using their own musical instruments, whilst being reminded of the recording the same recording is shared with the audience though loudspeakers. Lucier first investigated this idea of imitating the environment in an earlier work, (Hartford) Memory Space in 1970. It was inspired by the ability of animals to imitate certain physical characteristics of their environment in order to survive. Lucier posits that imitating our sonic environment will help us relate to it more fully. The performers almost disguise themselves by blending in with the sounds around them. In this way, they are required to remove the ‘art’ from their playing, an idea that appears in much of Luciers’ work. This is not an improvised piece – the copying is very controlled and learnt beforehand, driving the musicians out of their musical comfort zone. The work was commissioned by the American ensemble Challenge,  an ensemble active in the 1980s and featuring Antony Braxton, David Rosenboom and William Winant. The score suggests an open choice for perfomers: Decibel performed this with cello, piano and saxophone.
 3.   In Memoriam Stuart Marshall (1993) for bass clarinet and pure wave oscillator.

This is one of a many works Lucier has written for sine tone generators and instrument. These works explore the spatial properties of sound by revealing  certain acoustic phenomena that are created by the interaction of a pure tone with a rich harmonic instrument. The clarinetist interacts with the electronically produced tone and in doing so, creates moving sound geographies in the space. Unlike other sine wave pieces, such as Still and Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas (1973 – 1974), this work is  scored, using a diagram that indicates the direction of pitch movement for the clarinetist. Each interaction creates a different acoustic phenomena within the room, depending on the room. Lucier’s sine tone pieces began as a provocation to an awareness of one’s surroundings using sound, influenced by the ideas of author Carlos Castenada.

4. Nothing is Real (Strawberry Fields Forever) (1990) for piano, amplified teapot, tape recorder and miniature sound system.

This work came about when Japanese pianist Aki Takahashi commissioned Lucier to arrange a Beatles tune for her to perform. Not wanting to make yet another Beatles cover to the list of hundreds, Lucier decided to displace the tune by altering and manipulating its sound quality.  The original melody is broken into clusters played over the entire range of the piano, more like Lucier remembers them than how they were written in the song. These clusters are left to hang and decay in the space, only to reappear replayed from a speaker hidden in a teapot that sits on the top of the same piano, rearticulating the sounds through the very body of their source, and manipulated by movements of the teapot lid and surfaces.

 5.   Hands (1994) for organ with one or more players.

Performers hands are used to subtly alter the harmonics produced from the pipes of an organ. A series of adjacent semitones are played and sustained on the keyboard – the melodic, rhythmic and chordal detail is all generated this way. The performers are free to choose which pipes to ‘effect’ using a range of suggested hand movements, as most notes on the organ have a number of pipes according to the different stops selected.

INTERVAL 

1. I Am Sitting In A Room (1970) for voice and electromagnetic tape.

Special Guest : Peter Holland.

Every room has its own melody, hiding there until you make it audible.” Alvin Lucier, 1994.

This classic of electronic music has existed for many years as a piece of recorded sound art. It is important because it was an early example of process music, and was one of the first works to really examine the acoustic space of a room as a compositional element. Digital technologies have made this work more readily performed live, a possibility always suggested on the score. The spoken fragment of text serves not only to tell what will happen to itself, but also provide the sonic material to start the piece. This voice  is gradually altered as it is repeatedly played and recorded many times in the space. What was once a short paragraph of spoken word slowly becomes  a piece of music, the meaning of the words is lost, and all that remains is a the rhythm of the original voice. The acoustic space has taken over the voice, it is the main performer in this piece. The human voice intersects in a very direct way with its immediate environment.  The original recording of this piece features Lucier’s own voice, which has a stutter making it very distinctive. Likewise, Peter Holland’s voice is distinctive to most Western Australians, making him the perfect choice for this work. This is a music rooted in the power of speech. 

Peter Holland started working life in 1964 as an actor with the National Theatre Company at The Playhouse. The following year he was appointed as an announcer at the ABC, where he spent the next 32 years making programmes on radio and television. For 20 years, he was the ABC’s principal television news-reader in WA, later presenting the television news for Channel 9 in Perth. He remains an active broadcaster for ABC Classic FM.

2.  Directions of Sound From the Bridge (1978) for string instrument, audio oscillator and sound sensitive lights.

Lucier is interested in the three dimensional phenomena of sound, and the way sound emanates from instruments into space.  In this work, Lucier is attempting to reveal the simple sonic beauty of the instrument, allowing it to speak without a player using any extreme or rehearsed technique to play it. A tone is played at the cello’s bridge, the pitch very slowly and continuously changed in a way that would be impossible for a performer of the instrument to achieve. The cello creates what Lucier calls a  ‘sound shadow’, usually unperceivable due to the sheer amount of activity on the instrument during performance.  In this work however, the sound shadows are revealed by lights in the space illustrating the direction and intensity of movement of sound throughout the space.

3. Ever Present (2002) for flute, saxophone and piano with slow sweep pure wave oscillator.

Soon after the composition of Still and Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas, Lucier expressed in interest in creating pieces that used more than one waves and instruments. This work iterates this idea in wonderfully subtle, involved way. The two sine wave generators interact with each other in acoustic space, interrupted and enhanced by the acoustic instruments. The combination of electronic and acoustic timbres create complicated patterns in the space that change depending on where you are in the room. The sine tones are part of the music ensemble alongside other instruments, controlled and mediated by performers.