Alvin LUCIER
“Theme”

New 1999 release previously unrecorded Lucier works from the mid-90s. Features: “Music for Piano with Magnetic Strings” (performed by Lois Svard, piano), “Theme” (Sam Ashley, Thomas Buckner, Jacqueline Humbert and Joan La Barbara, voices set to a poem by John Ashbery) and “Music For Gamelan Instruments, Microphones, Amplifiers and Loudspeakers” (performed by the Wesleyan University Gamelan Ensemble). “ ‘Music For Piano…’ is a work in which the strings of a piano sound by themselves. Several EBows (small electromagnets used primarily with electric guitars) are placed on the strings of the piano. The pianist works from a prose score which describes the process and suggests (s)he freely position and reposition five EBows on the piano strings, creating strands of sounds of varying density and texture. Much of the pianist’s time is spent listening for harmonics, audible beating, occasional rhythms produced as one or more magnets vibrate against adjacent strings, and other acoustic phenomena. ‘Theme’ sets a poem of John Ashbery’s to music. Lucier didn’t want to violate the flow of the words of the poem by fragmentation or any other cut-up method. The stanzas seemed musical enough just as they were, and he wanted the audience to hear the poem more or less in its pristine state. So working intuitively and by ear, he wrote out the poem for four readers in the order it was written, repeating words and phrases, overlapping and superimposing them in various ways. To ’set’ the poem, he inserted microphones into the mouths of various vessels, including a small milk bottle, a sea shell, a vase , and an empty ostrich egg, to pick up the words as they were sounding inside the vessels. The readers speak normally, alllowing the pitches of their voices which match those resonances of the vessels to create musical sounds.”a