Vespers and Other Early Works

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
These 1960s-era Alvin Lucier works show the composer neck-deep in extracting musical composition from its customary modernist tenets. The layers and layers of "Vespers" originate from dolphin echolocation devices, and their reverberant environmental clicking is to postclassical music what Nobukazu Takemura is to contemporary electronica. "Chambers" captures miniature field-recorded sound moments and hazily pastes them together into a fascinating collage. "North American Time Capsule" starts almost flatulently, but settles (or unsettles) into a squiggly circus of vocoder-generated ricochets, scrambling any notion of linearity or serial form. Then comes the most overtly musical segment, "(Middletown) Memory Space," a series of workaday-world impressions translated into a quintet of shakuhachi, koto, guitar, piano, and accordion pressing forward and receding with no tonal centers and a smartly fractured sense of pulse. Finally, there's "Elegy for Albert Anastasia," a quietly dark cloud of nearly inaudible electronic vibrations that challenges so many listener conceptions of not only an elegy but of musical composition itself. Sound as experience: this is Lucier's call. --Andrew Bartlett

Album Description
Alvin Lucier (b. 1931) is best known for his pioneering work in the mid-sixties in the exploration of sonic environments, particularly sounds that we would never perceive under ordinary circumstances. Vespers and Other Early Works restores to the catalog several of his key works from that time. In Vespers (1969) performers with Sondols (sonar-dolphin), hand-held pulse wave oscillators, explore the acoustic characteristics of given indoor or outdoor spaces by monitoring the echoes of the pulse waves off the walls, floors and ceilings, as well as any objects or obstacles in range of the sound waves. Over time, the listener receives an acoustic signature of the room. In Chambers (1968), battery-operated radios, tape recorders, and electronically powered toys of various kinds are hidden in paper bags, shoes, kettles, and small suitcases and other small resonant environments. As performers carry these small "rooms" into larger ones, such as concert halls, football stad! iums and underground cisterns, the sounds, already altered by the acoustics of the small environments, are altered a second time by the acoustics of the larger ones. This version was recorded in 2002. North American Time Capsule (1967), for voices and vocoder, is described metaphorically by Lucier as a message to listeners who don’t know about us. These could be very remote and exotic humans or the fabled "beings" in some other part of the universe. The message is encoded in accordance with the empirical fact that purely electronic signals are more easily transmitted through space (and through time) than the more complex waveforms of speech. (Middletown) Memory Space (1970) is a reenactment of the composition called "(Hartford) Memory Space, for any number of instrumental players with recordings of environmental sounds." The instructions for the original (city) composition say: "For performances in places other than Hartford, use the name of the place of performance in parentheses at the beginning of the title." The instructions tell the performers to go out into the city and record, by any means—electronic recording, graphic notation, or memory—the sounds of the city, and to return to the inside performance space at any time and "re-create, solely by means of your voices and instruments and with the aid of memory devices (without additions, deletions, improvisation, interpretation) those outside sound situations." Elegy for Albert Anastasia (1961–1963) is described as composed "for electromagnetic tape using very low sounds most of which are below human audibility." Liner notes by Robert Ashley.

Of related interest: 80389 Vladimir Ussachevsky – Film Music 80521 Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center 80555 Richard Maxfield/Harold Budd – The Oak of the Golden Dreams 80585 Kenneth Gaburo – Five Works for Voices, Instruments and Electronics

Vespers and Other Early Works, Music, Alvin Lucier, Chamber Music & Recitals, Classical, Classical Composers, Classical Music, Electronic, Electronic/Avant-Garde/Minimalist Music, Minimalism, Modern Composition

Vespers & Other Early Works
Average customer rating:

Amazing and unexpected music.

Vespers & Other Early Works
Alvin Lucier
Manufacturer: New World Records
ProductGroup: Music
Binding: Audio CD

Chamber Music | Forms & Genres | Classical (c.1770-1830) | Historical Periods | Classical | Styles | Music
General | Classical | Styles | Music
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ASIN: B00006RYCU
Release Date: 2002-10-29

Tracks:

Vespers (1969)
Chambers (1968)
North American Time Capsule (1967)
(Middletown) Memory Space (1970)
Elegy for Albert Anastasia (1961-1963)

Amazon.com

These 1960s-era Alvin Lucier works show the composer neck-deep in extracting musical composition from its customary modernist tenets. The layers and layers of "Vespers" originate from dolphin echolocation devices, and their reverberant environmental clicking is to postclassical music what Nobukazu Takemura is to contemporary electronica. "Chambers" captures miniature field-recorded sound moments and hazily pastes them together into a fascinating collage. "North American Time Capsule" starts almost flatulently, but settles (or unsettles) into a squiggly circus of vocoder-generated ricochets, scrambling any notion of linearity or serial form. Then comes the most overtly musical segment, "(Middletown) Memory Space," a series of workaday-world impressions translated into a quintet of shakuhachi, koto, guitar, piano, and accordion pressing forward and receding with no tonal centers and a smartly fractured sense of pulse. Finally, there's "Elegy for Albert Anastasia," a quietly dark cloud of nearly inaudible electronic vibrations that challenges so many listener conceptions of not only an elegy but of musical composition itself. Sound as experience: this is Lucier's call. --Andrew Bartlett

Album Description

Alvin Lucier (b. 1931) is best known for his pioneering work in the mid-sixties in the exploration of sonic environments, particularly sounds that we would never perceive under ordinary circumstances. Vespers and Other Early Works restores to the catalog several of his key works from that time. In Vespers (1969) performers with Sondols (sonar-dolphin), hand-held pulse wave oscillators, explore the acoustic characteristics of given indoor or outdoor spaces by monitoring the echoes of the pulse waves off the walls, floors and ceilings, as well as any objects or obstacles in range of the sound waves. Over time, the listener receives an acoustic signature of the room. In Chambers (1968), battery-operated radios, tape recorders, and electronically powered toys of various kinds are hidden in paper bags, shoes, kettles, and small suitcases and other small resonant environments. As performers carry these small "rooms" into larger ones, such as concert halls, football stad! iums and underground cisterns, the sounds, already altered by the acoustics of the small environments, are altered a second time by the acoustics of the larger ones. This version was recorded in 2002. North American Time Capsule (1967), for voices and vocoder, is described metaphorically by Lucier as a message to listeners who don't know about us. These could be very remote and exotic humans or the fabled "beings" in some other part of the universe. The message is encoded in accordance with the empirical fact that purely electronic signals are more easily transmitted through space (and through time) than the more complex waveforms of speech. (Middletown) Memory Space (1970) is a reenactment of the composition called "(Hartford) Memory Space, for any number of instrumental players with recordings of environmental sounds." The instructions for the original (city) composition say: "For performances in places other than Hartford, use the name of the place of performance in parentheses at the beginning of the title." The instructions tell the performers to go out into the city and record, by any means—electronic recording, graphic notation, or memory—the sounds of the city, and to return to the inside performance space at any time and "re-create, solely by means of your voices and instruments and with the aid of memory devices (without additions, deletions, improvisation, interpretation) those outside sound situations." Elegy for Albert Anastasia (1961-1963) is described as composed "for electromagnetic tape using very low sounds most of which are below human audibility." Liner notes by Robert Ashley.

Of related interest: 80389 Vladimir Ussachevsky - Film Music 80521 Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center 80555 Richard Maxfield/Harold Budd - The Oak of the Golden Dreams 80585 Kenneth Gaburo - Five Works for Voices, Instruments and Electronics

Customer Reviews:

Amazing and unexpected music........2007-01-03

Alvin Lucier is by far one of the most far-sighted and gifted of avant-garde composers. His works are always based on a scientific, sociological, or conceptual ideology never before attempted in the field of musical compositon. The works, however, are never mere dry exercizes, but wonderfully poetic evocations of the underlying ideas inherent in each composition. Even in works where conventional instrumental forces are called upon, the basis is so unconventional that the music sounds unlike anything ever composed before. Lucier is very adept at using unconventional devices such as Sondols (echo-location devices) and the Sylvania vocoder system (for compressing speech signals for telephonic transmission), and the conceptual and musical aspects of these works are seamlessly joined to create a musical experience unlike any other. Any adventurous new music listener will be amazed and intellectually engaged by these early works, which still sound as fresh and inventive as when they were first produced. Topnotch performances, recording, and CD packaging (including superb program notes).

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