David Behrman was born in Austria in 1937 and came from a family of artists and performers. He was son of noted playwright and Hollywood screenwriter S.N. Behrman. His mother Elza Heifetz Behrman was the sister of violinist Jascha Heifetz. Performance, music, and the arts were all in his blood. The family piano was something always available to him, and he spent a lot of time sitting with the instrument. His inclination towards music was encouraged and he was able to continue to study it in the world of higher education. There he met some of the people who were working towards the awakening of a distinctive American music in the classical tradition, and others who would go on to have a lasting influence over his own musical trajectory.

From the American Five the American Four

In 1953 he went to the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. It was there he met a person one of his lifelong friends and musical companion, Frederic Rzewski. It was around this time period that he also met Wallingford Riegger. He became a student of Riegger’s who initiated him into the alternative current of American classical music.
​
In an interview Behrman commented, “One person from whom I learned a lot, about music and also about feisty independence, was the composer Wallingford Riegger. One year in New York, when I was 17, I went twice a week to his little apartment to take composition lessons. Riegger had taught Morton Feldman and Bob Ashley and had been a friend of Henry Cowell and Edgard Varese.” Behrman was soaking in the ambience of some rarified musical circles.

His teacher Riegger had been born in Albany, Georgia, at some point moved to Indianapolis and from there went on to school at Julliard in New York. He graduated in 1907, a member of the prestigious music schools first graduating class. Riegger went to Germany for a spell in an attempt to become a conductor. He learned a lot and also improved his cello skills before coming back to the States in 1917. Back in New York in the twenties he devoted himself to composition when he couldn’t find work as a conductor. 

Riegger was one of what was called the “American Five.” The other members of the American Five included Henry Cowell, Charles Ives, John J. Becker, and Carl Ruggers. The group aimed to cast off the long shadow of European composition. Just as the Transcendentalists and later Walt Whitman had begun to build up an American identity in literature, these composers were feeling into the wide open spaces of a new and independent American music. In particular Riegger immersed himself in the work of the New Music Society started by Henry Cowell. This society put out publications and recordings to spread the work of American composers. Riegger also played a part in forming the Pan American Association of Composers that represented composers throughout the western hemisphere.

Within the American Five, Riegger was known as an early adopter of a twelve-tone system. Though he learned the technique from Schoenberg’s student Adolph Weiss, he wasn’t a strict adherent to serialism. He also wasn’t strict in the way he used Schoenberg’s method. He didn’t think he needed to always use rows with twelve tones and he didn’t necessarily transpose his rows. If he wanted to use a note, he used it, and if he didn’t, he didn’t. Twelve tone techniques were just another tool in his tool box, not a rigid compositional dogma. In this he was truly part of an American tradition of using whatever tools happened to be at hand and discarding them when they didn’t suit him.
​
In 1957 Riegger got summoned to the House Un-American Activities Committee. He was on their list of suspects during their investigations into communism in the musical world. Behrman recalls his former teachers political views, “He was a courageous dissenter; because of his political views his music was blackballed during the McCarthy era. He used to alternate counterpoint lessons with lessons in radical politics. It was from him that I learned about some of the independent voices in American music - about Ives and Cowell, Varese and Cage. And I'm still a fan of Riegger's; his music had a wonderful sense of sonority and rhythmic vitality.”

​​Riegger had nurtured this spirit of independence and it found full flowering in many of his students, including Behrman and Ashley. This connection to two members of the Sonic Arts Union to one of the American Five, and the spirit of independence they picked up from him was a key influence on Behrman and Ashley. Perhaps, for their generation, another name for the Sonic Arts Union might have been the American Four.

Alternating Currents

Two of his other musical friends had a huge influence on him. “Frederic Rzewski and Christian Wolff, had a lot to do with what was on my mind in those days. Christian was a graduate student at Harvard when I met him. He and Frederic knew a great deal about new developments in European and American music. Frederic was always the first person in the area to order the latest scores by Stockhausen and Boulez. He got them way before the Harvard Music Library did.”

In 1959 Behrman was keen to get a taste of what was going on in Europe. He had become a fan of Stockhausen, especially impressed by Gesang der Juenglinge, which was in many ways the gateway drug for a generation of electronic music composers. His imagination fired by Stockhausen, he went to the Darmstadt composition class in the summer of 1959 to study with the composer. La Monte Young and Naim June Paik were fellow students in his class, while David Tudor and Cornelius Cardew were his advisers. “Stockhausen's course was an eye-opening experience for me, in part because of his intense devotion to new music, in part because he encouraged my efforts, in part because it was at that course that a long-lasting friendship with David Tudor began.”

Back in the United States his friends Wolff and Rzewski hatched a plan to bring David Tudor to Harvard for a concert. All three were members of the music club but they only had a small fee to give the musician. To their surprise “not only did Tudor accept, but he brought his friends John Cage, Morton Feldman and Earle Brown with him. Tudor played new European and American music brilliantly that night; it was a moment that considerably expanded the mental horizons of many of the students who were present.”

David Tudor’s influence got the younger students further interested in the possibilities of using both traditional and electronic instruments, alone and in combinations. When Behrman met Gordon Mumma at the 1963 Feldman/Brown concert the two became fast friends, and took up a lively pen pal correspondence which also included the exchange of circuit diagrams. Mumma started tutoring him in basic electronics through the mail and gave him instructions on how to build things. Electronic music offered a workaround for young composers in the early sixties. It was often hard to get musicians to play an unknown composers work, but in the DIY milieu that was coming up around electronic music, a composer could build their own equipment and play their own compositions; in part because the building of a circuit was essential to the structure of the piece, a crucial component of the score.    

 “From David Tudor and Gordon Mumma I learned how to build little battery-powered devices that could radically alter or hugely amplify acoustic sounds. Gordon Mumma's enthusiasm was catching; he wrote me a series of letters in 1964 that were like a basic course in electronic music before there were any books on the subject. The first letter had a circuit for a ring modulator, which I eagerly built. Before that I'd had the experience of composing scores and copying out parts and asking other musicians to play them; one was always in the situation of asking favors and that didn't usually feel very good. Better was the self-reliant feeling of performing oneself, and of using homemade instruments to create sounds that no human ears had ever before experienced!”
​
In 1965 Behrman had one of his electronic pieces played at the ONCE Festival. The next year the Sonic Arts Union would blossom. 

Wave Train and Runthrough

Behrman has written much fine music, well worth spending time with. Two pieces from the Sonic Arts Union era are noteworthy.

In Wave Train he uses guitar pickups placed around the body of a grand piano to explore properties of feedback and resonance. The gain on the guitar pickup is set high enough to excite the strings through its feedback. In performance Behrman would often have Mumma play the piano, while he moved the microphones around during various points in the piece, to showcase the different effects this would have on the piano.

Alvin Lucier said of the piece, “The performer’s job is to ride the feedback, raising and lowering the volume levels, creating arcs of sound waves. David likens this activity to surfing where one is constantly monitoring one’s position along a surging wave front.”
​
In one sense Wave Train is a prepared piano piece in the tradition developed by Cage and Tudor; in another it explores the properties of microphones being placed around an instrument, as Stockhausen had investigated in his Mikrophonie pieces from 1964 and 1965. 

Runthrough was a piece where all four of the Sonic Arts Union members played a variety of Behrman’s homemade instruments. It is built from “cheap circuitry put together at home” and is used to make improvised music. There isn’t a score, but two of the players use the sound generators, modulators, and dials and switch to play the electronic sounds. One or two other people use flashlights to control a photocell distribution circuit that acts as a kind of mixer for the other sound sources. The audio is fed into four or eight loudspeakers set in a circle around the listeners. Behrman suggests that no skill is necessary to play the music, so it is a fun piece for non-musicians to explore. The piece emerges as players run through the various combinations and settings of the equipment, each time the sound potentially different. “Because there is neither a score nor directions, any sound which results from any combination of switch and light positioning remains part of the 'piece.' (Whatever you do with a surfboard in the surf remains a part of surfboarding).”
​
This piece is an exercise in improvisation and intuition, a playful way for three or four people to listen to each other, a communion made in music and shared electricity.  

Choreographing the Music of Our Time

It was in the late 1960s that Behrman would get a job that helped bring a lot of the new music to a wider audience. He landed a gig at Columbia Records and worked on producing the “Music of Our Time” series of albums. Two of the most well-known records he helped produce for this series were by Terry Riley, his In C and A Rainbow in Curve Air. Other works that Behrman produced for the series included recordings by Robert Ashley, John Cage, Mauricio Kagel, Alvin Lucier, Richard Maxfield, Gordon Mumma, Pauline Oliveros, Henri Pousseur (under whom he had also studied), Steve Reich, David Tudor, and Christian Wolff.

Along with Mumma, Behrman had the privilege and opportunity to work with the Merce Cunningham dance troupe, writing music for their performances, a gig that came from their connections to Cage and Tudor. Of his time with the troupe Behrman said, “Merce Cunningham, besides being a great choreographer whose career has spanned more than a half century, has been a long-term champion of live music. He always has live music-makers in his performances and must be the only choreographer on earth who never tells the musicians he works with what to do. In 'Events' in particular -- Cunningham Company works in such a way that nothing at all about the music is prepared in advance -- musicians can explore the idea that 'a movement, a sound, a change of light' can all independently share the space and time of performance. Often coincidences occur among the media in a way that seems magical and that could never be planned.

The Cunningham Company tours have provided much experience over the years of performing repeatedly for large live audiences. Lately I've learned a lot about the use of interactive software on tours with fine musicians such as Kosugi, Stuart Dempster, Steve Lacy, Jon Gibson and others. Looking back on the earlier years, the memories of touring and performing with John Cage and David Tudor, Gordon Mumma and Maryanne Amacher are very precious.”
​
In 1969 fellow Sonic Arts Union member Robert Ashley was asked to come and direct the CCM at Mills College. In 1975 Behrman came and joined him as the co-director. Those years formed another chapter in his creative life.

Each month of 2021 Sothis Medias will feature a brief sketch of someone who did things their own way, who lived their own iconoclastic life. Last month we looked at the fringe dweller Harlan Hubbard, this month we are going to ride the rods and look at the life of orphan, hobo, boxer and writer Jim Tully.

(If you are interested in the background of WHY I am writing these notes on American weirdos you can read this post by John Michael Greer on Johnny Appleseed's America.)

“Jim Tully was one of the fine American novelists to emerge in the 1920s and ’30s. He gained this position with intelligence, sensitivity, and hard work. . . . No matter how crazily violent or fantastic his stories are, readers accept them as nonfiction. Tully makes the improbable seem true.”— Harvey Pekar

Jim Tully is a true American hero, a writer's writer and hero who came to the fore in 1920s and '30s. He started his career as a hobo, a train hoppin' tramp, who left behind the slop and shudder of life in St. Mary's, Ohio to see the country for himself. His story is a rags to resources tale of hardscrap pluck.

Jim Tully's father was a ditch digger, an Irish immagrant named James Dennis. His mother, Bridget Marie Lawler Tully gave birth to him in 1886. Until the death of his pop, he was happy, even if living in a family whose financial condition was broke. His mom died when he was six years old, and like many kids whose moms died in that era, his father found himself unable to really care for his son. So he was sent down to Cincinnati where lived at the St. Joseph Orphanage Asylum for six more years. 

At some point he went back home to St. Mary's where he lived with his relatives, the "Shanty Irish", and the name of one of his later books, exploring the world of the underclass Irish workers in the mud spattered streets of Ohio. There wasn't much going on for him there except for hanging out with his cousins, with his Uncle John Lawler, a horse thief who was sentenced to fifteen years in the state pen for his crimes, with his grandpa, Old Hughie Tully, who had the gift of gab and was a natural storyteller, “capable of turning death into an Irish wake and pouring liquor down the throat of the corpse.” He also had a girlfriend of sorts, herself a young prostitute, who was fond of Jim for his kind boyishness and his red hair.

On a fortuitous occasion he was hanging out at a bridge where he met a young vagabond, who convinced him there was nothing for him but hard labor if he stayed in town. He decided to head out for a life on the rails himself. This was Tully's education. His first trip took him to Muncie, Indiana, where he was quick to spend a night in a hobo jungle. It was a gateway to a  hobo jungle state of mind. AS he crisscrossed the United States by railway he spent a lot of time in the public libraries where he satiated his lust for the written word.

Sara Haardt wrote that “He became an inveterate library bum, ducking in and out of public libraries from one end of the country to the other. He read everything: biography, history, fiction; Dostoievsky, Carlyle, Olive Schreiner, Balzac, Dumas, Mark Twain, Conrad, the files of the old Smart Set.”

During the six years he spent tramping about,  he spent some time working  for a circus. Too bad running away to join the circus isn't much of a viable career option anymore as it was in the days of Tully, and the days of the Mighty Atom, another man who met his fate underneath the canvas of the big top. Another of Tully's books, Circus Parade, came out of his experiences as a laborer the traveling entertainers. He paints a lively if unflattering look at the life. In its pages you meet Blackie, a drug addict without a moral compass, the hard-ass Cameron, the owner of the circus, whose business practices erred on the side of the seedy, and Lila the four-hundred pound strong woman, amongst others.

In 1907 he'd had enough of the roadlife for a time. He'd traveled back to Ohio and found himself in Kent. There he found work as a tree surgeon, chain maker, and in another instance where his life gave material for his writing, as a boxer. His experiences in the ring gave authentic shape to his 1936 novel The Bruiser, the tale of a drifter who brawls his way up the ladder and into the heavyweights. Tully got to know a lot of boxers in his life and the characters are modeled on figures such as Jack Dempsey, Joe Gans, Stanley Ketchel, Gene Tunney, Frank Moran, and Johnny Kilbane. Tully dedicated the novel to Dempsey, whom he counted as a friend. Dempsey said of the boo, “If I still had the punch in the ring that Jim Tully packs in The Bruiser, I’d still be the heavyweight champion of the world today.”

During his time in Kent, inspired by all that he'd read on the road, he started giving his own words space on the page. He started writing poetry which was published in the local papers. In 1912 he decided he'd finally had enough of Ohio and moved to Hollywood, where he really started burning the midnight oil as a writer. He became a freelance journalist, which at that time was a path still open to working class folks who hadn't gone to college (1).

Tully was one of the first reporters to start covering the Hollywood scene. As a free-lancer he wrote what he wanted and how he wanted. His portrayals of people like Charlie Chaplin, for whom he had worked, were not always flattering, but people still loved Tully. His work writing up the exploits of the movie stars earned him the name of the most-hated man in Hollywood -and his muckraking wasn't nothing compared to the vituperation and vile seething of today's hate mongering media. Even so, Tully grew journalistic strength from the barbs and lashes thrown at his way, reveling in the title. 

As he gained success in the papers, he gave his hand to writing books, memoirs, such as Beggars of Life, about his early days as a hobo. Beggars of Life was his first book and he wrote it in a six week stint while he was living with a bootlegger. His novels that drew on his experiences followed, and he continued to write article after article. 

Critics of the day thought his work was violent, his depictions of the realities of prostitution and the life of common workers cut too close to the bone. He did not water it down for a public he thought could not handle it. He respected his audience more than that.

In writing to an editor he said, “I have tried, however futilely, to get away from all the namby-pamby trends of American literature. My reward has been misunderstanding. I am considered a roughneck because, as an artist, I seek to lay bare the broken hearts of the people from whom I sprang.... I have no whine at fate. I began with nothing and have ended with more money than is good for one. . . I write because I love to. . . I have perhaps less academic training than any man who has ever succeeded at writing in America. . . I will never be the artist I thought I would. Words are not elastic enough. . . I have done as nearly that which I set out to do as any American writer ever has. . ."

Please forget and forgo the MA in creative writing. In my opinion it is a mar on America's once vibrant literary landscape. Skip class and go to the library instead, forget the debt. Read books and consider getting into the thick of life, as Jim Tully did. 

Literature is in need of the hot fire of lived experience, and the souls like Tully who could lay it all bare and share their unique journey.

.:. .:. .:.
Footnote as media rant:
1 [Matt Taibbi covers the transition of journalism from a job a blue collar type could get into without a degree, to the credentialed mire of elitism for rich kids that it is today in his excellent book Hate Inc., the "Manufacturing Dissent" of today's youtube generation ;) Hate Inc. is probably the most important book I've read this year in terms of the divide between the Coke/Pepsi type non-choice of Red Church or Blue Church.]  


.:. .:. .:. ​Do you like what you have read here? Then sign up for Seeds from Sirius, the monthly webzine from Sothis Medias. It delivers blog posts here to your door while gathering and sowing much additional material, news of various shortwave and community FM transmissions, music,  deindustrial fiction, strange meanderings and more: 
http://www.sothismedias.com/seeds-from-sirius.html

A major development that came out of the ONCE Festival was the creation of the Sonic Arts Union, first known as the Sonic Arts Group, which formed in 1966, the year of the final festival. The members of the group, Robert Ashley, Gordon Mumma, Alvin Lucier and David Behrman had all played together in various configurations as part of the ONCE Festival and sidereal events.

The four composers had first met at a Morton Feldman and Earle Brown concert in New York City on October 11 of 1963. Ashley and Mumma had driven in just for the event, and Alvin Lucier was there to conduct the chamber chorus from Brandeis University where he was a student. David Behrman was also there. Behrman and Lucier had become friends while in Europe, introduced by pianist and composer Frederic Rzewski, who himself later became a founding member of Musica Elettronica Viva.

A year after the Feldman concert Mumma and Ashley invited the Brandeis Chamber Chorus to perform at the ONCE Festival. Two years later in 1966 Lucier invited Mumma, Ashley and Behrman to perform at Brandeis. Despite the excitement to be had with four friends playing pieces together on the same evening, the Brandeis show ended up as something of a failure on the technical level. Yet something was salvaged out of it in that afterwords the four minds came together and hatched a plan to start an ongoing collective ensemble to share electronic equipment, musical ideas and help in performance.

Ashley remembered talking with Lucier after the concert. “We just had the idea that if one of us got invited to someplace, we could offer the guy four composers instead of one composer… I think that was a successful part of it. Then we started doing a lot of concerts.” They made immediate plans to embark on a tour of North America and Europe.

All the members of the Sonic Arts Union were friends who appreciated each other’s music and the different approaches to composition they each engaged in. “It was the fact that we were all very different, and doing interesting things, they different than what I was doing, different from what Ashley was doing, and all the rest of it,” said Mumma.

An artist statement written in the later sixties or early seventies explains their approach. “The four composers are devoted to the composition and performance of live electronic music. In general, Ashley's works are theatrical and are concerned with social conditions both inside and outside the musical situation, while Lucier's often refer to natural systems--brainwaves, bat and dolphin sonar and resonant frequencies of rooms. Behrman and Mumma design and build their own complex systems of electronic components for the production and control of sounds for specific works. All have used speech as well as instrumental sounds as source material for electronic processing. In addition, all have used, or intend to use, the computer.”
By this point the members of the Sonic Arts Union lived far apart geographically. Ashley was furthest away having gone to California in 1969 to head up the CCM. The rest were on the east coast. Mumma had moved to New York City to be close to Merce Cunnigham and David Tudor, as he was a resident composer with the dance troupe between 1966 and 1974. Behrman was in Stony Point, New York, and Lucier remained in Connecticut. Yet they wrote, talked on the phone, and traveled, seeing each other at concerts and other events. As such they were not just a union but a decentralized network.

Performances ranged from concerts in which four works were presented, one by each of the members, to longer, more environmental installations. Occasionally, guest musicians and visual artists got involved in the action. One of their first concerts was in November of 1966 when they played in New York on a bill with Fluxus founder Ben Patterson, Max Neuhaus, Takehisa Kosugi, and Takahiko Iimura.  

For some of the concerts the Union was joined by a cadre of wives, lovers and other artists. Shigeko Kubota, a member of the Japanese avant-garde who had been involved with Group Ongaku before moving to New York was one of these, during the years she was married to Behrman. She was a Fluxist known for her work as a video artist and for creating sculptural installations, all done in the spirit of DIY. Some of her sculptures had video monitors embedded within them playing her own videos. Mary Ashley and Mary Lucier also contributed their own pieces to the variety of events.
​
At a Sonic Arts Union concert, according to Behrman, “established techniques were thrown away and the nature of sound was dealt with from scratch." Each of the four members built sounds from scratch in their own unique and individual ways that deserve to be explored. 

THE SONIC POETRY OF ALVIN LUCIER
For Alvin Lucier, who had composed chamber and orchestral works since 1952, the throwing away of established techniques exemplified by the ONCE Group and the Sonic Arts Union was a liberation of imagination. He had felt stifled by the formality of serialism and the often rigid parameters of academic music in general. His work with the Brandeis Chamber Chorus gave him a basis for how his future work in the precise knowledge of acoustics he acquired while working with vocal music in different settings. As Lucier started to blossom as a composer he often turned to very specific acoustic properties such as resonance, and incorporated them into the gestalt of his compositions.

He counts his 1965 piece Music for Solo Performer as the beginning of his compositional career. From that point on Lucier wrote a number of pieces investigating brainwaves, vocoders, acoustics and long thin wires that made the voice of the aether audible to the listening audience.

Pauline Oliveros called Lucier “the poet of electronic music.” His pieces are eloquent haikus, elucidating natural principles with creative insight in simple set ups underscored by profundity. Mumma said his “works are at once gemlike in their exquisitely defined concept, and large-scale, even vast, in their theatrical presence.” The Sonic Arts Union gave Lucier a vehicle for presenting these works to an expanded audience. In sharing these works with the public he has given listeners a chance to explore and experience the world of sound alongside him.     

​

Music for Solo Performer

All music involves commands from the brain, whether conscious or unconscious. Music for Solo Performer demonstrates this in a unique way.  In 1965 Lucier met Edmond Dewan a scientist who was investigating alpha brainwaves. Dewan was a physicist who had stirred up the imagination of the public when he hooked up an electroencephalogram (EEG) to a lamp, and through the control of his brains alpha activity, switched the lamp on and off. His next feat was to hook the EEG up to a Morse code oscillator and spell out “I can talk” in dots and dashes.

At the time Dewan was doing this brainwave research for the US Air Force in a laboratory near Brandeis. Dewan had many interests and music was one of them. As an amateur organist he used to go over to Brandeis and visit the music department where he made the acquaintance of Lucier.

When the physicist and the composer met, Lucier had stopped writing music. Dewan helped get Lucier back into the game when he asked him if he would be interested in using his equipment to detect the alpha waves and turn them into a musical piece. It was the kickstart he needed to start writing music outside the mold of notated sheets which had stifled his creative process, so Dewan brought some of his gear to the Brandeis electronic music studio so Lucier could start experimenting with brainwaves hooked up to various electronic components and see how he could excite them.

Studying the temporal cycle of the alpha wave which has a frequency of 8-13 cycles per second Alvin hit upon the idea that they could be thought of as rhythms and so he decided to create a percussion piece.

Alpha brain waves are commonly associated with meditative states of mind and to create them a person needs to be in a relaxed mental state. This presents a problem for live performance when the nerves of a performer are often excited and on edge. Still Lucier thought the potential payoff of sitting in front of an audience, with an EEG hooked up to his head and using it to control musical activity was worth the artistic risk. So he took what he called “a dangerous course which is to sit on stage and try to produce alpha waves, live, in front of the audience.”  

It took practice to get consistent results, as he could only produce alpha waves in short bursts at the start. Lucier writes how through experimentation he found “precisely the right physical and psychological conditions” to create alpha waves for extended periods of time, or long enough for a performance in any case.

To achieve the correct physical and psychological conditions he basically had to teach himself how to meditate. He remembered a time when he had been imprinted with the memory of a monk in contemplation while he was attending preparatory school at the Portsmouth Abbey  in Rhode Island.

“I remember going into the chapel and watching a Trappist monk in the act of contemplation... he was thinking – deeply. It looked like somebody just thinking as hard as he possibly could. I remember I went back an hour later – he was in the same attitude – and I thought, ‘Well, if there’s any such thing as pure thought, that guy is doing it.’ And that impressed me a lot... So when I did the brain wave piece, you’ve got to sit and not think of anything; because if you create a visual image your alpha will block.”

EEG measures voltage fluctuations resulting from ionic current within the neurons of the brain and those currents being picked up by the electrodes and passed on to an amplifier. Next the signals pass through a filter allowing only the alpha waves to pass through. For Lucier’s piece the signal was then split into several different channels, each amplified again and routed to a loudspeaker. These loudspeakers were placed on snare drum heads, or other percussion instruments, so when the amplified alpha wave came into speaker it would vibrate the drum, cymbal, or the air. An assistant or two controlled the volume of individual channels to shape the piece live during the performance.

Part of the interest in watching a performance of the piece is that the soloist is just sitting there. John Cage had brought in the idea of creating a music free from the composers own ego, of allowing chance operations to control and set all parameters of a composition, from duration, to dynamics, notes and more. Lucier took a similar tack with Music for Solo Performer, creating an elegant set up in which the soloist does nothing but relax into meditation under the pressure of a staring audience.  

It was by chance that Lucier had first met Dewan, and it was this chance meeting that inspired him to take a chance at a performance whose results, from concert to concert, though similar, were largely indeterminate. It set the course for his continuing exploration of music and sound as a physical phenomenon, for using the parameters of composition to ask questions rather than showcase the same specific answer over and over again, and to use non-musical instruments as a standard operating procedure. 

After Lucier other composers took up using their brainwaves to drive instruments. Richard Teitelbaum, another member of the collective Musica Elettronica Viva, became a prominent practitioner of the form. In the mid-1960s Teitelbaum asked Robert Moog to adapt his synthesizer to use neural oscillations as control voltages.
​
David Rosenboom, who worked closely with Don Buchla, also explored the uses of biofeedback in his music. His 1976 album Brainwaves is an expansive document showing the possibilities involved. Rosenboom also wrote the book on the subject, Biofeedback and the arts: results of early experiments, published the same year his album came out. Artists have continued to explore this extended musical interface with the human nervous system.

I Am Sitting in a Room: Exploring Resonant Frequencies

“I am sitting in a room different from 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.”

So go the words, and so begins the repetition of those words, in what is arguably Alvin Lucier’s most famous composition. The piece features Lucier recording himself reading the above text, and then playing the tape recording back into the room, and re-recording it. He then re-records that recording, and repeats the process until his words totally disappear and only the sound of the resonant frequencies of the room remain. It is a fascinating piece that shows how certain frequencies in speech are emphasized as they resonate in the room. Through the process of re-recording the words eventually become unintelligible, replaced by the pure resonant harmonies and tones of the room itself.

All rooms and spaces have characteristic resonant frequencies. A large concert hall or cathedral would have different resonant frequency than a dry walled bedroom, or a basement, or the crypt of an old church. When performed or recorded in different spaces, the end results will be of different tones and harmonies.

The inspiration for the piece came after one of Lucier’s colleagues mentioned attending a lecture by Amar Bose, the man who developed the famous Bose speakers, at MIT. Bose described how he was developing and testing a set of loudspeakers by feeding audio back into them so that the audio they had originally produced in the first place was picked up again via microphones. This triggered Lucier’s idea.

Each time Lucier’s process was repeated the sound of his speech became disarranged as specific frequencies began to supersede the words. These frequencies grow with each successive playback until Alvin’s voice disappears and the only thing left to listen to is the sound of the room. It doesn’t take long for the words to disappear. At about the 17 minute mark the formants start to deform into pure tones, and by the 27 minute mark any trace of the words has been absorbed by the room’s resonant frequency. It is a magical thing to listen to and hear how utterance can been transformed into pure tones.

The work is a great example of a process piece, where the technique itself is showcased as part and parcel of the content of the composition. It’s also an excellent example of minimalism as a repeated text is transformed over the course of 45 minutes into a long and sonorous drone.

I Am Sitting in A Room is also an exploration of the concept of generation loss. This is when the quality between subsequent copies gets reduced with each further copy. Lucier shows how the original representation is liable to disappear with each copy of a copy of a copy. Audio artifacts are introduced as the process continues and these increase during the process.

Many other musicians and composers have since used the process. The generation loss aspect of the work was notably used in 2008 by Iranian born musician Kamran Sadeghi when he was selected as a resident artist for Sastop, an artist organization utilizing an old nuclear cooling tower in Washington state. In the 1970s a group of public utilities started to build what was to be the largest single nuclear power project in United States history. Five reactors, divided between sites located near the cities of Hanford and Satsop were intended to be a solution to projected energy demands of the area.

Before the facility was completed construction stopped. There remained however a structure 423 feet across the base with a height close to 500 feet. The left behind building contained uncanny acoustic properties (the kind of place Pauline Oliveros would have liked to play in). For four years between 2004 and 2008 a small group worked to bring artists and musicians into the space, recognizing that it had unique acoustic properties, and that its weathered industrial architecture showcased a derelict beauty. 

Sadeghi was inspired by Lucier’s composition and decided to amplify an original electronic music passage two minutes in length into the open aired structure and then re-record the outcome of the tower's reverberant response. He then took the recording and reamplified back into the tower and re-recorded. He repeated this a total of ten times. The natural acoustics of the tower began to reshape the original passage until it disappeared completely. It’s a unique document of a structure exposed and re-exposed to a passage of music and the passage of time.
​
Sadeghi named the piece Loss Less in reference to the audio engineering term lossless compression, a process that allows for the preservation and perfect reconstruction of audio data when a recorded waveform is reduced to differing extents for transmission without the loss of quality.

Scanner also made use of this technique on one of the versions of his architectural work, Vex.

NORTH AMERICAN TIME CAPSULE

Lucier himself explored audio compression, and specifically speech compression in his 1967 piece North American Time Capsule.  Compression may have not been top on his mind when he created the piece, but a principle function of the vocoder was to compress the audio bandwidth of the voice down. It did this by sending only the parameters of the vocal model over the communication link, instead of a direct recreation of the waveform. Since the parameters change slowly compared to the original speech the bandwidth required to transmit speech can be reduced.

Which is perfect for encryption.

This piece came about when Lucier was invited by Sylvania Applied Research Laboratories to come and use their prototype vocoder in 1967. Sylvania Electric Products was a manufacturer of a variety of electrical equipment, including transceivers, vacuum tubes, semiconductors, and the MOBIDC mainframe computer. The engineers at Sylvania were also involved in the developing the COBOL programming language.

Since he would be using the vocoder to create a work, Lucier decided on making a vocal piece and he enlisted the help of the Brandeis University Chamber Chorus in what must have been one of their most interesting assignments. His score required the chorus members to “prepare a plan of activity using speech, singing, musical instruments, or any other sound producing means that might describe—to beings very far from the earth’s environment either in space or in time—the physical, social, spiritual, or any other situation in which we find ourselves at the present time.”

Along with Sylvania engineer Calvin Howard, Lucier used the vocoder to isolate and manipulate elements of speech in real time. Eight separate tracks were recorded and subsequently mixed by Lucier.

Since one way to use a vocoder is as an encryption tool, where a person with a vocoder on the other end of a transmission could decode it, Lucier got the idea that this whole piece was an encoded message for people who haven’t heard about us here in North America. The first time I heard it, close to twenty years ago at the time of this writing, I didn’t know the slightest thing about vocoders but I was captivated by the raw expressiveness exuded by all the voices -all the voices I couldn’t quite decipher.

Lucier’s instructions leave a lot left open to the vocal interpreters while still providing a sturdy sketch or outline. He wrote “Using sound, the performers might choose to convey, for example, the ideas of life and death, young and old, up and down, male and female. Sonic aspects of our technological environment, such as household appliances, trains, aircraft and automobile horns, might be used.”

These every day activities and occurrences that might be of interest to someone outside our own circles of space and time become alien to the present day listener when processed by the vocoder. The audience hears these wild utterances coming out of the time capsule as if they had dug it up themselves.
​
Alvin Lucier brought a conceptual sonic poetry to the performances of the Sonic Arts Union.

.:. .:. .:.
​
Read the rest of the Radiophonic Laboratory: Telecommunications, Electronic Music, and the Voice of the Ether.


.:. .:. .:. ​Do you like what you have read here? Then sign up for Seeds from Sirius, the monthly webzine from Sothis Medias. It delivers blog posts here to your door while gathering and sowing much additional material, news of various shortwave and community FM transmissions, music,  deindustrial fiction, strange meanderings and more: 
http://www.sothismedias.com/seeds-from-sirius.html