Alvin Lucier

Photo Alvin Lucier
Alvin Lucier
BiographyAlvin Lucier (1931–2021) was born in Nashua, New Hampshire, and died in Middletown, Connecticut, in 2021. He was educated at Yale University and Brandeis University, and spent two years in Rome on a Fulbright Scholarship. From 1962 to 1970 he taught at Brandeis, where he conducted the Brandeis University Chamber Chorus, which devoted much of its work to the performance of new music. In 1966, along with Robert Ashley, David Behrman and Gordon Mumma, he co-founded the Sonic Arts Union. From 1968 to 2011 he taught at Wesleyan University where he was the John Spencer Camp Professor of Music.
Since the mid-1960s, Lucier has produced a range of important compositions that have influenced the culture of experimental music and the sonic arts. Early works such as «Vespers» (1968), «I Am Sitting in a Room» (1969), and «Bird and Person Dyning» (1975) establish a clear thread throughout his long career: making the inaudible audible, making the audible visible or spatially tangible. Among Lucier’s many innovations is «Music for Solo Performer» (1965), the first performative work of art to use brainwave amplification, displacing the sonification of alpha waves through an array of percussive instruments. He premiered it with John Cage in 1965.
Lucier collaborated with John Ashbery («Theme», 1994) and Robert Wilson («Skin, Meat, Bone», 1994). Over the past years he made numerous compositions as well as transcriptions of older works for the Ever Present Orchestra, a group dedicated to the performance of his music.
Photo Credit Original Photo: Lon Holmberg, Design: Patrick Vitacco
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