I try to compose as little as possible, but that means that
I have to think about each piece a lot, to avoid any kind of
pre-existing musical structures that would take away from the perception
and focus of the sonic phenomenon in which I'm interested.
>> Interview
Alvin Lucier 1931
Music for Cello with One or More Amplified Vases.
Interview between Alvin Lucier and cellist Arne Deforce.
Made
in Gent (B), on the occasion of the performance of Music for Cello with One or More Amplified Vases, at
Handelsbeurs Festival Acta
Religiosa, Gent May 13, 2003
AD:
I would like to speak about your two cello pieces, Indian Summer and specifically the piece with the pots, Music
for Cello with One or More Amplified Vases.
NATURE.
In this article "The eloquent voice of nature", James Tenney
explains how most of your work deals with the physical phenomena of
sound and the curiosity about "how things work". Looking at Music
for Solo Performer, Nothing is
Real (Strawberry Fields Forever) and more particularly Music for Cello
with One or More Amplified Vases, it is obvious that much of your
work has indeed not only to do with the physicality of sound but also
with what Tenney observes as a mysteriously "expressive"
quality which he poetically defines as if it were "inarticulate
nature speaking to us." Two questions come up in my mind. First,
how do you see your music as related to nature and secondly could you
clarify what you understand as "expressive" qualities of
sounds, free of personal
expression?
AL:
The nature of sound is universal. Music is not universal.
Everybody, every culture, every city even, has a different musical
expression. Several years ago I was in Delhi, India, and went out
looking for sheet music for piano. I discovered that it was practically
nonexistent in music stores. There is virtually none in India, at least
in the Western classical genre. India has its own music, its own
instruments, its own manner of presentation.
For some reason I try to avoid musical language that belongs to a
specific culture. I remember living in Europe in the early Sixties and
suddenly realizing that the wonderful European music that I heard wasn't
my music. When I came home I tried to find something that I could call
my own. Now of course, you can say, that's cultural, specific to the
American Experience, that's true, but I think that acoustical phenomena
are universal, not cultural, so I decided among many other things that
I've been doing, to explore the natural characteristics of sound waves,
how they flow in space from an instrument into the room, how they
coincide with each other if they are closely tuned, listening to the
audible beating, the bumps of sound that occur when two sound waves
coincide. That’s just the beginning of my work. It's where I start to
have ideas. I try to compose as little as possible, but that means that
I have to think about each piece a lot, to avoid any kind of
pre-existing musical structures that would take away from the perception
and focus of the sonic phenomenon in which I'm interested.
So
by expressive I mean that quality which shows something about its nature
but which is unintentionally produced. Ripples in a stream, wind through
grass, sunlight reflecting off water
tell us something about themselves without intending to do so. All
natural sounds are unintentional, but nonetheless press out (express)
from themselves messages with no meaning other than what they are or how
they are produced.
AD:
VASES. The perception and the focus of sonic phenomena goes along
with a visual kind of aspect as well. I think of the teapot ritual in Nothing is Real, or the use of enormously amplified brain waves in Music
for Solo Performer, the visual representation of sound in other
pieces and the use of vases in the cello piece. I feel there is a sense
of mystery in using these external sound devices, and perhaps also a
theatrical set-up, provoking a curiosity for what is going to happen. Is
that a fair thing to say? What is the function of the vases? Does the
visual theatrical aspect also contributes to a certain kind of
“listening with the eyes”, the mysteriously "expressive"
quality of the whole concept?
AL:
I think of the vases as small rooms, in which the sound of the
cello gets trapped. We know that every room has a set of resonances,
determined by its size and physical dimensions.
It’s the same for a pot, where there is one strong resonance
frequency. I think of the
pots as resonant environments. The theatrical and visual aspect that
goes with the piece, comes afterwards. Each player that plays the piece
uses a different set of pots. So, there isn't only one visual image,
it’s just sounds of the cello getting trapped in the pots, and each
pot has its own resonant frequency.
AD:
PROSE SCORES. Many of your scores give no traditional
information, on the notation of the actual sound. Some are little prose
texts, giving minimal instructions of what the performer should do. This
means the score is more or less a kind of "pre-composition".
It implies a big trust in, and gives an important responsibility to, the
performer. Somehow he might as well be considered as a co-composer.
Although he has to avoid any kind of "self-expression" the
performer still has an important role in the making of the music, to
make the sound events work. Is it correct to say we are dealing with a
kind of "improvisation-scores", the "open-form"
principle? Scores which allow a lot of freedom and which are open to
play within the frame of the prescriptions, like games? How do you see
these items ?
AL:
I don’t see my pieces as games. The purpose of the prose scores
are to give the performer as clear a set of instructions as possible. I
write them in prose only because there is no other way to present the
ideas. I don’t expect the performer to use the score as a point of
departure or as a do-it-yourself kit with which to devise a different
piece. He or she must understand the goal of the work and realize it to
the best of his or her ability. Often, a score is accompanied by a
diagram or drawing of the equipment set-up.
These
pieces certainly do not use open-form principles, as I understand them
from the works of Earle Brown who invented the term. Open form gives
freedom to the performer to choose various options, to move to various
places, regions in a more or less notated score, for example. The
performer may rely on his musical taste, which is usually derived from
past experience, to construct the performance in ways that taste
dictates. My own prose scores define specific tasks for the performer to
reveal the acoustic phenomenon which is at the core of the piece.
Personal choices, based on what a player feels to be musical, have no
place in these works.
AD:
SOUND ART & THE ROLE OF THE PERFORMER.
When I started working on this piece, I had the feeling that I
was building a kind of sound installation in which the musician, the
human being as opposed to the electronic devices, becomes part of the
sound art performance. The rehearsal process started with going to
secondhand shops and buying about 30 vases of different shapes and
sizes, singing into them and listening to their tones, then trying them
out with different kind of microphones, listening to the resonances of
the vases, choosing them and finally putting them in a certain kind of
order. Finally I got to nine vases which I used in the performance. From
a traditional point of view we can say the musician in fact is not
"playing" his instrument but rather mediating and searching
for that specific "sound" which is hidden in the vases. Within
that view, how would you define the role of the performer, the playing,
the making of the set up and his "becoming part of sonic art
installation"?
AL:
I said in my interview the other night at the "Handelbeurs"
in Gent, that the performer has to listen more than play. The focus is
changed, away from the performer to the resulting sound. You have to
listen carefully to the resonances, then tune your instrument around
those pitches, to create the phenomena that occur, that are for me, the
content of the work. You have to tune very carefully. If you hit the
resonant frequency exactly, there is an amplification of the sound. If
you tune slightly above or below, you're interfering with the resonant
frequency and something else occurs, a rhythmical pattern. So
"tuning" becomes the playing, becoming part of the sound
installation. The player
simply activates the resonances in the vases. His role is anti-virtuostic,
in the sense that he must avoid any show of technique that distracts
from the task of finding and revealing resonances. The player must
listen rather than play.
AD:
A NEW VERSION. In the score of Music
for Cello with One or More Amplified Vases you prescribe that the
player "slowly and continuously sweeps up the range of the cello
starting on Low C, sweeping up a fifth, taking two or more minutes to do
so. As the fifth is reached, move the bow as smoothly as possible to the
G-string and continue sweeping upward. Proceeding similarly with the D-
and A-strings." In our general rehearsal, one hour before the
concert, you suddenly came up with new ideas to change the whole concept
of the piece, leaving the idea of the glissando, the ascending sweep.
Can we say the piece is getting into an new phase of performance
practice? What particularly disturbed you in the initial version, with
the long upward sweeping ? Do you intend to re-edit the score for this
reason?
AL:
It felt too predictable. There have been some pieces, where glissandi or single motion gestures have been wonderful. I'm
thinking of Jim Tenney's Cellogram,
and the piece for solo violin, Koan,
where you simply rise up from string to string, going from the G-string
to the D-string, There is something else happening of course, one tone
is sustained and the other one is sweeping, and these wonderful
phenomena occur. I've used single sweeps in works such as Crossings
for orchestra, and in In memoriam
Jon Higgins for solo clarinet. In those pieces a sine wave
oscillator sweeps so slowly, it’s motion is almost imperceptible. But
in Music for Cello with One or More Amplified Vases, it seemed too
didactic somehow. Even if one didn't know the resonances the vases were
tuned to, and unexpected things happened, it seemed that the upward
sweep was just too evident. It was a more scientific searching than I
had imagined it. Now, the idea to discover what the pitches are, to
remember those, put them in some order and then play against those with
silences in between, seems to evoke a lightness, a relaxation of sound,
between the various pots. You used all together nine pots, and there
where eight long silences; somehow that lightened the performance a
little bit. And also it’s unexpected, because one doesn't know to
which vase you will move. The audience surely doesn’t;
it’s a less oppressive.
So
I didn’t change the concept of the piece, which is simply to search
for and reveal resonances. As you were sweeping upwards, it began to
feel burdensome to my ear, perhaps because the resonances are not vivid
enough. Since they are subtle, your hear the sweeping gesture too much.
The cello has such a rich and colorful timbre, as opposed to the neutral
sound of a sine wave, for example, that it overshadows the subtle
resonances of the vases. If the resonances were more pronounced, the
cello sound would recede into the background. When I use audio
oscillators for sweeping, I limit their loudness so that they are not in
the foreground. I want the resonances to be in the foreground, to be the
focus of the work.
The
problem in Music for Cello with One or More Amplified Vases is that the cello
has to be loud in order to excite the resonances in the vases. Therefore
the cello sound predominates. By
inserting silences I hoped to lessen the continuous presence of the
cello. I will probably add a sentence or two the prose score suggesting
this option.
AD:
MEDITATION, THE SOUND OF NATURE. As your music is related to the
artistic movement of abstract minimalism, the so called esthetics of
"drone music" many people tend to relate the music to
meditation. Not in the religious aspect, but viewed in its initial
meaning as a process of getting acquainted with a different kind of
perception of things and phenomena similar to certain practices in
concentration in Zen. Is there something you approve with? Is it only a
physical experience of sound or can it be related to a certain kind of
contemplations on sound? Can you accept that people want to search this
experience? Of course the word meditation has a lot of connotations. But
there seems to be a similarity to e.g. Zen attitudes: listening to the sea or the wind, and realizing that
it’s just the sound of the sea or the wind? As you said about Chambers,
it “helps people hold shells up to their ears and listen to the ocean
again." Or in the case of the vases, listen to spaces and enclosed
rooms - what we hear outside and what we hear inside?
AL:
Well, I think of it as close focus and paying attention. I'm not
a religious person, not at all. I was once in a concert in Frankfort,
and a composer wrote a string quartet, for which he had all different
sorts of musical ideas. At a certain moment in the piece, two violins
were playing highly tuned closely tuned tones, creating beatings; but
they were not obvious enough, the players couldn't make the beats really
happen. And he asked me afterwards, why my beats worked and his
didn’t. I replied that
that's the only thing I pay attention to. I don't have a lot of other
stuff going on, no tunes, melodies, fragments, or different playing
techniques. In the middle of those sections of beatings, sometimes it
takes time to hear them. It’s
another formal idea, I can't prove it, but sometimes, when a piece of
mine is being played, it takes me time to hear what is happening. I
don't perceive it right away. So, you've got to really listen and focus.
Rather than
"meditation" I would use the term “concentration”. Too
many composers exploit oriental ideas into their work. I haven’t
studied Zen so I refuse to ally myself to
practice I know little about. I did attend a Benedictine
preparatory school, however, and was impressed by the monks’ rapt
attention while praying.
AD:
SLOW STROKES, FAST BEATINGS. Is this the reason why the
cellopieces - and so much of your works have to be long and slow? The
fact that everything is stretched and enlarged? A very very slow
building up of sound, to come into the "tuning"-activity, to
tune the ear into the mood of things, sounds, beatings, interferences?
AL:
I'd like to get away from slowness, it gets a little bit
soporific, it makes you sleepy. Perhaps the tones don't have to be so
long. Let me see, I just wrote a piece for trombone and clarinet Bar
Lazy J, in which I specified that the tones should be about 8
seconds long, separated by silences. However, in those works with
sliding sine waves, In Memoriam
Jon Higgins, for example, the sweeping tone is moving up at a rate
of one semi-tone every 30 seconds, which is very slow, but as you are
sustaining a clarinet tone against it, as the electronic wave sweeps up
toward unison with the clarinet sound, the beats start fast and slow
down, because the rule is, the further above, the faster the beating.
The long tones are about one-minute duration but the beats are fast,
sometimes several per second. You could think of them as corresponding
to, let’s say, sixteenth notes, eight notes, quarter notes etc.. I
tried to mitigate the length of the tones by the faster beating
patterns.
The
main reason I favor slow sweeps is to make them seem imperceptible or at
least recede into the background. If something moves slow enough, you
don’t perceive its motion as continuous. I want to focus on the
changes of speed of the beating, not the speed of the sweeping waves.
I also want the listener to be
able to perceive the accelerating audible beats clearly. For example, in
In Memoriam Jon Higgins, for
solo clarinet, the oscillator sweeps upward at a rate of 30 seconds per
semitone. If you take, as an example, the semitone between A @ 220 and
B-flat @ 233 Hz, you have a distance of about 13 Hz. If the clarinet
sustains a B-flat while the oscillator tone sweeps up toward it from A,
for example, the beating starts at 13 cycles per second (780 cycles/ minute) and slows down until, at the halfway
point, the speed is about 6.5 seconds
(390/minute). At 30 seconds, the tempo is zero (unison). Deceleration
from 780 beats/minute to zero covers a huge range. Therefore, I want to
give the listener time enough to hear the continually changing patterns,
particularly as the wave approaches unison with the clarinet tone and
the beats slow down enough so that the listener can hear them
separately. If the sweep were too fast, all you would hear would be
rapid buzzing. Remember, too, that at each octave higher, the
frequencies double.
AD:
NEW IDEAS. In our performance we had a set of nine vases, for
nine sound events, separated by silences. After this experiences I can
imagine a new version in which each sound event explores different
constellations of one or more pots all tuned slightly different around
the same pitch. The cellist explores the different resonances and
beatings of each group, moving up and down, in and out the sound space
of the vases. For example, we could have a set of 1, 3, 2, 4, 1, 1, 3,
2, 3 vases - corresponding with nine tuning-events of the cellist, and
nine silences, each one of them having different durations. This is the
version I would like to make. Do you have other interesting idea's to
add which might contribute to bring out the sound processes you have in
mind, such as timing, bowing, different tuning activities?
AL:
Personally, I wouldn’t like to impose a grid-like structure upon what
is a search for resonances. The
form of the piece is a search, not the fulfillment of a pre-determined
structure.
AD:
FEEDBACK. Some players told me it is very difficult to make the
resonances of the vases audible. So they bring the vases in feedback and
play against the sound of the singing vase? Is this an option as well?
AL:
I wrote a piece for the Arditti string quartet with piano and
trombone that uses six vases, and what I did was to raise the volume of
the vases just above the threshold of feedback, producing six different
tones, creating natural oscillators. But the cello piece is based on a
different idea, it’s capturing the sounds of the cello in the pots,
not playing against feedback from each pot. Last night I thought it was
beautiful the way you played it, you didn't stay on each sections too
long. And that was very good, because it didn't get tiring.
AD:
INDIAN SUMMER. The piece was written for Jeffery Krieger and is
meant for an electric cello. Could also be played on a normal cello?
AL:
His cello had a built-in delay system, so that within the
sustained long tones, there was a time delay and a harmonizer shifting
the pitches within a range from zero to 10 cents. So within the
instrument you could have a pitch-shifted sound. You cannot do that on a
acoustic cello. So it was meant for a electric cello. If you had another
electronic device that could change the range from zero to 10 cents,
then you would have the beating of the both strings plus the beating of
the electronically generated sounds.
AD:
What is the meaning of the title Indian
Summer?
AL:
“Indian summer” is a term we use in America to describe those
warm days in Autumn that seem to hark back to summertime. It also has to
do with the time that our Native Americans harvested their crops, then
rested. There is no relation between the title and the concept of the
piece. I may have written it in early Fall. I do remember a popular
American song from the 30’s or 40’s called Indian
Summer. It was beautiful and sentimental, reminiscent of joyful
times past. My mother would
often play it on the piano and I have fond memories of our family
singing it around the dinner table after supper.
AD:
I thank you very much for these words on the nature and sound of
your work. String-players can now tune their ears, and sounds resonate
the vases.
Copyright
© 2003 Arne
Deforce,
Gent,
May 15, reviewed by email by Alvin Lucier, 23 Sept. 2003