The Future of Our Music

I would like to begin my talk on the Future of Music by making a few

comments on an article I came across with the same title by Charles
Rosen in the New York Review of Books, December 20, 2001. In his
essay, Rosen addresses several issues, mostly relating to historical
Western classical music. One of the first points he makes has to do
with the written score. He says that because of the ambiguity of the
written score the music has survived. He says ". . . a score can be
realized in many different ways, with many different kinds of
sonority, as if a purely ideal structure could be made to give life
to a multitude of actual forms." (In our time Boulez has made this
into a principle of composing, with many different versions of the
same structure, but in his case the working-out of a new realization
is in reality only a later and more advanced stage of composition.)
As I read this, I wondered why Rosen stopped with Boulez,
particularly since the Boulez example didn't prove his point. Boulez
rewrites his scores to improve them, to give them finality, not to
open them up for various interpretations. Rosen might have looked
around for composers who actually build into their scores certain
variables which allow for different but valid future performances.
He might have taken a step further by including John Cage, many of
whose scores are designed to accommodate a multitude of various
instruments and sound producers. How often in Cage's scores have we
read "for any number of players" or "for any duration." For Cage,
these variables are not stages in composition but integral
components of the works themselves. It is part of Cage's philosophy
and compositional method to construct forms open to varied
interpretations. He does nothing to give his works closure. He
leaves them open. I remember in the early sixties, when I was a
student at Tanglewood, hitchhiking in Lenox. John Cage, in his
famous Volkswagen bus, stopped to pick me up. I knew who he was. He
asked me what kind of music I made. Trying to be funny, I replied
that it was way back in the twentieth century. He laughed and said,
"Oh well, our music is timeless!" I think Cage might have meant two
things by this. One, Cage often said he was composing for the
future. (We all think that our music will be understood after we
die, don't we?) David Tudor said to me once that he thought that
Boulez wasn't interested in the future but rather in maintaining the
hegemony of European music.
Chance operations for Cage were a way to get magic moments. When two
or more sounds occur accidentally, something special happens which
doesn't happen in pre-planned sound occurrences. Cage used the term
"luminosity" to describe this quality. Boulez never could accept
that idea. He never heard those accidents as luminous. But one can
hear them, particularly when one is performing a Cage work. Years
ago David Tudor and I were performing John's Music for Amplified Toy
Pianos. The instructions were to realize your own version of the
score using chance operations. David had stacked the pianosóthere
may have been as many as a dozen of themóone on top of the other.
Each was amplified with a contact mike. As the keys on these
miniature instruments were struck, enormous sounds would come out of
loudspeakers positioned around the room. Well, we started playing
and, after a minute or so, long silences came up in each of our
parts at the same time. We both stopped playing for a minute or so.
(It seemed like hours.) I became terribly embarrassed. Where in
music does a silence happen so soon in a piece, and for so long a
duration? Anyway, we resumed playing and, lo and behold, our twenty-
minute performance was over in a flash. I got so engrossed in the
process, I lost track of time. I was playing from a fixed score, but
one which was generated by chance processes. I am hard pressed to
try to explain my experience during that performance. There is a
kind of elation and freedom in being a part of a random system where
sound is the manifestation. It's different but certainly as
rewarding as those peak experiences I had when I conducted the great
works of classical choral music. My task then was to move along in
time, across the music, picking up peak moments along the way. I
felt I was inside Cage's works, in one timeless moment. If Cage's
music is to survive, it will be because people will want to have
those experiences.
Rosen seems not to be aware of Morton Feldman's music, either. Morty
couldn't conceive of writing a note down unless he knew exactly what
instrument was going to play it. I am mentioning this here because
it contradicts Rosen's comment about ideal structure which could
accommodate "different kinds of sonority." It goes against Cage,
too, I guess. In Feldman the instrumentation and dynamics (almost
invariably soft) are fixed but the durations, at least in his early
works, are often free. In his later large-scale works, however, the
rhythms are completely notated so that he can spin out long strands
of music by almost endless repetitions, each one slightly different.
In his essay Rosen even mentions that, by the time of CÈzanne, the
hierarchy of line over color had disappeared. Feldman's friendship
with the New York painters, particularly Philip Guston, is well-
known.
For Feldman soft dynamics have an acoustical function as well as a
poetic one. Quiet sounds with no attack, particularly piano sounds,
eliminate the onset sound-spike with its accompanying noise,
enabling the sound to attain a purity it otherwise wouldn't have. He
created a new sound for the piano. You can hear the aftersound, too,
that slow beating pattern caused by slightly out of tune strings.
Actually, the free durations, as well as the soft dynamics, gives
Feldman's music that uncanny presence that is the hallmark of his
music. I recently heard that someone recorded Feldman's music by
playing is loudly, then simply lowered the volume for playback. This
shows a basic misunderstanding of the sound of Morty's music. It's
not supposed to be simply heard softly, it's supposed to be played
softly. It is curious that Rosen missed these musics. He doesn't
include Cage and Feldman in his field of vision.
I was in Vienna recently and heard a concert of Feldman's early
works, including a neo-classical sonata for piano and cello, as well
as music from a few of his scores for films, including Hans Namuth's
Pollack. Included on the program was a work from 1958, Two
Instruments, for horn and cello. It was a particularly pungent
memory for me. In the early sixties, when I was teaching at Brandeis
as choral director, I had invited Gordon Mumma to come and help
design our electronic music studio. We had in our department at that
time a wonderful cellist named Madeline Foley. I came across
Feldman's duo in the Peters Catalog and ask Madeline and Gordon to
play it. (I was trying to infiltrate this music into the serial
environment of the Department.) In addition to being a composer of
complex electronic music Gordon was also an accomplished horn
player. Two Instruments is only a few minutes long and is typical of
Feldman's early works. The performance directions state that both
players start simultaneously, then proceed at their own speed,
playing quietly with a minimum of attack.
Hearing Two Instruments after almost 40 years was amazing. It
consisted of two voices moving separately, but it didn't sound
contrapuntal. I felt as if I were present in my own future. In 2001
this small masterpiece was now programmed on a Wien modern concert
for a fascinated audience. In the mid-sixties it was new and
controversial. I had to sell it, explain it, to people. How could a
composer leave the durations up to the players, particularly since
the pitches, notated vertically, would spread out and be heard
horizontally, getting further and further apart from each other?
(Phase music.) People thought it was irresponsible.

A performance of Two Instruments by Charles Curtis (cello) and

Warren Greff (horn).

Rosen also mentions musica ficta, a practice in which singers could

raise or lower pitches by adding accidentals to the written notes
and how, in the motets of Josquin, for example, only the parts were
writtenóor at least that's how the written music has come down to
us. He tells the anecdote about how, in 1789, Charles Burney tried
to re-assemble Josquin's DÈploration on the Death of Ockeghem. He
copied the parts out into a score; the results were absurd. But, by
simply transposing the tenor part up a step, the music worked. It
was a puzzle that had to solved. (It caused a change of mode, too,
from Dorian to Phrygian. The first glimmer of polymodality?) It
reminds me of certain works of Christian Wolff which have no clef
signs. In Exercises, for example, the notes may be played in any
clef. This gives a certain strangeness to the work. Because it is
most often played by readers of the treble and bass clefs,
asymmetrical parallels are prevalent. Players may move out of phase
with each other, creating a kind of natural heterophony.
When I was teaching at Brandeis in the Sixties, several graduate
students showed an interest in Christian's work, so I ordered the
score for his Pairs. In this work, from one to four pairs of players
(eight in all) may play chronologically or horizontallyóone pair
after anotheróor vertically, the pairs stacked up, one on top of
another. The instruments of each pair may change from performance to
performance, too. At one of the Brandeis contemporary music concerts
we played one version before the intermission, a second, with
different pairs, after the intermission. One of my colleagues
thought I was privileging this work over others on the program and
persuaded me to perform another work twice. It was common practice
in those days, as it is now in some places, to perform difficult
works twice, in order to hear the definitive version of the piece.
In Christian's piece, you got to hear it in two separate versions,
each one definitive. (Two reasons for repetition.) In those days, at
places like Brandeis, we experimented with presenting concerts
consisting of music from different periods: a couple of motets by
Josquin or Ockeghem, for example, as well as a Mozart string quartet
and one or two contemporary works. It was an idea of Stavinsky's, I
think. It was a wonderful idea but it didn't last. (Too many pasts
and futures at once, perhaps.) Audiences come to concerts to hear
specific music. It's still that way.
A few years ago I participated in a conference on world music in
Jakarta, Indonesia. A well-known composer presented his vision of a
future music. He had recorded samples of musics from around the
globe and presented a mix of them (geographical collage). I don't
remember whether or not they were recorded live or were a studio
mix. Anyway, certain instruments pre-dominated, particularly Western
brass instruments, the trombone especially, because of its high tech
construction. There are no Javanese instruments that I know of with
such a dynamic range. I hated the results. As I was listening, I
looked around the room at those representatives from more remote
parts of Indonesia, many of whose musics had not yet achieved
recognition. I would have hated to see their music get swallowed up
in someone's grandiose idea. Roland Barthes said that integration is
paranoid. Someone or some group of people want to encompass a wide
variety of elements under one roof. They are afraid to be left out.
Of course, it is they who do the encompassing. I would rather hear
as many of the world's musics as possible separately rather than all
of them at once. I know I am in danger of espousing the "separate
but equal" clause but we shouldn't leave anyone out.
During my first few years at Wesleyan, I felt guilty that I wasn't a
"world music composer". What was in the air then was the tendency to
mix music of various cultures. I resisted this tendency searching
for a neutral, non-cultural music without language, consisting of
pure sound. When asked why I didn't use musics of other cultures, I
would answer that I had my own ideas. They were surprised.

I'd like to tell you about an experience I had at Aspen several

years ago. I went to a concert by the Kronos String Quartet
specifically to hear the quartet version of Jim Tenney's Koan for
solo violin, which he wrote for Malcolm Goldstein. We all know this
piece. It consists simply of tremolos glissing gradually from one
open string to another. Starting with a tremolo on the Open G and D
strings, the player gradually raises the lower string until it is in
unison with the upper. Then he raises the upper Open D string until
it reaches the Open A. And so on. Once the pattern is established
the listener is not concerned with what is going to happen next; he
or she is free to focus on the small acoustical
phenomenaóscratching, scraping, buzzing of the resonating strings,
not to mention the audible beating produced between the ever-
widening intervals. The form is totally predictable. I was riveted.
A well-known composer was sitting a few rows in front of me. After
the piece got going for a while she started turning around and
grimacing at her friends, pretending to be flummoxed by the piece.
Her antics spoiled the performance for me. I wish I had had the
courage to have asked her to behave herself but I was too polite to
do so. As I get older I'm not as easily intimidated by such things.
(I didn't predict my own future.)
Then the quartet played a piece by a well-known composer and faculty
member at Aspen. It was extremely well composed, exploiting just
about everything stringed instruments are able to do. At every
measure, if not every beat, something new happened. It was composed
to be interesting at every moment. But I couldn't keep my mind on
it. My mind wandered. What was meant to keep the listener's interest
and continually entertained, distracted me (attention deficit). I
still don't know the reason for this, why sitting quietly and
focusing on the predictable musical form of Jim's piece was
fascinating, more so than the work which jumped from one idea to
another. What was "boring" became interesting; what was made to be
interesting, became boring. Jim's Koan, seems to me a perfect
example of experimental music; the other work, flowing from the
great European avant garde tradition, specialized in contrast, and
spectacular results. Each piece requires a different kind of
listening. Perhaps the difference between the two lies in attention
span. During Jim's piece you listen to one inexorable process,
getting surprised by small occurrences along the way. He doesn't
help you by pointing them out. You have to be aware at all times. In
the Aspen composer's piece, very moment was beautifully crafted; the
relationships among the moments were disjunct (attention deficit).
The composer moves you from point to point abruptly. Perhaps that
was the reason. In Cage's Thirty Pieces for String Quartet, by the
way, a similar thing happens. Short complex fragments are
meticulously constructed and sounded by the players. But the players
are spaced far apart from each other and they are unsynchronized and
free to play their fragments within certain time boundaries. This
opening up of time and space releases the listener from oppressive
relationships.

In the sixties, certain composers invented a new form in music. It

consisted of a single gesture or activity which, when put into
motion, produced unexpected results. Steve Reich's Come Out is an
example. A single fragment of speech is looped and played on two
identical tape recorders. As one machine moves a bit faster or
slower than the other, the fragments may be heard to sound out of
phase with each other. A canon, formed by the time lag between the
two machines, is created in real time, in front of our very ears.
(It was as if Steve were showing us the origins of the canon.) In
Jim's Never Having Written a note for Percussion, a player plays a
soft roll on a tam-tam. As he or she gradually crescendos, the tam-
tam steps into a different mode of vibration. In Gordon Monahan's
Piano Mechanics, the simple addition of tones, one by one, to a
series of repeated clusters in the lowest reaches of the piano,
causes the instrument to abruptly step into astonishing modes of
vibration. The piano seems to heat up and start burning. Spontaneous
combustion. And in my I am sitting in a room, several paragraphs of
speech are recorded and recycled into a room up to as many as
thirty-two times. Even though the process is constantóI make no
changes in the recording except to keep the tape from over
saturatingóthe rate of change of the processing of the spoken words
varies. The point at which the speech goes from intelligibility to
unintelligibility is different for each person. I love to watch
individuals in the audience get the idea. I can almost see light
bulbs go on over their heads. Christian Wolff recently confessed to
me that he had had trouble with this pieceóit was so personal and
self-referential. ("Self-indulgent" was the word I think he used.)
But then, as the speech disintegrated and was transformed into a
more general, objective state, he began to like it.
These processes resemble scientific experiments in that something
wants to be discovered. A simple process is put into play, to scan
the material in a neutral manner, with the hope of revealing the
nature of things. The process cannot be altered along the way, for
fear of missing something. It's a very useful procedure for acoustic
exploration. I heard two solo works on this week's New Music Forum
[at UCSD] that used similar processes: Rob Wannamaker's Violin and
Nicholas Hennies' piece for solo vibraphone. In the Hennies piece,
the percussionist repeatedly taps a single bar on the vibraphone
without varying tempo or dynamics. The result is syncopation caused
by the damping properties of the metal bar. It was hard to believe
that the player wasn't changing the rhythm with dynamic accents.
(The magic of an uninterfered-with system.) Perhaps I am being a bit
partial by pointing out these works. If you had heard my triangle
piece the other night you would know why. Almost all the student
works I have looked at this week have explored the acoustical
characteristics of musical instruments to greater or lesser degrees,
leading me to think that this adventurousness will continue well
into the future. I hope so.

A second subject that Rosen takes up is the opposition of

composition and realization. (Harold Bloom would probably say the
"agon" between the composer and the performer.) Much has been said
about the disappearance of the composer. The overwhelming abundance
of music-making in the world is improvised, that is, performed
without written scores. Rosen suggests that the dwindling of the so-
called classical music audience is due to the lack of piano playing
in the home and further the piano and four-hand piano arrangements
of symphonies and such. When those amateurs went to symphony concert
they understood the music being played. That doesn't happen much any
more. Certainly the prevalence of young people playing in rock bands
has taken the place of the nineteenth century piano-based at home
chamber music." What we have in its place is an astonishing number
of young people who are active in performing for their own pleasure
and for a few friends." Their instruments are electric keyboards,
guitars, saxophones and percussion. (I wonder how many rock bands
there are on this campus.) Rosen says that now "realization becomes
all." Rather than the disappearance of the composer we have
improvisers, composers in real time.
There have been recent explorations of new music by pop groups.
Sonic Youth (not to be confused with the Sonic Arts Union) recently
came out with a CD of pieces by Pauline Oliveros, Christian Wolff,
Jim Tenney, John Cage and others. A group of Steve Reich's pieces
has been re-mixed. A friend of mine said that a group called A Tribe
Called Quest mentioned that they were interested in my "I am sitting
in a room". Perhaps this is an omen of things to come. Pop music has
its own traditions which influence how it performs experimental
works. Often they can't tolerate the long durations, the patience
required for certain pieces. Sonic Youth shortened Steve's Pendulum
Music (perhaps with his approval), and added sounds to Jim's tam tam
piece. If this music is to survive it must be able to tolerate these
reworkings. One still has the originals, after all.
Care must be taken to avoid real betrayal, even with the best
intentions, of the basic ideas of the works. There have been ill-
advised interpretations of several of the works of the composers
discussed above. In one recorded version of Christian Wolf's For 1,
2, or 3 People, for example, the performers, not wanting to look
inept, have rehearsed the coordinations beforehand, then played them
with confidence and professional aplomb. (You are not supposed to
know beforehand what will happen from moment to moment. The work is
based on the idea of coordinations. Sometimes they make you look
hesitant, amateurish.) In a recent recording of Feldman's Piece for
4 Pianos a single pianist overdubs the parts. I can hear him
inserting sonorities when he thinks they should come in, to fill in
gaps in the texture. In both cases, the performers, by fixing their
parts, have closed the music. If they played it as it is supposed to
be played, it would retain its open quality. I can't use these
recordings in my classes. It's a shame.
Advice to young composers: Read Testaments Betrayed, by the Czech
writer, Milan Kundera. It is basically about the abuses of
translation, including the refusal of translators to use the same
verb several times, even though the author saw fit to do so. They
must show their erudition by using synonyms, thereby changing
meanings. But there are many musical examples, too, including
Bernstein's elongation, by means of rubato, of an assymetrical
motive in Stravinksky's Sacre, making it symmetrical and ordinary in
the process. When performers add their own interpretation to a
piece, it often means imposing an idea that comes from earlier
music, an idea that they already know. It's a natural tendency, I
suppose, but it spoils the freshness of new musical ideas. It
retains the past, blocks the future.

In his essay, Charles Rosen spends lot of time on improvisation,

pointing out examples that have achieved classical status, such as
Art Tatum and Miles Davis. For a long time I have been confused
about this music as long as I felt that it was based on habit and
memory. I had been devoted to Cage's idea of freeing the musician
from habit and memory, in order to attain a certain expansiveness in
awareness. But I was not aware of recent trends that has taken the
improviser far from those heroic golden solos. Ron Kuivila, a
colleague of mine, curated a conference at Wesleyan last year called
"The Free World". He took the phrase which came into vogue after
World War II and applied it to two strands of music making in
America. One, the indeterminism of John Cage and David Tudor and,
two, free jazz. I felt that it opened up an expanse of experience
for the musician and the listener.
I also remembered that most of the works of my friends in the early
years of our activity were executed without written scores. Each
piece had a particular configuration of electronic equipment that
took the place of a written score. Often we didn't need any prior
rehearsals. We simply played into and occasionally interacted with
the equipment. In Gordon Mumma's Hornpipe, for example, the player
tests the acoustic space by playing random French Horn sounds into
the room. A box of electronic equipment (Gordon's Cybersonic
Console) picks up and analyzes the resonances that come back from
the architecture. There was no way for Gordon to pre-compose these
sounds. They had to be created in real time as he heard what was
happening. I guess that's improvisation. I can't pre-determine
exactly what the players will play in Vespers, which you heard the
other night. They simply accept the task of moving through a
darkened room, orienting themselves sonically. The space is the
score.
Several years ago I played a version of my old North American Time
Capsule with Anthony Braxton. I freely mixed 8 channels of tape
material I had made in 1967 with a Sylvania vocoder. As I did so,
Anthony played alto saxophone along with my barrage of sounds. I
suppose you could say he was interacting with my sounds, but there
was so much distance between his sounds and mine, there seemed to be
no connection. Or the connection-interaction was so processed by
Anthony's quick thinking, the whole thing seemed free of influences.
(I guess I have to say I find interaction oppressive.) It felt
completely open. I didn't feel as if we were "improvising"; we were
simply playing the piece. It resembled automatic writing.
I have to tell you a story about call and response. About ten years
ago, I went to India to collaborate with a group of Indian
musicians. One of the things I brought with me was a set of
recordings of indoor spaces at Wesleyan. I recorded the concert
hall, a teaching room, a hall way and so forth. I hoped to play
these environments into the Indian spaces, superimposing them on the
acoustics. I thought the musicians could sing and play with the
resonant frequencies of the rooms. One of the recordings was of
Crowell Hall which has enormous windows. In the winter, they
contract and expand, producing loud cracks. Every time there was a
crack from a window the tabla player would hit his drum. That's what
he is taught to do. He was a good drummer and was doing his job. The
results were horrible. It was so predictable it drove me crazy. I
didn't know what to do. During a rehearsal, Joe Reed, a colleague of
mine from the English Department, came in and stood in the doorway.
I asked him what I should do. He said, "Why don't you ask the
drummer to hit his drum before he hears a crack in the window?" I
did and that solved the problem. The drummer had to predict the
future, not simply respond to the past. Call and response is a means
to close music, not open it up. It's like saying "skoal!" That's a
way to control drinking, making sure that everyone gets drunk at the
same time. It used to drive me crazy in Sweden after a concert. Your
sponsor would say "skoal" at periodic intervals. You had to drain
your glass. You couldn't get drunk at your own pace. (or not get
drunk at all.) So everyone got drunk in four-four time, even if they
didn't want to.

Circumscribing the Open Universe, by Thomas DeLio, University of

America Press, consists of essays on several of the composers I have
mentioned in this talk, as well as poets Charles Olsen and sculptor
Robert Irwin, who "have embraced the notion of openness as a
mechanism for shifting the focus of an artwork, thereby placing the
image of an emerging consciousness at the center of the aesthetic
experience". On page 3 he says: "Thus within the open work content
becomes substantially the same as process as it is engulfed by that
perpetual state of immanence which is the essence of each
individual's experience of being in the world". "In its most
characteristic manifestation, the open work seems to be one in which
perception replaces object". "Traditional notions of expression and
drama become irrelevant as all vestige of priorness is replaced by
process." I can imagine a future music which is more concerned with
listening than composing or performing.
In the visual works of Robert Irwinóyou have one right in your back
yard [as a part of the Stuart Collection at UCSD]óthere is often
almost nothing there to see or touch. What is there may be only a
slight alteration of the environmentóan almost invisible sheet of
photographic film on the windows or a scrim which filters the light.
When one is in the presence of an Irwin sculpture, one becomes aware
of how one is perceiving the work rather than perceiving the work
itself. The viewer is in a very different position vis-‡-vis the
work. He is watching himself, not an object. Here are a few quotes
from Irwin who lives, by the way, in nearby San Diego. Here are
three quotes from a recent show of Irwin's at the Dia Foundation in
New York:

"To be an artist is not a matter of making paintings or objects at

all. What we are really dealing with is our state of consciousness
and the shape of our perception."

"The act of art has turned to a direct examination of our perceptual

processes."

"There is an essential kind of knowing, which comes from a purely

phenomenological basis."

I recently visited the garden that Irwin designed for the Getty
Center in Los Angeles. It was almost more beautiful to watch the
people visiting the garden than the garden itself. They seemed to be
in a special frame of mind, feeling the spaces, rather than paying
attention to the plantings. I can't prove that but I'll say it
anyway.

Years ago I asked Bob Ashley what he thought the future of music
might be. He said, "Pops and clicks." I never forgot that. It was
around the time Bob was composing his String Quartet Describing The
Motions of Large Real Bodies. Let me remind you that for the
duration of this piece, the string players are asked to bowed slack
strings extremely slowlyóone bow per ten minutes, if you can
imagineóbearing down hard. The result is that discrete pulses are
produced instead of smooth bowed string sounds. It seems to me that
this piece dramatized the transition between the analog and the
digital environment we were going through at the time. Analog bowing
created digital pulses. Even without the electronic processing that
is called for in the score, plenty of natural resonances and timbre
changes were produced.
Every year I ask my undergraduate students to choose music for their
funerals. They react, naturally, with horror. The thought of their
own deaths is so far in the future they can't even imagine it. For
my own funeral, in the not so near future I hope, I would choose
among works of my friends, including David Behrman's Runthrough and
a recent piece that Christian Wolff wrote for my seventieth
birthday, an excerpt from Bob's quartet. The pulses sound to me like
the sound of rigging on a sailboat, to take me to the Western Lands.
I asked Peter Hoyt, a colleague of mine at Wesleyan: What will
become of this music? He said it would be played by those who care
about it. My sister Louise said, "There will always be wonderful
music." I think they are both right.
I remember a lovely work called "Loverfinches" by the German artist
Carsten Hˆller which documented the following story: A rich man
wanted to woo a lovely young woman. He asked his bird keeper to
train the birds on his estate to sing a love song, popular at that
time. He invited the lady over to his mansion. She heard the love
songs and was so touched she fell in love with the man and married
him. Even now, many years later, remnants of that song may be heard
in the vocabulary of the birds in that forest.
Sometimes I think that some of the ideas I have
discussedóindeterminacy, focus, reduction of metaphor, awareness of
one perceiving a musical workówill remain as remnants in future
music.
Advice to young composers: Read Italian writer Italo Calvino's
Norton Lectures at Harvard, "Six Memos for the Next Millennium".
Each lecture is devoted to an attribute or characteristic he
predicts for the future. Among them are: Quickness; Exactitude:
Visibility; Multiplicity; and Lightness (not as a feather but as a
bird). Young composers should think about these.

I would like to end with Sferics, a recording of electromagnetic

disturbances in the ionosphere. I especially wanted to include it
here because it was the result of a project I was involved with at
UCSD, in 1968. Pauline Oliveros invited me here to try to receive
sferics--that's the scientific term, by the way--on and around the
UCSD campus. We talked some electrical engineering students into
building us a radio receiver and proceeded to extend a couple of
hundred feet of hook-up wire as an antenna down and across a canyon
around here somewhere. Nothing much happened. All we got was hum and
a good bit of static. We persevered, however, and made a
presentation out on a glider park overlooking the ocean. We didn't
get any sferics but did hear signals from aircraft flying over to
Vietnam. Years later, in 1980 to be exact, I discovered that, with a
pair of home-made antennas and a cassette tape recorder, I could get
beautiful sferics. All I had to do was get away from power lines, to
avoid hum. I managed this by driving a jeep up into the Colorado
mountains one August and setting my two home-made antennas up
against some bushes, far enough apart to get stereo, about eight
feet. I recorded all night, changing the position of the antennas
every hour, to change the stereo field. The result is a telescoping
of eight hours of material into an eight-minute recording. Here it
is.
†
Copyright © 2002 Alvin Lucier
and the Composition Area, Department of Music, University of
California, San Diego
Published by Permission
Online publishing and editing by Karen Reynolds
All Rights Reserved.
SEARCH EVENT IV, 3 March 2002, University of California, San Diego

The following TEXT was commissioned by the Composition Area,

Department of Music, University of California, San Diego for its
SEARCH initiative. The TEXT / TALK is copyrighted and appears in its
original presentation here. While links TO this TEXT or recording
from other sites are welcome, no part of this TEXT may be reproduced
in any form or by any electronic storage or retrieval systems,
without permission in writing from the copyright holders [Please
contact Roger Reynolds: info@rogerreynolds.com to facilitate this.].