Eight Lectures on Experimental Music

by Alvin Lucier

  How many of you know about standing waves? It’s easiest to notice with a sine wave in an enclosed space. How many people know what a sine wave is? Good. A sine wave is the only waveform that has only one frequency component. It can be the building block of sound—you can’t make it any simpler. Sine waves are very beautiful; they sound like a flute or a harmonic, but they have even less color, because they have no harmonics. So if you put a sine wave in an enclosed space, it will find places in the room that will organize it. It will be forced to organize itself according to the structure of the room in such a way that in some places it will be louder, and in some places it will be softer. And what happens when you go into one of my Dream House environments, for example, since it’s created completely of sine waves, is you can walk in and out of the loud spots and the soft spots. And it becomes very complex if you have as many as thirty-five tones because the low frequencies have long wavelengths. You can walk maybe all the way across the room before you get from the loudest to the softest point, and the high frequencies can have tiny wavelengths so that you just barely move and you can move in and out of the nodes. So, if two musicians are sitting listening to a sine wave in an enclosed space and trying to tune to it, and they’re tuning by pitch as opposed to by frequency, one of them will hear it louder, and the other one will hear it softer, and they’ll both have a different impression of pitch. So you just cannot tune that way; you have to use beats. These acoustical beats are the way to tune and be precisely in tune, and this way you’re in tune every time and it never fails. It’s a very interesting study.

  One of the things I’m interested in in relation to my Dream Houses is this concept of the drone state of mind. Some of you know that one of the reasons that Indian classical music evolved the most elaborate system of tuning, until we got into more modern times, is that it always took place over a drone. If you have a constant to which you can always return and refer to, it’s like having a home, then you can develop very elaborate relationships because you always have this one fixed entity to come back to. When you go into a Dream House, the sine waves are there, and they’re fixed in frequency; they don’t change. You get different impressions of pitch and impressions of loudness and this sensation of being able to create your own melodies and harmonies as you walk in and out of the standing wave patterns. The standing wave patterns, then, are really a type of resonance. Simple resonance is when you have a frequency that starts at that wall, hits that wall, and gets back to that wall, just in time for the next positive pulse. You know, the way frequency is described as positive and negative pulses. Just think of a loudspeaker going positive, negative, positive, negative, positive, negative, producing a frequency. So a resonant frequency is a frequency that is just such that it starts at that wall, A; hits that wall, B; gets back to that first wall, A; just in time for the next positive pulse. So it’s adding to what’s already being produced. So that’s simple resonance. But there are other kinds of resonance that take place in enclosed spaces. Some simple resonances and other angles and so forth. So standing wave patterns are these kinds of patterns that take place in enclosed spaces.

  The concept of the drone state of mind is that each periodic pulse of the air molecule patterns hits the eardrum. For low and mid-range frequencies it’s especially true that these pulses make it all the way through the synapses up to the cerebral cortex with pretty much a pulse pattern, so that the brain is receiving this pattern of pulses. This pattern of pulses can become like a reference pattern. In the same way that you already have patterns taking place in your body that you use as reference patterns, a set of frequencies in the sound environment can become a new set of reference patterns. In the same way that in Indian classical music they were able to develop this complex system of srutis because the pitches were always performed over a drone, in a Dream House as you spend time in it, you can establish a new foundational system based on this set of referential frequencies, which are actually, in the case of the current Dream House, using relationships that are based on very high prime number ratios.

  Those of you who know about systems of musical languages know that in many systems you can reduce the system to a simple set of primes. Like in Western classical music, everything factors down to 2, 3, and 5. And in Indian classical music, I would say most of it really factors down to 2, 3, 5, and 7. Various Greek theorists did a little bit of work with higher primes, and over time people like Helmholtz became interested in more and more complex intervals, and we finally got ourselves into the twentieth century where you have composers like Harry Parch and Ben Johnson really starting to think about primes and getting a little bit into higher primes. But the question is how to find your model to listen to these primes. You have to be able to analyze your way up into the harmonic series. And this is where the Rayna synthesizer became very interesting for me, because I was able to program intervals. Let’s say I program the ratio 61 to 64. Well, nobody had ever been able to hear it before. No way, impossible. I used to tune these first oscillators that I had back in the ’60s using Lissajous patterns. You know what Lissajous patterns are? You use an oscilloscope, and you put one tone in the y-axis and one in the z-axis, and it makes a pattern. If you have a simple ratio like 2 to 1, one axis is horizontal, and the other is vertical; one axis has two points, and the other has one. Or if you have 3 to 2, one axis has three points, and the other has two. By watching the pattern—they tend to move; in those days oscillators tended to drift. So you would tune them up so that the pattern stood exactly still, and there was then a way if you used the z-axis to count up a pretty high number. I used to count thirty-one segments in the z-axis over a simpler pattern on the x- and y-axis. But this was, like, taking forever, to count up thirty-one points, and with the Rayna synthesizer I can use primes like 127, anything literally within whatever the limit of the thing is—I didn’t find out yet. But it definitely has limits, but they could easily be bypassed.

  I had, then, the opportunity to listen to intervals that I had never heard before, so that the synthesizer-computer combination then became like a teacher and a model. It offered me something that I had never heard before, and that no one else had ever heard before. So if you go to this environment of mine, for instance, in New York City, one of the things you should know is that it’s using prime numbers selected from the range of 288 to 224 in the harmonic series that reduces to the ratio of 9 to 7; 9 to 7 is an interval that I’ve been interested in for a long time, and, you know, how many people know anything about the harmonic series? OK. Very simply, the harmonic series can be thought of as, my voice is different from your voice, because the harmonics in my voice and in your voice are in different resonant chambers, which emphasize different harmonics. The harmonics don’t sound the same because the resonant chamber that they take place in is different, and it emphasizes some of the harmonics in my voice, where in your voice it may not. Some ladies have higher-pitched voices, some men have higher-pitched voices, some have lower-pitched voices, all of these factors go to make up the difference in our voices. But the harmonics, the way the harmonics sound, is one of the very most important things.

  The harmonic series is best represented as the positive integers. So they just go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, up on into, through the series of positive integers. So, the lowest tone is 1, and an octave higher is 2. The very definition of an octave is that it has twice as many frequencies per unit time as the octave below it. The ratio of a perfect fifth is the ratio of 3 to 2. It means you have three frequencies happening in the time of two frequencies. So you have three positive pulses in the time of two positive pulses. As you go through the vowels, you emphasize different harmonics in the voice. To give you an example of why constant frequency helps you to have a more elaborate set of intervallic relationships: If I sing a tone today, and a year later I sing a tone and ask you to compare them, it is very difficult. If I sing one today, and I sing it tomorrow, still not so easy. But, if I sing it now and sing it right after it, it’s much bette
r. But the best case is [sings with Marian] if the two are happening simultaneously. The measurement of frequency has to take place in time, and tuning is a function of time. Scientists used to study the movement of planetary bodies for thousands of years and compare what astronomers back in Egypt had recorded, in Greece, and compare these movements over many, many, many years to begin to be able to get a sense of what was really the tuning of a particular planetary body. And, in frequency, it’s the same thing. If I give [produces quiet, staccato tones], it’s very difficult to get a sense of what its exact pitch is. If I start holding it out [sings], then you can latch onto it, you can start thinking about it, you can study it, and the same is true with instruments. If you analyze the tuning of intervals with instruments, even though instruments are now very fast and they can come up with an instantaneous reading; nonetheless, the reading is more precise if you let it run for a few days, weeks, months, or years than it is if you just do the instantaneous reading. And the drone state of mind that can be established in a Dream House, then, can allow your imagination to take new flights of fancy, go in new directions, go in previously untraversed paths, because it has a new set of reference frequencies to which you can be constantly keeping in touch as needed. And, for me, that’s one of the interesting things that can take place in a Dream House. Yes?

  QUESTION

  As an experimental musician, could you talk about your experience being an American before a European audience in the musical scene, versus that of being an American before an American audience in the American scene?

  LA MONTE YOUNG

  As an experimental musician? This is a question very dear to my heart because I think that America’s the most creative place in the world. It’s very difficult for anybody like me to have ever evolved out of Europe. Tradition is very strong in Europe. We’re very young. You know, because we’re young, because our forefathers came to this country and literally started over in the woods and made their own way, invented their own safety pin, we’re still part of that beginning. And we still have this sense of creativity such that we have to be able to think about it ourselves and do it ourselves. Additionally, because what tradition we had was from so many different places, we developed a sense that, OK, tradition was important, but you could break tradition. In fact, tradition is there for your own good, but you go to Europe and there is only tradition. It’s very difficult to get out of tradition. I’ll give you the simplest example. I grew up in L.A. In L.A., the supermarkets are open all night long every day of the week. You go to Europe, the stores close at five o’clock, and they are closed—it’s over, for the night. They open at eight in the morning, and they close on Saturday at 1:00 p.m., and they never are open on Sunday. Some stores have put up an incredible fight, and they are able to stay open until 8:00 p.m. It’s like that on every level.

  Young composition students are really fighting the tradition, and in the ’60s Europeans thought it was literally inconceivable that a person like me wanted to live in sound environments all the time. They think that, you know, you do some music and then you don’t do music and you do something else, and vacations … it’s the way … you know, I haven’t had a vacation in maybe some ten years. It’s difficult being a composer who earns his living through his work to ever get caught up on money; it’s a very difficult situation. So, I don’t really have time for vacations. But I am so involved in what I’m doing and so happy, and I do get to go on tour, that I don’t ever really exactly want a vacation. Once I had a vacation; somebody insisted I take a vacation in 1985. I took this vacation, and what did we do? We practiced and I composed; I finally had a chance to compose. I am so busy running my life that chances to do creative things are rare. I have to really fight to get a commission, to get some time to get free to compose something, because a lot of my time goes into the production of the work. You produce records, you produce concerts, and you try to keep your work semiarchived.

  And so … I really like performing in America, but there is one good thing about performing in Europe. And that is that, although we’re much more creative here in America, they really think artists are important, unlike what most Americans think. I go to Italy, and they want to touch me. They think I’m important. In America the artist is the lowest possible thing. You go out there into the Midwest—I know, I was born in Idaho. I go back and I visit them once in a while. I’ve heard guys say, “I don’t want any of my tax money going to some faggot in Greenwich Village for some art program.” That’s what they say. I mean, they’re just thinking totally differently from what you and I are thinking about. They haven’t yet had an opportunity to learn that art on the highest level is perhaps the most important thing that can lead humanity into a better future. But they have that sense in Europe. Somehow, when we got over to America, life was so hard. During the recession that we had just in these last few years, you have a good example. There was very little support for the arts because people really needed the money to buy a quart of milk. And when push comes to shove, it’s basic survival. It’s true; you can’t eat a painting. You can listen to a good piece of music and it might help your psychological state for a while; but, you know, the basics are the basics: food, water, sex, drugs, rock and roll.

  I think that it’s very nice to perform in Europe, and it’s very nice to have that kind of appreciation, that they actually think you’re doing something important, but I love to come back to America because I really think it’s the most inspiring, most creative place I’ve ever been in the entire world. I’ve been to India, and they’re even more middle-class than the United States. Talk about Middle America; these people are so concerned about what their next-door neighbor thinks about them. My God, you know, it’s impossible. And for somebody like Pandit Pran Nath to have evolved out of Indian culture, it’s practically a miracle, because there’s so much against anything that’s out of line. Within the realm of music, of course, an enormous amount has been done, and in certain religious traditions in India … but nonetheless, just as soon as you get slightly out of that, well.… In India, musicians are considered one of the lowest castes.

  I think that very few people go through life and end up being like me, ready to break away from it all. You know, I grew up in a very, very strong religious tradition, my entire family was Mormon, and it was their entire life. They went to church seven days a week. Your entire life was programmed, and I was a model student. I had 100 percent attendances for years and years and years. When I left the church when I was seventeen years old, it literally broke the whole family’s heart. Why did I leave the church? One of the reasons, to be advanced in the priesthood as a Mormon, you had to believe that the Mormon Church was the only true church. And I went to my interview to be advanced, and I said, “Well, I believe the Mormon Church is true, but I also believe other religions are true, and I definitely don’t think this is the only true church.” And so that was that. And it was over. But are we nearing the end of the hour?

  ALVIN LUCIER

  Yes, we are, if we want to perform Poem. I think we could have another question, perhaps.

  LA MONTE YOUNG

  You choose the next person to ask the question.

  ALVIN LUCIER

  Mark Slobin, our chairman.

  MARK SLOBIN

  This might be easy. In terms of Indian music, has your relationship to it evolved in particular ways over the last period?

  LA MONTE YOUNG

  Well, I had a very traditional training in Indian classical music with Pandit Pran Nath. Marian and I brought Pandit Pran Nath to New York City in January 1970. We became his first American disciples. And he literally wouldn’t teach us unless we became disciples. There are different levels of study of Indian classical music. They have students who just come and take lessons and go away, but the disciple goes to a ceremony where—various things take place at the ceremony. A red band is tied around your wrist. And through this ceremony, you take on the responsibility of supporting your teacher throughout life, and he ta
kes on the responsibility of teaching you music. He taught us in an extremely strict way. For instance, some of you know that Marian and I live on a very special rotating sleeping-waking cycle. Currently, we’re usually awake for about twenty hours and then we sleep for about ten hours. And this goes around, all the time it’s going around. So we have to predict in advance what our schedule’s going to be. But during the years that we studied with Pran Nath, he wouldn’t let us live on that schedule. He felt that the serious lessons had to take place at sunrise. So, I had to wake every day at three or four and make tea so that tea was ready when he was ready to wake up, and then we would serve him tea, and he would give the lesson. And if he happened to be staying somewhere else, and we had to go to where he was, if we came after 7:00 a.m., he wouldn’t teach us. So, he was very strict with us. He would sometimes hit me at the lessons. I was already over thirty years old, thirty-five years old when he was hitting me. His teacher used to beat him in public, and his teacher’s teacher had scars on his back where his teacher beat him with an iron rod. And they were some of the greatest musicians of all time. It’s really a question of discipline. And, you know, I’m not saying that that’s the best way or the only way to teach, but that’s how that tradition had been coming down, that you had to really line the students up, the students had to be very serious, they had to be totally devoted.