Eight Lectures on Experimental Music

by Alvin Lucier

  Every one of these fields has an established hierarchy, a kind of structure of how those things get put together. After some time, you begin to figure out what that is. And it becomes very helpful to know what that is, because it makes it easier to work with people, and the expectations are specific for each one. For example, if you are writing music for a play, then the person who will work with you will be the director or the dramaturge. The director will tell you he or she wants music. Maybe you’ll write what you want to, but you can’t generally put it where you want it to go.

  If you’re working with a dance company, you have a little more latitude because not many dancers can read music; that saves you a lot of trouble. Almost always, dancers want the music before the dance. Sometimes they’ll choreograph the dance before the music, but that’s rare. Mostly dancers are still putting steps on beats and they want to know where the beats are. You can do it the other way—it can be done, but it’s a little complicated. Even so, the choreographer will actually control how the resources are used. And the main resource in the theater is time.

  I remember doing a ballet for Jerry Robbins in the New York City Ballet. He wouldn’t let me come to any of the rehearsals until the dress rehearsal. That was how he was. The orchestra sounded terrible. I told him that they couldn’t play the music and that we needed a separate music rehearsal. We had only an hour and a half left. He said there was no time for that; he needed to work on the choreography. And that was the end of it. Eventually the orchestra learned the piece. They’ve done it now for about fifteen years, and by the fifth or sixth year, they played it pretty well. If you go and hear it—it’s called Glass Pieces—it’s good! But the first year, it was just agony; it sounded terrible. But it was Jerry’s house—the dance house belonged to the choreographer.

  Film is even worse! I’m going to give you all the sad stories; I’ll get to the good parts in a minute. With film, there’s no question that the film is run by the director. Anyone who’s worked in film can tell you endless stories. If you’re lucky, you can put the music where you want to, sometimes the director will let you. That’s called “spotting” the film. Occasionally the director will let you decide. I was working with Paul Schrader on a film called Mishima. He was doing it in Japan. I happened to be there doing some concerts, so we got to talking. We spent hours talking about the writer Yukio Mishima and why we were doing a film about him. Finally, I came to the critical crisis and asked Paul where the music should go. He did a wonderful thing. He took the script and threw it across the table and said, “You tell me where it goes.” But that almost never happens. I’ve done about fifteen or sixteen films. It happened one other time with Martin Scorsese. When we were working on Kundun, he let me put the music where I thought it should go.

  Anyway, the only place in the theater world where the composer is in the composer’s house is in the opera house. Perhaps that’s why I’ve written so many operas! I’ve written about fifteen or sixteen of them. Still, the elements have to be harmonized in some way. I’m still working with a writer, someone with movement, and someone who’s creating images. That’s on the first level. And then there’s another level, including sound, costume, and lighting designers (which is part of the image and part of the sound, but they may not be the actual person that you’re working with). That comes into play in the creation of the work.

  However, when I decide to write an opera, the first thing I do—and it’s important that you do this in the right order, believe me, it’ll lead to a lot of trouble—is find the director. If you find the designer before the director, the director will never be happy. You can get away with it a couple times—they’ll go along with it—but the director expects to be involved in choosing the designer. So you get the director first, then you get the designer. You may not have a writer. The writer might come in early or later. The work might be based on a story or on a piece of text, so the writer might not be there. When I did Orfée, Cocteau was long gone, so I had the scenario of the film. That was a given. But sometimes I’ve done operas with living writers, so they have to be brought in. This is a very interesting area where the composer actually gets to create the actual working relationship that goes into the piece. And if this is set up carefully, the chances of it working out are much better.

  I’ve gone through collaborations where we’ve fought like cats and dogs the whole way through. One time the choreographer and I couldn’t talk to each other. It was one of the best pieces that we ever did! It doesn’t guarantee—it just means that life is a lot more pleasant when you’re working where you can talk to everybody. It doesn’t guarantee the work is going to be better. It doesn’t mean that you’ll be happier when you’re doing the work. And also, my feeling about collaborations is that I wanted to get the best I could out of every person I was working with. My way of working was to invite them in as cocreators and, very often, if you look at the credits of the operas I’ve written, I’ve listed them as coauthors.

  The first thing I do is put together a team of people—the writer, the director, the designer, myself. I’ll get everyone together and tell him or her that I’ve got an idea for an opera. When we did the Allen Ginsberg opera, the Hydrogen Jukebox, I invited a number of people to be part of that. We spent about a year—that’s a luxury, to spend a year working—on the concept.

  By the way, that’s not all we do. Usually, I’m working on three operas at the same time, but they’re all at different stages. One I’m thinking about, one I’m actually writing, and one we’re actually building. So I’m involved in different productions all the time, but each production has its own timeline. I find that the first year is very important.

  I expect each person to bring his or her best work to the piece. I’ve found that the best way to let them do their best work is simply to invite them to the project and then let them contribute their own ideas too. I rarely have vetoed something; almost always it’s something I didn’t think of, and therefore I don’t have any idea what they’re driving at. I remember working with choreographer Susan Marshall on Les Enfants Terribles. It was a combination of dance and opera, based on a film. Since I had initiated the project, it was my project. I asked Susan to do the adaption with me. She would be the choreographer and the director, and we agreed on the costume designs. We did all that together.

  The piece had only three characters in it. (Actually, there’s a fourth character that comes at the beginning and at the end.) We were talking about the rehearsal period, and she said that she would need eight performers. I reminded her that there were only three performers in the work. She said that she had another idea. And, of course, this meant the whole budget was completely different because we were thinking of travelling with seven or eight people and now it was going to be twelve or thirteen people. That determines how many performances you can have and where you can travel. I had no idea what she was doing. She worked for a couple weeks and invited me to her studio. What she had done was wonderful. Each character—a brother and sister and a friend—was also performed by two dancers. So there were three performers playing each major part.

  It was wonderful! What she did sometimes was have the three singers in the front and the others behind. Sometimes they would be on opposite sides of the stage. If one of the actors said something, you could get three different reactions. And I realized that what she had done was most interesting. The kind of things you might hear, and in your head you might have several reactions: I would like to do it; I’m afraid to do it; I can’t wait to leave; I don’t want to be with you anymore. You might have all those reactions at the same time. Then your computer brain might say that that’s a good idea. You figure it out; you do it without even thinking. What Susan did was to portray dramatically everything that went on in the minds of the characters. It was the most wonderful thing. And I had no idea she was going to do that.

  So my experience of being with people is that they think of something that I haven’t thought of. That’s why I’m doing it to begin with
! If I could do the choreography and the design, I wouldn’t need any of those people. The fact is that I only know how to do one thing, which is to write the music. I don’t know how to write the words, how to do the designs or the movement, so I get involved with all these people. Once I invite them in, they become real partners in the work. That’s the dynamic that I try to set up in the way I’m working.

  One other thing to talk about is the kind of situation where I have the most freedom. When I say I have control of the environment, I don’t actually control all the elements. I’m not interested in controlling all the elements. I discovered very early on that one of the ways that music can—and this is a problem for any composer, any writer, any painter—one of the problems that we have in our work is to create an environment for ourselves in which we’re constantly growing and changing. It’s the most difficult thing to do. When we’re young, we think that the big problem is to find our voice. That is a fairly simple problem. The first problem is to find the voice; the second problem is to get rid of it. And that takes the rest of your life. You never really do it. I’ve been trying to get rid of my particular way of working since I began, and I’ve never succeeded.

  I’ve managed to make changes that may seem incremental but over twenty or thirty years have turned out to be big changes. That’s about the best you can do. But I’ve done that through tremendous effort. We learn techniques of working; we become good at certain things. And it becomes very easy for us to repeat what we do. It’s as if you were to say that today you are going to walk, talk differently, and write differently. You have to be able to see who you are and what you’re trying to do. You have to have an analytic grasp of your style. You may think you are doing something, but you are actually doing something quite different. So there’s an analytic perception of your own work that’s required.

  You very often repeat things that are easy. You see this all the time. There are certain artists I know who have been able to work within one defined area. They go deeper and deeper until their ideas have been resolved in such a high level that you think there was no other way for them to do it.

  These choices are based on the personality of the person involved. My particular personality is one to always be looking for new things. When I finished Einstein on the Beach, it never occurred to me to write The Son of Einstein. Half the people who heard my next opera, Satyagraha, were angry and disappointed because it didn’t sound like Einstein. The other people forgave me. I gave myself permission to do something different. After a while people got used to the fact that I wasn’t going to pay any attention to what they said anyway, and they left me alone. That’s pretty much the way it is. Now I can do whatever I want because people expect me to do it.

  Working in the theater and working with collaborators became almost a guaranteed way for me to do new work: for example, working with Susan Marshall on Les Enfants Terribles or Allen Ginsberg on his poetry. When I work with someone I haven’t worked with before, they bring something to the table that I didn’t anticipate.

  Now, let’s say that there are always at least four collaborators: a writer, a designer, a director, and a composer. I’ve often brought in other composers and done collaborative pieces, so that angle can also be changed. I’m doing a piece right now with Australian musicians; that throws a whole other element into the mix. I don’t even know what’s going to happen, but I will be sure that at least one of three be someone that I haven’t worked with before. I almost always include one person I know as my security blanket. It can be a designer I like or it can be the writer. If there’s one of the collaborators that I’ve worked with before, that’s enough. The other two, hopefully, will be different. I won’t be able to anticipate the dynamic between the working situation and the kind of ideas that are presented. And since I can’t anticipate them, I almost always have to do something I hadn’t done before. I’ll grab on to what I can to make it possible to work at all, and then I’ll combine it with some new ideas. So that’s how the music begins to change.

  I’ve often said that I don’t mind repeating failures, but I will not repeat a success. I’m terrified of that. But the idea of working—with Bob Wilson, we did Einstein in 1976. It was a very famous piece and made it possible for the both of us to work in ways that we hadn’t before. We didn’t work together again until 1984. Then we didn’t work again after that until maybe 1991. We spent about eight years apart from each other.

  We’ve developed a very interesting rhythm of working, every eight years we would come together and do a piece. And then I found I would be in touch with Bob’s work, and when we began to work together I would love to see, what are the commonalities that were still there? In what ways had he changed? Bob began very much thinking about visual, like paintings. His pieces were big pictures with music. He became more and more involved with movement. Now when he does pieces, he’s really a choreographer. So there’s been a big shift in his work. So that means that, even as we come to work together, we have a totally intimate working relationship where I know how he works, I know how he thinks. But at the same time, his work has changed.

  And the same thing that happened with him has happened with me. When he began working with me, I was working with texts that were in foreign or dead languages, where the main event of the piece would not actually be the singing but would be the instruments. Eventually, I got involved with texts and words, and that led me to work with voices in a different way. Now the main event is the voice, not the instruments. That’s a big shift in what I’ve done.

  Now Bob and I have a familiarity with each other. At the same time, there are new things that we bring to the work. In the early pieces, Bob didn’t really care about the text. By the time we did The White Raven in 1989, we found a writer together. But what we did in Monsters of Grace, in 1997—he sent me a text, and I totally disregarded it. I simply picked a different text. I sent it to him and told him that this is the text we were using. It was okay with him. My point was that, as the composer, I had to set the words to the music. And I, for sure, had the primary responsibility for picking the words. On that basis, Bob deferred to me. That’s how Bob and I work. There are areas I take for my own. There are those he takes for his own. But we had also had the experience of spending years together so that we knew how each other worked.

  There is one thing I wanted to say at the beginning about how we develop—how do we get the training to do this work, and how do you learn to do music theater? With this audience, I think it’s worth talking about. It’s actually very simple. You spend lots of time in the theater. I decided from the very beginning to go to the rehearsals. For weeks I would sit in the theater with the director. I would watch the lighting designer work, the costumes being fitted. I would talk to the actors and the dramaturge. I wanted to know how many fittings it took to make the costumes, how the lighting worked. I visited the scene shops to see how everything is painted. I wanted to learn every part of the theater from top to bottom.

  I also got involved in the producing aspects of it: for example, how much it costs to build a set, how big a truck I needed to move it around. Maybe we could design it differently so the pieces came apart so it could fit into a smaller truck, so the costs were less. All these things became very practical. I often said to people that the theater composer—anyone who works in theater—you end up being the most practical person because you never have enough money, you have to make everything work, everything has to fit in a certain space, into certain time, everything has to fit in a certain budget. If you don’t do that, you don’t get your piece done.

  I was invited to do a piece for the Salzburg Festival, for their millennium, and I went to see the director of the festival. I asked him what I could do. He said that I could do whatever I liked and that this was the biggest festival in Europe. So I said I’d like to have an orchestra and a chorus. He said of course I could have that. Then I asked him if he had a children’s choir. He said yes, he did. Then I asked for four soloists. He said I coul
d have five! I never would have been able to do such a large work unless someone had said that I could do whatever I liked. This was my Symphony Number 5.

  It happened one other time. When I did The Voyage at the Met in 1992, I was talking to the designer, Bob Israel, with whom I had worked before. He was designing this amazing piece with spaceships flying around, appearing and disappearing. For the first eight minutes everyone’s flying in air! At one point I asked him what the budget was. And he answered that we didn’t have a budget. I almost fainted. That’s unheard of.

  I was just in Boston—I’m talking about doing a piece with two singers. Well, that’s another thing you should know, another thing that’s very important to understand about theater. Not only do you learn it from being in the theater, but you also begin to understand that there’s a tremendous flexibility into how big and how small pieces can be. I’ve done pieces where there are three singers. I’m doing a ninety-minute, continuously sung opera right now based on Kafka’s In the Penal Colony. It is scored for two singers and string quintet. It can be done in small theater. I discovered that a theater company might mount a small opera if they can fit it into their normal budget. It was performed six or eight times in Seattle. They have put it away, and maybe they’ll schedule it again next year. They’re doing it right now in Chicago, for eight performances a week for five weeks. These theaters are about as big as this room. We’re talking about two or three hundred people at most, more often 180, 190. In June, it will be done in a little theater in New York. They’ll do forty performances, too. So here’s an opera that’s being performed 120 times in one year, which is completely astonishing. By the way, it’s not a good idea to call these works chamber operas because people tend not to want to perform them. I simply call them pocket operas.