FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: February 27, 2015
CONTACT:
Rebecca Bailey, Publicity Coordinator/Writer
Hopkins Center for the Arts, Dartmouth College
603.646.3991
“Sound art” pioneer and Boston musicians team up for Rollins concert
Photos (from top): Alvin Lucier; The Callithumpian Consort. Photos courtesy of the artists.
HANOVER, NH—An adventurous contemporary music ensemble teams up with one of the pioneers of electro-acoustic music and sound installations for a concert on Thursday, April 30, at 7 pm, in Rollins Chapel, Dartmouth College.
The New England Conservatory-based Callithumpian Consort (“one of Boston's most intrepid and accomplished new music ensembles”—The Boston Globe) performs works by Alvin Lucier that mix acoustic sound and pure wave oscillations to create shimmering, ethereal soundscapes. The program includes the premiere of a work celebrating the founding role Lucier's father, a Dartmouth '18, played in the College’s first jazz ensemble; and Dartmouth emeritus faculty Christian Wolff's 1991 Kegama, for violin, clarinet/bass clarinet, cello, piano & percussion. Lucier performs with the ensemble on his works.
The concert is part of a four-day Dartmouth Department of Music residency by Lucier and the ensemble that includes class visits, a master class and more.
Featured regularly in concerts and museum exhibits, including a recent major exhibit at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, Lucier remains, at age 83, an active, challenging artist. “Few composers have altered the worlds of contemporary classical music and sound art like Alvin Lucier,” wrote The Chicago Reader. Wrote The New York Times, “Mr. Lucier…is not concerned with such traditional musical building blocks as melody, harmony, rhythm and timbre. What fires his imagination is the acoustical space in which sounds mingle and the effect a space has on the tones produced within it.”
Born in 1931 in Nashua, NH, educated at Yale, Brandeis and the Tanglewood Center, Lucier was a long-time member of the Wesleyan University faculty. He is known for compositions and installations that—in a manner that is both exacting as well as playfully curious—explore acoustic phenomena and auditory perception. Much of his work is influenced by science and explores the physical properties of sound itself: resonance of spaces, phase interference between closely tuned pitches, and the transmission of sound through physical media.
Although composing since the 1950s, Lucier began forming his own musical language while on a Fulbright scholarship in Europe in 1960-62. Joining the Brandeis faculty, he became friendly with a Brandeis physicist conducting brain wave experiments, who allowed Lucier to borrow his EEG equipment. From this came Lucier’s 1965 Music for Solo Performer, which used electrical signals generated by the alpha waves of his own brain to control an armada of percussion instruments—and introduced Lucier to an international following. From there, he went on to break other new ground in composition and performance, including the notation of performers' physical gestures, the generation of visual imagery by sound in vibrating media, and the evocation of room acoustics for musical purposes. His famous 1969 work I Am Sitting in a Room is one of several that explore the sonic qualities of a specific space—the performer reads and simultaneously records a text, then plays back the recording while simultaneously recording the playback, and so on.
Lucier’s recent works include a series of sound installations and works for solo instruments, chamber ensembles, and orchestra in which, by means of close tunings with pure tones, sound waves are caused to spin through space.
The Dartmouth program includes the world premiere of Hanover (1918), a new piece celebrating Lucier’s father’s role founding the antecedent of Dartmouth’s first jazz ensemble, scored for banjos, piano, violin, alto and tenor sax and drums; Lucier’s 1995 Still Lives, for piano and sine waves, a suite of eight short movements based in shapes of eight simple household objects; and his 1992 Letters, for clarinet, violin, cello and piano, an intimate and delightful piece derived by Lucier’s own method from the letters in a brief note to a friend. Rounding out the program is Christian Wolff’s Kegama, for violin, clarinet/bass clarinet, cello, piano & percussion. Wolff, an emeritus member of Dartmouth’s classics and music departments, started composing as a teenager in New York City and soon was commanding attention with music involving prolonged silences, detailed aural cues and creative ways of incorporating improvisation. Later works have an explicit political dimension, and many were composed during a long collaboration with choreographer Merce Cunningham.
Founded by pianist and conductor Stephen Drury in the 1980s, the Callithumpian Consort is a professional ensemble producing concerts of contemporary music at the highest standard. Flexible in size and makeup, its repertoire includes the classics of the last 100 years and new works in the avant-garde and experimental traditions. Lucier is among the composers the Consort has featured recently, premiering others of his works and making him the focus of a concert series in spring 2014.
RELEVANT LINKS
https://hop.dartmouth.edu/Online/alvin_lucier
http://www.callithumpian.org/
http://alucier.web.wesleyan.edu/
http://eamusic.dartmouth.edu/~wolff/
Download high-resolution photos:
https://hop.dartmouth.edu/Online/default.asp?doWork::WScontent::loadArticle=Load&BOparam::WScontent::loadArticle::article_id=A14ACB33-679C-469F-9E07-5A08469894E7&sessionlanguage=&SessionSecurity::linkName=
CALENDAR LISTING:
Alvin Lucier with the Callithumpian Consort
The New England Conservatory-based Callithumpian Consort performs works by Lucier, whose pioneering mixing of acoustic sound and pure wave oscillators creates shimmering, ethereal soundscapes. The program includes the premiere of a work celebrating the founding role Lucier’s father, a 1918 Dartmouth graduate, played in the College’s first jazz ensemble; and Still Lives, in which a pianist duets with sine waves meditatively tracing the shapes of common household items.
Thursday, April 30, 7 pm
Rollins Chapel, Dartmouth College, Hanover NH
$20, $10 Dartmouth students, general admission
Information: hop.dartmouth.edu or 603.646.2422
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Founded in 1962, the Hopkins Center for the Arts is a multi-disciplinary academic, visual and performing arts center dedicated to uncovering insights, igniting passions, and nurturing talents to help Dartmouth and the surrounding Upper Valley community engage imaginatively and contribute creatively to our world. Each year the Hop presents more than 300 live events and films by visiting artists as well as Dartmouth students and the Dartmouth community, and reaches more than 22,000 Upper Valley residents and students with outreach and arts education programs. After a celebratory 50th-anniversary season in 2012-13, the Hop enters its second half-century with renewed passion for mentoring young artists, supporting the development of new work, and providing a laboratory for participation and experimentation in the arts.