Alvin Lucier

Works
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Gentle Fire, Chambers, Reykjavík Memory Space
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Music on a long thin wire
Sound installation for audio oscillator
and electronic monochord (1977)
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Opera with objects (1997) for performers with resonating objects
Music for Solo Performer (1965) for enormously amplified brain waves and percussion
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Gentle Fire (1971)
Chambers (1968)
Reykjavík Memory Space (1970)
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Gentle Fire, Chambers, Reykjavík Memory Space
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Two circles for quintet (2012)
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Performances
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Opera with objects (1997) for performers with resonating objects
Music for Solo Performer (1965) for enormously amplified brain waves and percussion
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Alvin Lucier - "Music For Solo Performer" (1965)
Alvin Lucier - Music On A Long Thin Wire
Alvin Lucier was born in 1931 in Nashua, New Hampshire. He was educated in Nashua public and parochial schools, the Portsmouth Abbey School, Yale, and Brandeis and spent two years in Rome on a Fulbright Scholarship. From 1962 to 1970 he taught at Brandeis, where he conducted the Brandeis University Chamber Chorus which devoted much of its time to the performance of new music. Since 1970 he has taught at Wesleyan University where he is John Spencer Camp Professor of Music.
Lucier is a composer of experimental music and sound installations that explore acoustic phenomena and auditory perception. Lucier has pioneered in many areas of music composition and performance, including the notation of performers' physical gestures, the use of brain waves in live performance, the generation of visual imagery by sound in vibrating media, and the evocation of room acoustics for musical purposes. His 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.