Alvin Lucier 85th Birthday Festival

Zurich University of the Arts celebrated Alvin Lucier and his work on behalf of his 85th birthday in autumn 2016. ZHdK’s festivities were centered around three days of concerts, installations, workshops, and symposiums that featured Lucier and prominent figures such as Joan La Barbara, Charles Curtis, Stephen O’Malley, Oren Ambarchi, Gary Schmalzl, as well as many University students and faculty members spanning the disciplines of composition, music theory, musicology, sound studies, aesthetics, critical theory, and art history.

The festival was followed by the publication of a box set that includes four LPs (12"/180 gram), a CD, as well as a discursive publication of essays, interviews, scientific articles and archival photos edited by Bernhard Rietbrock.

Alvin Lucier Festival Box

Alvin Lucier

As one of the most important representatives of American music of the second half of the twentieth century, Alvin Lucier’s pioneering work is most notable for making what is normally inaudible audible, but also for his very idiosyncratic way of making the audible visible or spatially tangible.
Since the mid-1960s, Alvin Lucier has produced a range of important compositions that have influenced the culture of experimental music and the sonic arts. Lucier’s delicate and lyrical compositional legacy and his enduring engagement with the elusive characteristics of how sound materializes – with how acoustic mechanics are rediscovered, considered, and performed – still resonates. Lucier has pioneered 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 sensitivity to sound as a physical phenomenon and his attention to rich aural experience is often practiced through tactical, research-oriented strategies dedicated to contextual listening. A vital figure within experimental music, the compositions of Lucier highlight a general theory of sound, one suggestive of our entangled perceptual position in the sonic world, as well as our attempts to hear the yet-to-be heard.