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Sospeso collaborates
with composer Alvin Lucier in his
latest sound installation at Engine 27, to be exhibited in Spring
2004.
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
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.
Mr. Lucier performs,
lectures and exhibits his sound installations extensively in the
United States, Europe and Asia. He has visited Japan twice: in 1988
he performed at the Abiko Festival, Tokyo, and installed MUSIC ON
A LONG THIN WIRE in Kyoto; in 1992 he toured with pianist Aki Takahashi,
performing in Kawasaki, Yamaguchi and Yokohama. In 1990-91 he was
a guest of the DAAD Kunstler Program in Berlin. In January 1992,
he performed in Delhi, Madras, and Bombay, and during the summer
of that year was guest composer at the Time of Music Festival in
Vitaasari, Finland. He regularly contributes articles to books and
periodicals. His own book, Chambers, written in collaboration
with Douglas Simon, was published by the Wesleyan University Press.
In addition, several of his works are available on Cramps (Italy),
Disques Montaigne, Source, Mainstream, CBS Odyssey, Nonesuch, and
Lovely Music Records.
In October,
1994, Wesleyan University honored Alvin Lucier with a five-day festival,
Alvin Lucier: Collaborations, for which he composed twelve new works,
including Theme, based on a poem by John
Ashbery, and Skin, Meat, Bone, a collaborative theater
work with Robert Wilson. In April, 1997, Lucier presented a concert
of his works on the Making Music series at Carnegie Hall and in
October of the same year his most recent sound installation, Empty
Vessels, was exhibited at the Donaueschingen Music Festival
in Germany. Recently, Diamonds, for three orchestras was
performed under the direction of Petr Kotik at the Prague Spring
Festival, 1999.
In March 1995,
Reflections/Reflexionen, a bi-lingual edition of Lucier's
scores, interviews and writings was published by MusikTexte, Koln.
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