Alvin Lucier - Navigations for Strings/Small Waves

Mode 124

Though much of Lucier’s reputation in the general public rests on his masterpiece, ‘I Am Sitting In A Room’, the great majority of his work since then (1970) has been concerned with closely aligned pitches producing audible wave fluctuations. Sometimes the ambition to capture these arcane phenomena brings his music a bit closer to a science experiment than one would wish but on other occasions he succeeds in pulling something unexpected and magical out of the ether.

Happily, this disc is closer to the second extreme. The opening piece, ‘Navigations for Strings’ (performed by the Arditti Quartet), is based on Lucier’s observations and recordings of “sferics” (short for “atmospherics”), which usually manifest as crackling sounds in radio reception but sometimes take on the character of whistling, slightly varying, long tones. It’s these latter that Lucier seeks to transfer to music for string quartet, the players essentially playing a long (15-minute) drone while very subtly gliding between a handful of tones: B, A, B-flat, A-flat. Often, the shifts are too small to be heard by human ears, but the resultant interference patterns are picked up as pulsating waves. Science aside, the listener is bathed in a shimmering curtain of strings that (admittedly prompted by the composer’s notes) does seem evocative of isolated nights on the desert. Indeed, there’s something almost Partch-ian about its character and I sometimes likened it to an extended drone for Blo-Boy.

‘Small Waves’, a 56-minute work, invites pianist Hildegard Kleeb and trombonist Roland Dahinden into the performance (along with the Arditti Quartet) and each assumes the additional responsibility of manning six water vessels. Microphones are hung in these vessels, their signals routed through image-compressors and the resultant feedback broadcast back into the room where the performers attempt to replicate the electronic sound as closely as possible. As an added element, the water is sporadically poured from one container into another, changing the feedback mix. This continues the sort of investigations Lucier had been doing since the late 60s, most starkly in his pieces for sine waves and mallet instruments (‘Still and Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas’) where the emergent phenomena of wave interference take precedence over the contributions of the individual musicians. ‘Small Waves’ is sonically far richer and the electronic signals mixed low enough that one is often largely unaware of the actual source of the sounds one is hearing, giving the misleading impression of the acoustic instruments being somehow responsible for these tones. It’s quite a lovely journey, Dahinden’s trombone acting as foghorn, Kleeb’s piano as buoy bell for the softly shifting sea of the strings. In some ways, it’s the sort of piece you’d wish Gavin Bryars would be writing. Portions of Kleeb’s work (and a little of Dahinden’s) actually take on a surprisingly romantic mien, something quite attractively thrilling in an otherwise austere environment like this. For some, the length of the piece and its relatively unvarying character might prove wearying but for those willing to immerse themselves in it, letting the waves buffet and roll, it’s well worth the time. Next to “I Am Sitting In A Room”, a work in a world of its own anyway, ‘Small Waves’ might be Lucier’s most beautifully realized composition. A must-hear for anyone interested in his creations.