An Open Call for Invention

In 1972, as a freshman at Wesleyan University, I signed up for “Introduction to Experimental Music” with the composer Alvin Lucier. It set the course of my life as a composer. This account of that year is an attempt to convey the aural and conceptual excitement—the sheer amazement of listening—to be found in a kind of music that even now strikes many audiences as baffling or actively annoying. 

On my second day at Wesleyan I met with the faculty adviser who had been assigned to me. Jon Barlow was a brilliant pianist, a Charles Ives scholar, and a polymath of extraordinary range. He listened patiently as I rattled off a list of alluring classes from a dozen different disciplines, then zeroed in on my mention of electronic music.

“Do you know the composer Alvin Lucier?”

I admitted I did not.

“Well, you should call him up. He makes music with bats.” 

I didn’t know if he meant flying mammals or Louisville Sluggers, but either way it caught my interest. I called Professor Lucier and was invited to his house on the edge of campus. This casual access was a surprise: my father was a professor at Columbia, but no undergraduate had ever set foot in our Manhattan apartment. Lucier’s living room suggested I had missed one hell of a party the night before, and I noted the absence of the obligatory composer’s piano. We made our introductions. He stuttered, which I naively assumed was hangover related. After a few minutes I proposed that I opt out of his introductory lecture course on the basis of a synthesizer class I’d taken over the summer. He was damningly diplomatic: “I’m sure you know much more about synthesizers than I do, but I like my students to be familiar with the music that’s already out there. I hate having to say the words, ‘that’s very nice, but it’s been done before.’” 

Chastened, I signed up for “Introduction to Experimental Music,” which was held in a large hall normally used for introductory lectures in the sciences: Lucier’s class was a popular gut for pre-meds and athletes. In his opening lecture he spoke about hearing the music of John Cage for the first time. It was the summer of 1960 and Lucier was in Venice on a Fulbright Fellowship. He had been writing what he described as “neo-classical music in a vaguely Stravinsky style” and had just bought some beautiful handmade manuscript paper on which to notate it. A friend called: “Come with us tonight, we’re going to hear this crazy composer John Cage at La Fenice. It should be a laugh.” 

When the lights at the opera house dimmed, the pianist David Tudor—a highly respected interpreter of contemporary music—ran down the aisle, jumped onto stage, slid under the piano, and started banging on the underside of the soundboard. Some minutes later, Cage rose up on a hydraulic lift, playing another piano and then turning on a radio. “The audience was furious,” Lucier told us, before inserting a dramatic pause. “For the next year I couldn’t write a note of music. My mind was a blank. I did nothing but eat pasta and drink red wine.” The manuscript paper sat untouched.

I have since heard many tales from other composers of Lucier’s generation about their own first encounter with Cage and the years of silent shock that followed. By the time Cage turned fifty, he had challenged fundamental assumptions about music and the roles of composer and performers. He embraced sounds many would have dismissed as noise. He invented methods of removing personal taste—the putative locus of artistic genius—from composition. He elevated impersonal sounds, like those of the natural world, to the same aesthetic level as the violin or piano. He pioneered the use of electronics in live performance. The list goes on and on. 

Twice a week for the next nine months I listened as Lucier played records and tapes, passed around scores, and talked. The material ran from around 1939 to the mid-1960s, focusing on the “New York School” of Earl Brown, Christian Wolff, Morton Feldman, and Cage. Feldman took issue with the serialist doctrine of octave equivalence (the idea that a C is a C is a C within the serial rule set, regardless of octave) and recognized that widely transposed intervals were ambiguous in terms of their relative consonance/dissonance. The result was music that—unlike Cage’s—always sounded beautiful. But every lecture on Cage was a revelation, from the earliest works for junkyard percussion to the unexpectedly romantic pieces for prepared piano, and the uncompromising 4’33”. (This “silent” composition had been premiered by Tudor in 1952 in a small chapel near Woodstock, New York—an event Alvin asserted was “the real Woodstock, not all those hippies naked in the mud.”) 

It was Cage’s Cartridge Music (1960) that resonated most profoundly with me. Earlier electronic music, like that of Pierre Schaeffer or Herbert Eimert, had usually been made by recording various sounds, slicing up the tape, and stitching it back together in a studio; performances, such as they were, consisted of playing the tape back from speakers on a stage. Everything, with the possible exception of the machine breaking down or an audience member coughing, had been determined in advance. There was no drama, no risk, no visceral evidence of thinking on one’s feet. 

Cartridge Music was the opposite. In place of sophisticated studios or synthesizers, Cage adapted the stylus cartridges from record players—something almost every American home had at the time—to act as contact microphones, and instructed players to replace the needle with anything that would fit in the opening: pipe cleaners, straws, guitar strings, Slinkies (this last was later adopted by Ben Burtt to create the iconic lightsaber sound for the first Star Wars movie).

Like the “instrument,” the score was built on the principle of adaptability: twenty sheets of paper covered in amoeba-like blobs, and an array of transparencies bearing forms like a clock face, polka dots, little circles, and dotted lines that might have been lifted from a pirate’s treasure map. By superimposing these sheets the performers created graphic charts that indicated when to insert and pluck at the pipe cleaners, springs, or whatever; how to adjust the loudness of each cartridge, and when to use another microphone as a secondary sound source. The volume could sometimes ratchet up loud enough to generate feedback, but Cage’s instructions dictate: “All events, ordinarily thought to be undesirable, such as feed-back, humming, howling, etc., are to be accepted.”

Instead of papers or exams, Alvin required each student to prepare a fifteen-minute realization of Cartridge Music and perform it live, which we did in the Wesleyan Faculty Club shortly before Thanksgiving. It was my electronic music concert debut and the performance verged on chaos. I loved the sounds, I loved Cage’s acceptance of the player as a partner in the preparation of the score, I loved his opening of the stage to nonmusicians by exchanging conventional instruments for consumer technology. I now understood that electronic music could be a performed music rather than the recorded output of a studio process. 

Wolff intrigued me almost as much as Cage. I was smitten with his “coordination scores” such as For 1, 2 or 3 People (1964), which “reduced the tempo to zero” (his words), replacing tempo-based notation—the familiar array of whole notes, half notes, quarter notes, and so on—with graphic symbols that specified when a musician might start and stop in relation to others: for example, “play after a previous sound has begun, hold till it stops.”

Home for the holiday, I rattled on to my parents about this exciting new music and mentioned that Wolff had, as a high school student in New York, approached Cage for composition lessons. (Cage later told me that they gave up after three lessons because Wolff “didn’t want to follow my assignments.”) 

My mother glanced up from the turkey. “Not little Christian Wolff?”

A brief genealogical tour of her German-Chilean family ensued (her ancestors had emigrated from Hamburg to Valparaíso in the nineteenth century to establish an import/export business). Christian’s parents were the eminent émigré publishers and editors Kurt and Helen Wolff. My great aunt Ena in Santiago was Helen Wolff’s sister, making Christian my cousin, at least by Chilean standards. When my mother had come north to the United States to study in the late 1940s, she had seen a lot of the Wolffs and their then-teenaged son. 

I was impressed and charmed by this connection, though it didn’t prevent me from misinterpreting Christian’s work. Child of the 1960s that I was, I saw the conductor-less democracy of his ensemble interaction as a harbinger of the left-wing texts and workers’ songs he began incorporating in his music soon after. Later, when I began learning computer programming, those same pieces struck me as a kind of proto–computer music, given the similarity of his instructions to logical operations. Eventually, Christian kindly disabused me of both ideas: he had developed his notational system when a time-strapped student at Harvard, looking for an efficient way to produce a rhythmic complexity that would otherwise take hours of painstaking work to score conventionally. It was just one of my many misunderstandings—some useful, some not—that first year with Alvin.

The second term brought us from the Sixties to the present day, examining composers of Alvin’s generation who had been affected by Cage: Terry Riley, La Monte Young, Pauline Oliveros, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Robert Ashley, Gordon Mumma, David Behrman, and Alvin. Postwar European music was better documented and more widely taught, but Alvin focused on the New World, especially the New York “Downtown” music (mostly performed in lofts below Fourteenth Street) in contrast to the fare I had encountered in my New York uptown adolescence. Many of these composers were described as “minimalist” for their penchant for stretching a small amount of musical material to extreme lengths (a tendency I interpreted as a reaction against the overwrought complexity of late serialism). A prime example of durational minimalism is La Monte Young’s Composition 1960 #7, whose score consists, in its entirety, of the interval of a perfect fifth and the instruction “to be held for a long time.” The instrumentation downtown often deviated from the conventional ensembles of the time: electric organs instead of pianos, homemade circuits in lieu of violins. Most of what we heard that semester had been composed within the previous five or ten years. This music was not just new to me, it was new, period.

Alvin was a member of the rather grandly titled Sonic Arts Union, a quartet of composers that also included Ashley, Behrman, and Mumma. They had joined forces in 1966 but had never been an ensemble in the usual sense: they did not perform repertoire as instrumentalists. Instead, each composer presented his own work, sometimes solo, sometimes assisted by the others. They shared equipment like amplifiers and speakers, but unlike the Beatles or the Budapest String Quartet, their collective identity was secondary to that of the individual members. Lucier’s music revolved around acoustical phenomena such as architectural resonance; Ashley worked with voice, giving equal weight to its physicality and the literary content conveyed; Behrman used simple circuits and feedback networks in group performances that balanced control and chaos. Mumma built complex circuits that might interact with conventional instruments, producing intermittent shrieks, for instance, in response to his French horn playing. 

For a teenager with adventurous ears, it felt like surfing the crest of a paradigm shift in the very idea of music itself. As Behrman explained, “established techniques were thrown away and the nature of sound was dealt with from scratch.” The methods fascinated me as much as the resulting sounds. I heard it as an open call for invention. 

In talking about the many young composers whose conservatory-instilled cosmologies had been shattered by Cage, Alvin pointed to a collective impulse to “return music to the year zero”—to scrutinize music’s most fundamental assumptions. He offered a parable about Philip Glass. After graduating from Juilliard and receiving a Fulbright scholarship, Glass went off to France to study with Nadia Boulanger, the legendarily demanding teacher of formal compositional technique. In the midst of his struggles he was hired to help with the score Ravi Shankar was writing for Conrad Rooks’s film Chappaqua (1967). Glass’s task was to listen to Shankar and tabla player Alla Rakha perform, and transcribe what he heard so they could be recreated by a French orchestra. Like most Westerners at the time, Glass knew nothing about Indian music, and his attempts to pin down the intricate rhythmic structures using traditional staff notation were frustrating for everyone until he finally removed the bar lines between measures. For Boulanger this would be an unthinkable act, but Glass could now see the repeated patterns endemic in Indian music. He has spoken about the liberating influence this had on his own compositional trajectory.

Alvin’s version of this story added (or possibly invented) a detail missing from Glass’s own account. The rules of Western counterpoint had been laid down by Johann Joseph Fux’s 1725 textbook (followed by Boulanger and still in use today), in which one of the most important rules was “no parallel fifths.”¹ Noticing the prevalence of those intervals in the orchestrations Shankar suggested, Glass pointed out that this wasn’t allowed, and Shankar responded that Indian musicians had been playing parallel fifths for thousands of years.

Glass asked himself what would happen if he went back to Fux’s directive and did the opposite: instead of no parallel fifths, use only parallel fifths. He derived a new compositional technique from this contrarian starting point and, in 1973, released an LP with the first results, Music in Fifths (1969) and Music in Similar Motion (1969). The story of how those pieces came about may be apocryphal, but it aptly illustrated the willingness to reinvent musical assumptions in that heady time. Glass rewrote counterpoint from its own year zero and let a new species evolve from one critical mutation. 

Alvin’s year zero had caused him to reconsider not just what constituted acceptable intervals or instrumentation but the most basic phenomenon of aural experience—the meeting of physical acoustics and biological perception. His 1969 composition Vespers carries a poignant and expansive subtitle:

For any number of players who would like to pay their respects to all living creatures who inhabit dark places and who, over the years, have developed acuity in the art of echolocation, i.e., sounds used as messengers which, when sent out into the environment, return as echoes carrying information as to the shape, size, and substance of that environment and the objects in it.

Using “Sondols” (echolocation devices developed as navigational aids for the blind in the 1960s), the performers in Vespers navigate a dark room by sound while blindfolded (hence the bat allusion in my first advisory meeting). Lucier had taken sound back to before a composer’s year zero, before human notions of music, to its use by prehominid flying sonic virtuosi. 

The physical structure of any space, indoors or out, is friendlier to some frequencies of sound than others: some are absorbed and die away quickly, others ricochet longer. When you hold a conch up to your ear, what you hear is the white noise of wind and surf filtered by the shell’s cavity to emphasize certain resonant frequencies. 

In his best-known work, Alvin explained this phenomenon while allowing it to subsume his voice. I am sitting in a room (1969) bounces his recorded text back and forth between two tape machines, playing and rerecording the sound through a speaker and microphone in a room, recycling the words as the resonant frequencies of the architecture reshape the speech into mellifluous gongs and whistles—“musical” sounds for sure, but as much “echoes carrying information” as the minimal clicks of Vespers—while at the same time charting the inexplicable journey from prose to song, from explanation to experience.

My childhood had involved little musical training—no piano, no church choir—but I had spent innumerable twilights in Chilean Aprils and Cape Cod Augusts observing bats with fascination. In New York there was a family sport (both my parents being architectural historians) of spotting the distinctive terracotta tiling and listening to the unique acoustics of the architectural vaults built by the engineering firm of Rafael Guastavino.² Alvin’s example affirmed the advice I had received from the one composer I knew in high school: “There is no ‘correct’ musical background.” It was possible to make musical—or at least sonic—works about the things that fascinated me. I wanted to be a composer, and Alvin handed me a toolbox I understood. 

He taught me how to listen—not just to music, but to the acoustical phenomena that underlie and precede it. By the end of the year, whenever I entered a bathroom I could hum its resonant frequency, no doubt from recognizing, subconsciously, the filtering of my footfall in a hard-tiled space. My parents had taught me the importance of spotting details: a herringbone pattern in masonry, the trifoliate horror of poison ivy. Alvin shifted my attention from seeing to hearing.

Even now, despite the declining high-frequency response of older ears, I find I am ever more sensitive to architectural interference with ambient sound. When I lie in bed in the morning I notice the acoustic changes that accompany my wife’s closing the door to the adjacent bathroom. On the landing outside our apartment I hear the space expand when the elevator door opens. Clicking the car’s key fob in a parking garage, I visualize the wave front of the beep as it spreads away, rebounds off distant walls, superimposes on itself, then slowly decays into the ambient noise, like the ripples in a pond or physics lab wave tank. 

Alvin’s approach to teaching—drawing largely from his own experiences—dovetailed nicely with the oral pedagogy of Wesleyan’s World Music program. There were other universities around the country where you could study the musicology of India or Japan or Indonesia from books and recordings. At Wesleyan, however, you could learn to play the sitar, shakuhachi, or bonang through one-on-one lessons with a master musician, whose own training had often been primarily or entirely oral. When I began studying tabla, Sharda Sahai instructed me by reciting bols, the North Indian rhythmic equivalent of solfège.

Alvin illustrated his first-hand accounts with tape recordings from his own collection, often given to him by fellow composers, since there were few records available. He handed out scores photocopied from hand-drawn drafts. In the absence of textbooks, he passed around issues of Source: Music of the Avant Garde, a journal published irregularly from 1967 to 1973 that featured scores and essays submitted by emerging artists. Most importantly, Alvin arranged for other composers to visit, deploying his students to meet them at the bus station, drive them around, tech their concerts, and listen to their stories. (The only regular coverage of such work in mainstream media was Tom Johnson’s column in The Village Voice, which I read religiously.)

Lacking any unifying theoretical dicta about this music, we were left to our own devices to connect the dots—to consider how (or whether) works such as Music in Fifths and Vespers linked to each other or to the larger histories of music. We were asked to listen, perceive, and think for ourselves. I was fascinated by the question of how composers made decisions, how tightly or loosely they tried to control what happened, how they envisaged (or not) the probable outcome. I came to see each piece of music as arising somewhere on a spectrum that runs from aspirational randomness to unfettered personal choice. Cage’s use of chance methods (shuffled transparencies, star maps and, most famously, the I Ching) to remove personal preference lived at one end, while at the other lay the kind of “free improvisation” I would come to know through the performances of the British guitarist Derek Bailey or the AMM group. Terry Riley’s In C (1964)—whose score is a single sheet of paper bearing fifty-three short riffs that can be repeated any number of times by each of the players before proceeding to the next—sat somewhere in the middle, evoking a jazz chart and a skipping record in equal measure. 

Nearby Riley lay structures like those Sol LeWitt alluded to when he wrote “the idea is the machine that makes the art”: mechanisms and methods that point to themselves, not just to their output. Fugue, serial form, and twelve-bar blues are familiar examples of machines for making musical art (admittedly with considerable human intervention), but the music Alvin played introduced a panoply of new ones—systems and processes that stepped up to replace the old engines of instinct, taste, and tradition, with which I had always felt uncomfortable.

There was music with no discernible melody, harmony, or rhythm (such as Behrman’s Wave Train, 1965), and music that used impossibly long sounds (La Monte Young) or equally all-consuming rests (4’33”). And while music is reflexively celebrated for its manipulation of emotion, this new music allowed for objective and perceptual phenomena—physics, zoology, neurology—to motivate structures, as in Maryanne Amacher’s use of psychoacoustic effects, like “difference tones” (phantom pitches produced by interference between loud sounds) that induce music for the inner ear. 

There were “task scores,” from which music emerged as the byproduct or trace of a seemingly arbitrary process, rather than as the intentional output of inherently musical actions: in Vespers, for example, the sounds arise from trying to avoid bruising your shin, rather than play a beautiful note. There were “impossible scores” where sounds emerged from the failure to execute a difficult act properly: Tom Johnson’s Risks for Unrehearsed Performers (1977) supplied instrumental virtuosi with a series of instructions that escalated in difficulty until skill reached its inevitable limit and the player was forced to give up.

In “circuit-as-score” compositions, musical decisions were shared with electronic circuits (exemplified by the work of David Tudor, who eventually gave up piano to devote himself entirely to electronic work). New musical forms might arise from capabilities and limitations intrinsic to a piece of technology and later be extracted to live on as independent sonic structures—for example, Steve Reich’s compositions for tape loops such as Come Out (1966), which led to his phase music for purely acoustic ensembles (Piano Phase, 1967).

Alvin’s Vespers was composed for the behavior of sounds after they left the instruments, attuning audiences to how sound propagated and transformed in space. In her Sonic Meditations (1971) Pauline Oliveros turned listening itself into an immersive activity that erased the distinction between performer and audience. Notions about where and when music happened were being challenged by the emerging fields of sound art, installations, and video, led by artists such as Annea Lockwood, Max Neuhaus, and Nam June Paik.

Many of the scores we studied did not tell you how things would sound. Reading the score of a Bach prelude, a musically literate person can imagine the moment-to-moment progression of notes in their mind’s ear, but the magic of I am sitting in a room is that the flow of sounds you will hear cannot be predicted from its instructions. Most of these pieces were lumped under the label “Experimental Music,” differentiating them from the dominant styles of “Contemporary Music” such as Karlheinz Stockhausen or Charles Wuorinen, and at the same time acknowledging their openness to the arrival of the unexpected, even from a fixed set of instructions. Some composers took exception to the term, coined by Cage, but to me it made sense. Obviously this music was not experimental in the scientific sense of pitting an established hypothesis against a neatly delimited set of variables, but in the woolier sense of “and what if…?” 

Even within experimentalism, foundational concepts arose that multiple people adopted. Big ideas like “take a sound from one place and put it in another,” “do one thing for a very long time,” “slow something down a lot,” and “do something backwards” were treated as exercises, points of departure, or new forms to replace more familiar ones like the sonata or blues. Just the way many different pieces of music might share the same form, instruments, key, or time signature, Amacher and Lockwood and others all made pieces that transposed acoustic environments with phone lines. Occasionally someone might lay claim to one of these big ideas as a personal invention, but most understood that it was always going to be the specific manifestation of an idea—what it sounded like, how it played out—that counted. (As Robert Ashley once told me, “I’d rather see an old idea done well than a new one done badly.”)

When I was a kid I had loved the wayward machines of Jean Tinguely and the mechanistic mayhem of Rube Goldberg. These novel musical methods had a similarly willful indirection, upending efficiency in the name of surprise and discovery. Moreover, many of these “machines for making music” had moving parts that could be observed, and there was pleasure in that. I’ve always been a fairly monophonic person. Musically, I think in terms of horizontal lines, not vertical harmonies. Most of these compositions made a point of revealing their structure and content in a linear manner. I could follow their naked causality more easily than I could the artfully shrouded voices in a fugue. This music put me at ease.

Of course, things were not quite as simple as I thought that inspirational first year. What I took to be a world of new musical thought was the product of a remarkably small group of people—almost all of the same sex, ethnicity, social class, and educational background. The fact that Pauline Oliveros was the only woman whose work Alvin played or discussed that year was something I only noticed in retrospect. I had little to go on beyond what Alvin told me, what I read in Rolling Stone or the Voice, and what I heard on weekend jaunts to The Kitchen in New York, and these all reinforced the same unremarked systemic disparity. I recently dug out the 1972 class roster for Alvin’s course: it was 90 percent male and entirely white. I did not ask why experimental music appeared to be a mostly white male scene until years later. 

My other belated, road-to-Damascus moment had to do with my fundamental assumption about experimentalism itself. Yes, you can make a piece “about” anything, but if it’s going to work as music you cannot ignore musicality—those ineffable characteristics that make one piece live on in memory while another is forgotten. Numberless pop songs from my childhood share similar chord progressions, but only some are still being whistled by me now. When Alvin spoke about taking music back to the year zero, he didn’t mean it had to stay there: Glass may have thrown out the old rules of counterpoint, but he created new ones, mapping a fresh fork in the musical road and following it. Everyone was looking for a way through the rubble left by the soundless explosion of 4’33”, but the most successful pathways retained some axiomatic musical material underfoot: the harmonic series, a rhythm that inspires a bodily response, a perceptible structure, a familiar sound—a hook. The conceptual artist Mel Bochner once pointed out, “there is no art that does not bear some burden of physicality.” For composers it’s a burden of musicality.

Alvin wasn’t concerned with the creation of sound inside a circuit or computer; he was focused on what happened once it was moving through the room, when it was more difficult to control or predict. “I’m not so interested in sounds themselves,” he once said. “I’m interested in their reflections.” The clicks a Sondol emits are boring, he admitted. The music lies in their reflections, and the soul of Vespers is found therein: an homage to the pragmatic sonic genius of the bat, for whom the returning echo contains what really matters. 

Likewise, the sonic and literary qualities of the initial reading of the text in I am sitting in a room are unremarkable, but the words’ cumulative reflections eventually yield a musical masterpiece. In Music for Solo Performer (1965), Lucier’s breakthrough composition after his post–La Fenice impasse, greatly amplified brain waves are channeled through numerous loudspeakers placed on drums. The twelve hertz alpha waves are barely audible themselves, but as they bounce off a drumhead they play the instrument like a stick would. 

Years later, in John Lanchester’s short story “Reality,” I read this memorable evocation of the power of such acoustic reflections:

Ilona’s father had been a poker player in his youth (a very good one, according to him), and he had once said that the best way of telling whether someone was telling the truth was to listen not to what they were saying, or even the tone of their voice, but their echoes. The voices would often be lifted, bright, happy, joking. The echoes sounded flat and angular and full of silences; full of holes, contradictions, meanings that weren’t supposed to be there.