‘. . . and what they do as they’re going . . .
’:
sounding space in the work of Alvin Lucier
RANDAL DAVIS
40 Owen Street, #E7 Hartford, CT 860.233.3866, USA
E-mail: rdavis36@snet.net
This paper considers the early work of Alvin Lucier and
its often problematic positioning between concert and
installation work as a means of questioning how installation
might be defined. Following an introductory survey of
Lucier’s work, a history of installation in the visual arts is
traced through the debate, initiated by Michael Fried, on the
‘theatricality’ of minimalism. Fried’s condemnation of the
role of the viewer in what he termed ‘literalist’ art became,
contrary to his intentions, a central element in thinking about
installation work. Fried’s position was recently engaged
again by Hal Foster in positing a particular phenomenology
of minimalist work, which is seen to be directly relevant to
the example of Lucier. Having thus established the relevance
of this phenomenology to the consideration of sound
installations, whether they are themselves minimal works or
not, discussion returns to the problematic example of Lucier,
and the conclusion that the boundary between concert and
installation works may always be permeable, that a precise
morphology of installation will remain elusive.
1. INTRODUCTION
The title of this paper is taken from a conversation
between Alvin Lucier and Michael Parsons:
But what interests me is sound moving from its
source out into space, in other words what the
three-dimensional hall is. Because sound waves,
once they’re actually produced, they have to go
somewhere, and what they do as they’re going
interests me a lot. (Parsons 1995: n.p.)
This is, in one way, an unremarkable statement of
physical fact – although, it should also be acknow-
ledged, one perhaps too often forgotten. The propaga-
tion of sound is inevitably a dynamic phenomenon,
and intrinsically spatialised. This is no more evidently
the case for Lucier than, say, for Liszt.
To make too much, however, of this seeming com-
monality is, finally, not helpful and may, in fact, need-
lessly mystify efforts to understand sound installation.
Thus I also refer in my title to ‘sounding space’, which
may be taken in several senses: first, in the sense of
an exploration, an essay of the characteristics of an
acoustic space; and second, a more powerful sense,
that an installation project is, in some certain way,
indissociable from its environment, that is, in causing
Organised Sound 8(2): 205–212 © 2003 Cambridge University Press. Printed in the United Kingdom.
the space ‘to sound’. Both of these interpretations –
one might more appropriately call them ‘resonances’
– have direct meaning in Lucier’s work, and it is
the particular mode of Lucier’s interest that is of
concern here, specifically as it has to do with how the
morphology and, even, the phenomenology, of sound
installation may be understood.
Alvin Lucier (b. 1931, Nashua, NH, USA) has, in
a body of widely recognised work beginning in 1965,
with Music for a Solo Performer, consistently held
a position of eminence as an innovative figure in
live electronic music. Lucier has been no less signifi-
cant in creating a body of work which both clarifies
and problematises the understanding of what ‘sound
installation’ might consist. This double movement,
one might say, is found throughout his work. His offi-
cial biography, as published by Wesleyan University,
where he has taught for some years, notes that he has:
. . . pioneered in many areas of music composition
and performance, including the notation of per-
formers’ 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.
This brief statement, though, rather more confounds
than distinguishes concert and installation works. I
think this difficulty derives not at all from evasiveness
on the part of the composer but instead serves an
accurate measure of the diffidence such distinction
imposes.
A conversation between Lucier and Thomas Moore
in 1983 made the differentiation, or lack of same,
manifest (Moore 1983: n.p.):
TM: You do have an installation down at the
Corcoran later this month.
AL: Yeah, right.
TM: Or, no, it’s next month . . .
AL: Yeah, uh-huh.
DOI: 10.1017/00000000000000000
206 Randal Davis
TM: . . . which is the Pure Waves, Bass Drum and
Acoustic Pendulum piece.
AL: Which I’m playing this evening as a concert
piece.
In this case, it is evident that (to give its full title) Music
for Pure Waves, Bass Drums and Acoustic Pendulums
(1980) existed for Lucier as both, though presump-
tively in some way different, concert and installation
works.
Much later, in a talk at the Zeitgleich symposium
(1994), Lucier referred to Music on a Long Thin Wire
(1977) as ‘my first sound installation’. This would, on
the face of it, appear to establish a primacy trumping
at least some of the ambiguities in his earlier discussion
with Moore of Music for Pure Waves, Bass Drums
and Acoustic Pendulums. However, interestingly, the
published score of Music on a Long Thin Wire refers
explicitly throughout to its ‘performance’, no less the
conversation with Douglas Simon which accompanied
the first publication of the score, in consistently refer-
ring to ‘playing’ the work in what are explicitly ‘con-
certs’ and ‘performances’ – no mention is made of it
as an installation project (Lucier 1980: 160–70).
Again, the uncertainties here are no measure of
ingenuousness on the part of Lucier. At the same time,
they cannot but occasion a thorough review of the
body of work with specific respect to these questions.
The differentiation of ‘concert’ and ‘installation’
seems, in these cases, at the very least, permeable.
2. EARLY WORKS
Music for Solo Performer is undoubtedly one of
Lucier’s signature works, and surely deserved of sus-
tained attention – this exposition, however, substan-
tially omits it from consideration. Its performance
makes, beyond doubt, an extraordinary spectacle, as
the performer activates, by means of hugely amplified
brain waves, sympathetic resonances in an ensemble
of percussion instruments. Despite its significance on
any number of levels of critical and musicological
inquiry, for the purposes of this discussion, Music for
Solo Performer remains a decidedly concert piece. One
might, for example, consider it a large-scale instan-
tiation of Cage’s view of the prepared piano as a
percussion ensemble under the control of a single per-
former, to paraphrase the suggestion of his 1948 career
precis, A Composer’s Confessions (Cage 1993: 36). Or,
more broadly, pace Ravel, a concerto for left brain.
Lucier’s other early, no less signature work, I am
sitting in a room (1969), poses a very different set of
questions. Imminently suggestive of what the com-
poser himself has called his abiding interest ‘in the
poetry of what we used to think of as science’ (Lucier
1980: 169), I am sitting in a room subjects a short
fragment of spoken text to repeated playbacks and
re-recordings by a microphone placed in the room, a
process activating the acoustic characteristics of the
performance space itself. As recorded by the com-
poser, the text used also specifically, and reflexively,
describes the circumstance of performance (Lucier
1980: 30), beginning:
I am sitting in a room, different than the one you
are in now.
I am recording the sound of my speaking voice, and
I am going to play it back into the room again and
again until the resonant frequencies of the room
reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my
speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is
destroyed.
What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant
frequencies of the room articulated by speech.
I am sitting in a room appears, in this preliminary
view, a concert work, its performance practice quite
perfectly embodying the qualities of Steve Reich’s
Music as a Gradual Process, from 1968:
The distinctive thing about musical processes is
that they determine all the note-to-note (sound-
to-sound) details and the overall form simulta-
neously . . . I am interested in perceptible processes.
I want to be able to hear the process happening
throughout the sounding music. To facilitate
closely detailed listening a musical process should
happen extremely gradually. (Reich 1974: 9)
Yet, what do we mean here by ‘performance’? If
‘performance’ is understood as what results when a
performer follows the instructions of the score, then
I am sitting in a room is clearly a ‘concert’ work, as
the activities by the notional ‘performer’ to achieve
a ‘performance’ are clearly specified and essentially
invariant from circumstance to circumstance.
This would be consistent with the general example
offered by the mathematician Spencer-Brown, in sug-
gesting a certain equivalence between cookery and
composition – the taste, to restate his argument, of a
cake may be indescribable, but the steps to achieve the
result are readily demarcable, called the ‘recipe’, and
so, he suggests, with composition, where the replica-
tion of the composer’s gestures (i.e. notation) then
replicates an experience (Spencer-Brown 1972: 77).
This is fine on the face of it, and even of perhaps
broad relevance, but is nonetheless presumptive.
Indeed, I am sitting in a room appears to offer a strik-
ing, perhaps definitive, counter-example. It is intrinsic
to this composition that the result of arbitrarily con-
sidered identical actions in different spaces cannot
but produce radically different results due to the dif-
fering acoustic properties of the spaces. If, therefore,
‘performance’ is understood to refer to the listener’s
experience, the ‘taste of the cake’, as Spencer-Brown

would have it, I am sitting in a room appears much
more like, within the still general framework of our
differentiation, an installation work, i.e. one whose
experience is inseparable from the specific physicality
of its instantiation.
This is not simply a matter of the fine parsing of
semantics. I am sitting in a room, like the later Music
for Pure Waves, Bass Drums and Acoustic Pendulums
and Music on a Long Thin Wire, also seems to allow a
range of realisations which would readily encompass
installations, as the score also notes the possibility of
‘mak[ing] versions in which one recorded statement is
recycled through many rooms’ (Lucier 1980: 31).
This allowance raises still more very interesting
questions. If, for example, one assumes the audience
to be fixed in their [various] room[s], what we obtain
in this multiple realisation is the performance of
a ‘concert’ piece, provisos above notwithstanding, in
which the audience[s] will hear very different results.
If, though, the audience is mobile through these varied
environments, the inevitable multiplicity of this
experience would seem to move I am sitting in a
room decisively toward being an installation work.
Lucier himself seems to have responded to some of
the implications of his own instruction with the sub-
sequent Quasimodo the Great Lover (1970); it should
be noted here, as a point of reference, that the scores
thus far under discussion are all entirely verbal, and
their allowances, for example, of alternative possibili-
ties for realisation are not, therefore, marginalia, but
explicit to the published score.
Quasimodo, ‘for any person who wishes to send
sounds over long distances . . . to capture and carry
to listeners far away the acoustic characteristics of
the environments through which they travel’ (Lucier
1980: 55) is, in one sense, clearly and directly related
to I am sitting in a room. Employing the same basic
principle, that of the room as a resonant filter, Lucier’s
score describes, as one example, the passage of sound
through a building, in and out of rooms, corridors,
stairwells, and so on; the iterative process of the
earlier work is, in Quasimodo, made, though perhaps
labyrinthine, linear.
Or is it? The relation between I am sitting in a room
and Quasimodo might seem, at least in summary, to
enact something like the familiar distinction of syn-
chronic and diachronic structuration. I am sitting in a
room, at least in its restricted ‘concert’ version, would
appear decidedly diachronic, its process reflecting an
explicitly stepwise causality. The spatial extension of
Quasimodo, a literal chain of audio systems, quite
complicates the perception of causality.
Again, the score is suggestive in this regard with its
possibilities for realisation. Lucier first allows that
‘performers’ and ‘listeners’ may be absolutely sepa-
rate, with the instruction that performers, ‘isolated
[emphasis added] from the listeners at the last stage,
‘. . . and what they do as they’re going . . .’ 207
sing or whistle, or play any . . . instrument through the
system’ (Lucier 1980: 56).
And, again, certain deep questions present them-
selves. In this circumstance, a listener, notionally iso-
lated at the ‘last stage’, would have knowledge neither
of the originary sound materials nor of the acoustic
characteristics of the intervening environments; of
course, by direct implication, interestingly enough, the
performers themselves might have no knowledge of
the final sounding result of their performance. This is
an unusual circumstance and one, it should be noted,
that would seem to defy Reich’s definition of music as
process.
The concluding paragraph of the score of Quasi-
modo, however, bears quotation here in its entirety:
Systems may be set up in public or private places on
permanent or semi-permanent bases for people to
move through and use freely. Ambient events, such
as footsteps, door slams, and explosions may also
be welcomed for processing. (Lucier 1980: 57)
This final provision is, in one sense, clearly contra-
dictory to the distinction of the score’s earlier
specification of a separation between originary and
final stages. No less clearly, a situation in which
a listener may ‘move through and use freely’ these
discrete environments is a specifically synchronic
environment.
The allowance that the listener may ‘use freely’ these
sounding results, which may also incorporate ‘ambient
events’ is deeply marked, of course, by the influence of
Cage. Though Cage thematised this somewhat differ-
ently throughout his career, it served as something
very much like a constant; in the language of his later
years, as in Music Without Horizon Soundscape That
Never Stops (1991), this was the recognition that
‘structure now in my work has given way to process
just as a table would give way to the weather’ (Cage
1993: 278).
3. THE PROBLEMATICS OF INSTALLATION
I have, to this point, used the terms ‘installation’ and
‘concert works’ rather loosely; this, first, to suggest
how permeable the boundary between the two is in
Lucier’s music and, no less, to anticipate how difficult
reliable differentiation may be in any case. Installation
works have been, one may readily assert, a com-
monplace in the visual arts of at least the past three
decades. Deriving from the ‘post-studio’ practices of
minimalism and post-minimalism, installation works
were, at least initially, often defined via negativa – that
is, not painting, not sculpture, and so on, an operation
characteristic of such otherwise distinct examples
as the disordered order of Robert Morris’ ‘scatter’
pieces and the ordered disorder of Robert Smithson’s
‘site/non-site’ projects.
208 Randal Davis
The practice of installation art is manifestly not sin-
gular, but instead plural – and, I should go so far as to
suggest, perhaps irreducibly so. To the extent that this
is true, and I believe it so to a considerable extent, the
project of a unified history of installation practice will
prove elusive, whether with respect to visual or audio
art. It might, then, follow that it would be similarly
difficult to identify a primary impulse to the practice –
a ‘source’, if you will. Yet, in fact, if figured in suf-
ficiently broad terms, it is not so difficult to find such
an impulse, this evidently consisting of the activation
of the entirety of the space as, if not an active element
of the work, at least then as the site for an immersive
experience. Put differently, this primary impulse is one
which undermines the easy distinction of work and
environment.
The artist Jessica Stockholder expressed this well in
Parallel Parking, written in 1993:
My work doesn’t have a frame, in the usual sense,
nor a pedestal. But it often relies on its status as
art to be a gestalt; it would otherwise not exist as
a separate entity among everything else. Each piece
relies on its context for definition and also on the
idea of ‘frame’ that we all carry with us . . . There
is an important contradiction here – the frame,
though it is only an abstraction, functions to hold
the work apart from real time, and remove it to
an elevated timelessness; but to the extent that the
viewer participates in framing the work, the frame
becomes part of real time, part of life.
Stockholder is doubtless correct that there is at least
one, if not several, problems here. Spencer-Brown has
reasonably argued in his logical calculus that, to make
a distinction, the contents of the field being so distin-
guished must be said to differ in value, ‘in a world
where, in the first place, the boundaries can be drawn
anywhere we please’ (Spencer-Brown 1972: v).
And thus we encounter, if not contradiction in its
strict meaning, a paradox of self-reference at the very
least. That is, if installation practice is properly dis-
tinct from other art practices, say, painting or sculp-
ture, it is distinct only because it fails or, perhaps
more accurately, refuses, to make certain distinctions
necessary to differentiate it from, as Stockholder says,
‘everything else’.
So, again, one has not moved decisively away from
the via negativa – a presumption of the propriety
of site constitutes at least an implicit, if not explicit
denial of the uniqueness of the art object. This is, on
the one hand, simple enough. We might well, for
example, see a painting or sculpture in a particular
exhibition, and subsequently encounter it in some
other circumstance; that change of context may well
carry profound consequences for our apperception,
but is unlikely to compel the conclusion that the work
itself was somehow different.
Works, therefore, in the broadest sense, are under-
stood to be portable in a way which installations are
not. On the surface, this seems clear enough, though it
sets aside consideration of ‘works’ which may also be
intrinsically fixed to a site – in this regard, one might
regard Margaret Wertheim’s reading of Giotto’s
Arena Chapel as an installation work, ‘the medieval
equivalent of virtual reality’ (Wertheim 1999: 74) to
be most suggestive.
One could, quite reasonably, respond to this by
stipulating Giotto an installation artist, and drawing
from that the conclusion that installation has far more
permeated artistic practice than imagined, and our
failure to recognise this would, therefore, be histori-
cally explicable as an artifact of reliance on implicitly,
if not explicitly, formalist models. This may well be
true, but there is, in any case, nothing particularly
revelatory itself about the discovery that formalist
models of art may have been rather overvalued, nor
does that recognition, as the example above indicates,
necessarily clarify the status of installation works,
as one still remains, generally, within the space of
negative definition.
4. THE CRUX OF MINIMALISM
One might expect that the ‘crux’ precede disclaimers,
but it will be otherwise here, in part because of the
curious via negativa of understanding installation
work. I must also acknowledge that the particularly
apt phrase, ‘the crux of minimalism’, is borrowed from
Hal Foster, whose consideration of this question, it
shall be seen, is of vital importance.
Foremost among these disclaimers is that, by raising
the question of minimalism, I by no means wish to
argue, nor even imply, that installation works are
somehow intrinsically or necessarily ‘minimal’ –
whatever that association may figure. At the same
time, neither is this to say that certain sound installa-
tion works, not least several of Lucier’s own works,
might reasonably fall within, as variously understood,
this rubric. Edward Strickland, for example, regards
I am sitting in a room as ‘rank[ing] with the finest
achievements of Minimalist tape music’, though close
reading of his enthusiastic appraisal of this figurative
act of ‘sonic suicide’ also makes one wish, to some
extent, to attempt a rescue mission (Strickland 1993:
199). There are, in any case, obviously, and no less
persuasive, contravening examples, as the works of, to
name but two, Maryanne Amacher and David Tudor
abundantly evidence.
Second, the following discussion makes reference to
several conspicuous ‘landmarks’ of art historical and
theoretical discourse of the preceding decades, and it
need be understood that those treatments were, in
all probability, undertaken without anticipation of
the particular use to which they are here applied. This
is, in other words, a syncretic reading, one whose value

is understood to consist less in its conformity to
originary context than to its utility to the matter
at hand: in that sense, referentially though broadly
figured, this discourse claims its identity as an
installation, not a concert piece.
Those reservations aside, we begin with a critical
thunderclap, or as much of one as recent art history
and criticism has produced, that being Michael Fried’s
Art and Objecthood. In this argument, first appearing
in 1967, Fried was at considerable pains to elucidate
the manifestly deleterious effects of what he charac-
terised as ‘literalist art’. Specifically, to cite a now-
familiar passage in which he distances himself from the
practice of artists such as Donald Judd, Robert Morris
and Carl Andre:
. . . the literalist espousal of objecthood amounts to
nothing other than a plea for a new genre of theatre;
and theatre is now the negation of art. (Fried 1968:
125)
The first segment of his assessment is, at least in prac-
tice, unobjectionable, since the milieu was indisput-
ably rife with calls for ‘new genres of theatre’. It is the
second term, though, that demands attention here.
In what sense is this ‘theatre’, new or otherwise, the
‘negation of art’? Fried, to his credit, is not evasive on
this question, unhesitating though perhaps less than
satisfying:
The experience of literalist art is of an object in a
situation – one that, virtually by definition, includes
the beholder [emphasis in the original]. (Fried 1968:
125)
For Fried, this is simply to say that he proposes ‘a
crucial distinction . . . between work that is fundamen-
tally theatrical and work that is not’ (Fried 1968: 130).
The distinction is, indeed, crucial, and even a cursory
survey of the critical literature which has grown
around his essay is far beyond the scope of this
inquiry; the depth, no less the continuing acrimony, of
same is nowhere more in evidence than in Theories
of Art After Minimalism, a roundtable between Fried,
Rosalind Krauss, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, and
others, a discussion also of considerable relevance to
what was referred to above as the relative overvaluing
of formalist models (Krauss et al. 1987: 71–87).
To advance this exposition, it is simply necessary to
note that Fried’s own emphasis makes apparent that
the notional inclusiveness of ‘literalist art’ marks, quite
literally, as we will see below, an impediment to art.
A thorough derivation of his position from the neo-
Kantian formalist criticism of Clement Greenberg,
and its implicitly Cartesian reductivism, is, again,
beyond the present scope, but may also be readily
inferred, as will also be seen.
Fried, again to his considerable credit, was far
from unwilling to cite his adversaries. The following
‘. . . and what they do as they’re going . . .’ 209
passage, which draws upon Robert Morris’ Notes on
Sculpture, bears quotation at length:
. . . literalist works of art must somehow confront
the beholder – they must, one might almost say, be
placed not just in his space but in his way. None of
this, Morris maintains,
indicates a lack of interest in the object itself. But
the concerns are now for more control . . . of the
entire situation. Control is necssary if the vari-
ables of object, light, space, body, are to func-
tion. The object has not become less important.
It has merely become less self-important.
It is, I think, worth remarking that the ‘entire situa-
tion’ means exactly that: all of it, including it seems,
the beholder’s body . . .
Everything counts – not as part of the object, but
as part of the situation in which its objecthood is
established and on which that objecthood at least
partly depends [emphasis in the original]. (Fried
1968: 127)
Morris’ texts are themselves deeply imbricated, not
without their inconsistencies and contradictions, and
also the subject of a sustained body of critical inquiry.
In this passage, at least, Fried serves the opposition
well, perhaps better than his own position. Relative
to his apparent indignation at having an object placed
‘in his way’, and the odd emphasis on the corporeality
of the viewer, which would, in any case, seem unavoid-
able, Morris’ claim that the object simply lost in
‘self-import[ance]’ seems finally rather modest. For
this discussion, however, we need only note Fried’s
final castigation, that ‘everything counts’, an observa-
tion entirely consistent with, for example, Stock-
holder’s observation, yet one plainly drawn to a very
different conclusion. Fried’s position was, of course,
controversial at the time and, as noted, remains so.
Indeed, as comparison with the observations of
Morris and Stockholder make clear, the terms of
engagement were/are not so dissimilar; the sense that
is made of them is what is incommensurate. It is
against the backdrop of this debate that one might
read Foster’s The Crux of Minimalism, in which he is
primarily concerned with a rereading premised upon
precisely the engagement Fried decried:
In short, with minimalism sculpture no longer
stands apart, on a pedestal or as pure art, but is
repositioned among objects and redefined in terms
of place. In this transformation the viewer, refused
the safe, sovereign space of formal art, is cast back
on the here and now; and rather than scan the sur-
face of a work for a topographical mapping of the
properties of its medium, he or she is prompted to
explore the perceptual consequences of a particular
intervention in a given site. (Foster 1996: 38)
210 Randal Davis
This, for Foster, marks ‘a fundamental reorientation’,
one in which, clearly enough, the ‘refusal of safe
[and] sovereign space’ mirrors Fried’s abhorrence of
the theatrical. In Foster’s view, though, two ‘great
misreadings’ of minimalism persist: the first that
it is reductive, the second that it is idealist. His
commentary on the latter is incisive:
For it is precisely such metaphysical dualisms of
subject and object that minimalism seeks to over-
come in phenomenological experience. Thus, far
from idealist, minimalist work complicates the
purity of conception with the contingency of per-
ception, of the body in a particular space and time.
(Foster 1996: 40)
With necessary respect to the subtlety and breadth of
Foster’s argument, it need be noted here that he finds
this ‘announce[ment] of a new interest in the body’
itself problematic, not least as it may lead to a regard
of perception ‘somehow before or outside history,
language, sexuality and power’ (Foster 1996: 43).
Yet, in this case, the power of his reading consists
precisely in its generality; the critique of the idealist
reading of minimalism demonstrates, as noted above
in the first disclaimer, toward an understanding of
installation work independent of stylistic filiation.
Despite, or perhaps because of, its widespread cur-
rency, the term has always been somewhat suspect in
music. Strickland’s ambitious cross-disciplinary sur-
vey, for example, abounds in provocative illustrations
from painting, sculpture and music, ‘not only recogni-
sable but visible on all fronts’, yet this ubiquity obtains
at the cost of a very broad definition, premised upon
‘severity of means, clarity of form, and simplicity of
structure and texture’ (Strickland 1993: 2, 4). Keith
Potter, however, takes a rather different methodolo-
gical tack in his study of LaMonte Young, Terry
Riley, Philip Glass and Steve Reich in regarding the
matter rather more settled in the visual arts, which are
accorded the capitalised Minimalism, than in music,
for which he retains the lower case; his introduction
is, in any case, the single most useful treatment of the
history of the sobriquet in music theory and criticism
(Potter 2000: 1–20) and bears reading parallel to
Foster as an account of the varied, often conflicting,
meanings in purely formal and concretely historical
terms.
5. ‘. . . AND WHAT THEY DO AS THEY’RE
GOING . . .’
That said, I would restate the power, understood in
broad terms, of Foster’s reading, and suggest that
Lucier’s interest, noted above, ‘in the poetry of what
we used to think of as science’ can be read as a gloss
on Foster’s ‘complication’ of ideality by contingency.
Thus, of course, might one readily understand I am
sitting in a room, the conception of which, in its
theoretical sense, lies in readily demonstrable physics.
The score is also, setting aside for the moment some
of the allowances for other possible realisations, quite
explicit in, as Spencer-Brown would have it, many
aspects of its ‘recipe’ – at the same time, some ingredi-
ents remain, in a certain sense, unspecified, those being
the properties of the acoustic space which are, as
Lucier aptly indicates in his own performance text,
‘articulated’ only as a result of the process. What is
this, of course, but the contingency of perception? I am
sitting in a room enacts, in its very contingency, that
‘sounding space’ in that sense of exploration and
discovery.
Music on a Long Thin Wire offers an even more
complex view of this contingency. A coil of wire is
extended to great length, passing through a powerful
magnetic field and connected to an amplifier being
driven by a sine wave oscillator. A hybrid dis-
assembled loudspeaker (Lucier 1980: 165) and mono-
chord, the resonating wire, whose vibrations are
transduced and themselves amplified to audibility,
is an extraordinarily unstable system, as one might
readily imagine, due in large part to its (relative to a
loudspeaker) lack of damping; ‘the ecology of the
wire’, Lucier has noted, ‘is very fragile’ (Lucier 1994:
n.p.).
As Lucier specifies in his score, the wire may be
‘played’ in concert with, given sufficient preparation,
more or less predictable results. In an installation
environment, however, the results are significantly
different. Left alone, so to speak, a particular tuning
of oscillator[s] may, and is in fact likely to, produce, at
various times, clear and specific pitches, dense clouds
of harmonics, and extended periods of silence. One’s
experience of Music on a Long Thin Wire in an installa-
tion context is, therefore, explicitly conditioned by the
duration of listening (Lucier 1994: n.p. has an amusing
anecdote about the particular experience of these
extended silences).
One of Lucier’s most extraordinary essays in
‘sounding space’ is ‘Still and moving lines of silence in
families of hyperbolas’ (1973–4). In this composition,
which again can function explicitly as installation or
performance, sine wave oscillators drive pairs of loud-
speakers, typically placed in the corners of rooms.
When the same frequency is present in both speakers
(of a pair), an invisible topography of sound is created
between them (the titular lines of sound and silence
of the physical wavelength of the frequencies in use).
If one oscillator is slightly detuned, this pattern of
troughs and crests will move through the space, rotat-
ing on the axis of their hyperbolic distribution between
the loudspeakers.
As one would expect, the score indicates several pos-
sibilities for realisation; dancers may use the ‘families
of hyperbolas’ as guides for movement, musicians

may, by playing pitches microtonally distinct from the
oscillators, themselves cause the patterns to move,
passive resonators (‘unattended percussion’, he says,
such as snare drums – an interesting reference back to
Music for Solo Performer’s ensemble) may be placed
throughout the space, articulating the movement of
patterns by their response or, of course, an audience
may simply explore the environment freely (Lucier
1980: 128–9).
One’s exploration of this subtly defined space is
almost by definition hesitant, tentative – one has, in
very literal terms, been deprived, as Foster says, of
the ‘safe and sovereign’ space, and to navigate the
troughs and crests of Still and Moving Lines of Silence
in Families of Hyperbolas is to stimulate a very particu-
larly heightened sense of one’s own corporeality and
orientation to space.
This has hardly been a thorough review of Lucier’s
work, and has omitted, for example, his work with
‘portable environments’, a line of development begin-
ning with Chambers (1968) and continuing through
such recent manifestations as Theme (1994) and
Empty Vessels (1997). The latter is particularly inter-
esting, as evidenced by this note for the presentation of
the work in P.S. 1’s Volume: Bed of Sound (2000):
. . . eight green glass flasks, vases and melon jars are
placed on pedestals positioned in specific locations
in the room. Microphones are inserted into the
mouths and necks of the vessels and routed to eight
loudspeakers similarly deployed throughout the
space. The volume levels of the amplifiers are set to
just below the threshold of feedback. As visitors
walk through the installation the motions of their
bodies will alter the delicate balances of the system
and cause unexpected resonances, acoustic ringing
and soft feedback sounds to occur. (Lucier 2000:
n.p.)
Empty Vessels, unlike, for example, I am sitting in
a room, is not particularly dependent upon the acous-
tic properties of the space in which it is realised.
It is, though, another example of a ‘fragile ecology’ – a
silent and motionless viewer would, presumably
hear nothing, as there would be no disruption from
equilibrium.
Of course, the fact that the viewer will almost inevi-
tably fracture that stasis is a condition of their material
being, and Empty Vessels is, therefore, a precise
instantiation of the Friedian situation which ‘virtually
by definition, includes the beholder’. It is also a quite
beautiful realisation of an observation made, though
in a very different context, by Victor Burgin, that
‘perceptual fields are not experienced as objects in
themselves. Perception is a continuum, a precipitation
of event fragments decaying in time, above all a
process’ (Burgin 1969: 119).
‘. . . and what they do as they’re going . . .’ 211
In Lucier’s Vespers (1969) this phenomenon, and
phenomenology, is even more explicit. Performers
use Sondols (small devices emitting an intense, highly
directional clicking sound, originally developed to
assist blind persons in navigating spaces by means of
echolocation) to map the performance space. In his
notes to a recent release of a recording of the work,
Robert Ashley observes:
In Vespers the musical experience comes from the
special ‘meaning’ that the sounds give to the space
in which they are performed. This meaning of space
is something that we have not been invited to appre-
ciate before. Also in the equation, and equally
important, the sounds, as what we have come to the
concert to hear, do not have any musical meaning
apart from their relationship to the space. In Ves-
pers the music is not heard even in imagination
except in the performance. (Ashley 2002: 2)
The argument that the sounds are devoid of musical
meaning is, in this case, derived from Lucier’s specific
admonition in the score that ‘any situations that arise
from personal preferences based on ideas of texture,
density, improvisation or composition that do not
directly serve to articulate the sound personality of the
environment should be considered deviations from
the task of echolocation’ (Lucier 1980: 17).
The situation in Vespers seems, therefore, to satisfy
the conditions of the installation work, yet it is also no
less clearly, as Ashley’s notes indicate, a concert work,
albeit a very unusual one. A similar observation might
be made for Bird and Person Dyning (1975) in which
the performer, using a binaural headset/microphone
system, maps the acoustic space using the twitterings
of an electronic ‘bird’ as source material. Signals
picked up by the microphones are amplified to the
very edge of feedback so, as with the later Empty
Vessels, miniscule movements by the performer may
produce complex ringings, difference tones and other
resonances.
It is a peculiarity, however, of binaural recording
and playback that, properly configured, each listener
in the space will hear the movement of sounds as if
surrounding them, and them alone. Bird and Person
Dyning is thus another instance of a work that seems
to satisfy much of what we would expect from an
installation work, yet to do so while remaining within
the context of the concert presentation.
Thus does the distinction between concert and
installation works remain, in the case of Lucier, some-
what permeable, and as I strongly suspect, is finally, in
this and most other cases, almost inevitable. Bird and
Person Dyning is, however, a particularly apt con-
clusion here, as its engagement of the listener in its
process, through the properties of the binaural system,
and their unusual application in the composition,
results in something very much like the creation of
a virtual space.
212 Randal Davis
In the most general terms, the process discussed here
by which, as Foster says, ‘the body in a particular
space and time’ is situated, is always the creation of a
virtual space, one dependent upon what Stockholder
calls ‘the idea of “frame” that we all carry with us’. A
particular space and time is never, of course, fully
delimitable; those ‘virtual worlds’, or, in phenomeno-
logical terms, enframings, as a system, will never
achieve complete consistency, which may finally sug-
gest the simplest answer to why an absolute distinction
of installation work, whether in sound or visual art,
will remain elusive.
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