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The Modes of Intervention in Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room

Daniel Fox

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THE MODES OF INTERVENTION IN ALVIN LUCIER’S I AM SITTING

IN A ROOM

by

DANIEL FOX

A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Music in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York

2020
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ii
 The Modes of Intervention in Alvin Lucier’s I am sitting in a room

by

Daniel Fox

This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Music in satisfaction of the
dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Date Chair of Examining Committee

Date Executive Officer

Supervisory Committee:

Joseph Straus, Advisor

David Grubbs, First Reader

Suzanne Farrin

Jeff Nichols

THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

iii
 ABSTRACT

The Modes of Intervention in Alvin Lucier’s I am sitting in a room

by

Daniel Fox

Advisor: Joseph Straus

Alvin Lucier’s I am sitting in a room (1969) is an icon of experimental music and sound

art. The sizable literature addressing the aesthetic and philosophical implications of this piece

rarely discusses the performance practice beyond what is indicated in the score itself. This is

problematic for two reasons: 1) The meaning that is derived from the piece often hinges not

just on what sounds are obtained, but on how they are obtained. 2) Over the past 50 years,

changes in the performance practice have altered what constitutes the work: magnetic tape

was used until 2000 when it was replaced by digital computers. Before 2000 it was rarely

performed live; since then it has been performed live frequently. Despite this shift in how the

piece circulates, and the fact that most articles addressing it only appeared after 2005,

discussions in the literature rarely indicate which version of the piece they are addressing.

This dissertation rethinks the meaning of I am sitting in a room by making the

performance practice the center of the inquiry. I conducted interviews with five sound

engineers who have performed the piece, including James Fei and Nicholas Collins who have

played definitive roles in the life of the piece. The interviews undermine the common

characterization of Lucier’s aesthetic as one of “non-intervention.” Based upon substantial

knowledge of the actual performance practice, my analysis leads to important new

connections to the modernist tradition of commercial architectural acoustics and sound

mixing in mid-century Hollywood films.

iv
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I thank Gabriela Vainsencher for her loving support and for sharing her insights into

the subject matter of this dissertation. Many of the ideas in this dissertation arose or were

clarified through discussions with her. With regard to the analysis of Stella and LeWitt, I

mostly only needed to find a citation more admissible than, “my wife told me so,” in order to

make use of her insights.

I thank my adviser Joe Straus for mentoring me through the process of converting

sketchy ideas into concrete analyses. His insistence on clarity has made this dissertation as

readable as it is. I count myself extremely lucky to have had him as a role model. From my

first year of graduate school David Grubbs, my first reader, was my guide to the sprawling

networks of experimental music and sound art. His kaleidoscopic range of knowledge about

this area led me in unexpected directions that ranged from the details of performance

practices to philosophical abstractions. I thank Suzanne Farrin and Jeff Nichols for joining my

committee and supporting me through this process.

The interviews, which became the heart of this dissertation, would not have been

possible if Eliot Bates had not generously agreed to supervise them. He also steered me

towards literature that became fundamental to my thinking.

Jason Eckardt and Suzanne Farrin, who I had the pleasure to study composition with

in private lessons, were inspiring role models for thinking through a piece of music.

Composition seminars with Jeff Nichols, Douglas Geers, and Bruce Saylor provided

exemplary forums for developing my ability to talk about and, therefore, write about music.

Jane Sugarman’s seminar on Ethnomusicology and Social Theory fundamentally

changed my thinking about much more than just music. In particular, it pushed me to take

the ethnographic approach to performance practice.

My colleagues and friends were invaluable in developing the ways of talking about

v
music that I pursue here. The privilege to converse without clear aim at unknown length with

such a group of musicians is possibly the greatest pleasure of pursuing a doctoral degree.

Along these lines, I thank Imri Talgam, Tom Johnson, Noel Torres-Rivera, Aaron Harcus,

Jacob Sachs-Mishalanie, Chris McGuinness, Vicente Alexim, Elizabeth Flemming, Drake

Anderson, Elizabeth Newton, Red Wierenga, Greg Menillo, G. Douglas Barrett, Matt

Sandahl, and John Menick. There are many more colleagues at the Graduate Center who I

had the pleasure of learning from, but whom I will refrain from listing, in great part because

of the certainty that I will leave out the name of someone who generously spent time

conversing with me.

A significant portion of the first full draft of this dissertation came to exist in Dora

Feldfogel’s consultorio. I thank her and Ury Vainsencher for being supportive and loving

family.

I thank my parents, brother, and sister for their love and faith in me. As appreciative

as I feel of their presence in my life, I know I will always underestimate how lucky I am to

have them.

I thank my daughter, Leonora Vainsencher Fox, for the joy she has brought to my

life. She gives me perspective about what is important.

I dedicate this dissertation to the memory of my grandmother, Madeline Fox, who

shaped my intellectual life by sharing books and music.

vi
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................................. iv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS........................................................................................................ v

TABLE OF CONTENTS ....................................................................................................... vii

LIST OF EXAMPLES ........................................................................................................... viii

Chapter 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................. 1

The Four Themes .......................................................................................................... 1

An Aesthetic Based on the Modes of Intervention ........................................................ 6

Outline ......................................................................................................................... 17

Chapter 2. Transferred Agency ............................................................................................... 20

Recursion and the Dream of Non-Intervention .......................................................... 22

Gradual Process and the Transfer of Agency .............................................................. 41

Universality and the Transparent Composer .............................................................. 50

Listening: The Modest Witness and Experiment as Intervention ............................... 63

Chapter 3. The Modes of Intervention .................................................................................... 75

A Short History of the Performance Practice of I am sitting in a room ........................... 75

The Interviews ............................................................................................................. 82

I am sitting in a room and its Modes of Intervention ..................................................... 109

I am sitting in a room and the Soundscape of Modernity .............................................. 114

Chapter 4. Conclusion ........................................................................................................... 121

From Acoustic Resonance to the Modes of Intervention .......................................... 121

Further Possibilities .................................................................................................... 123

BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................. 126

vii
 LIST OF EXAMPLES

Example 1. Frank Stella, Tomlinson Court Park (second version), 1959. ......................................... 29

Example 2. Frank Stella, Marquis de Portago (second version), 1960.............................................. 30

Example 3. Copied Lines Wall Drawing #797 by Sol Lewitt. .................................................. 33

Example 4. The cover of the 1966 paperback Acoustics by Alexander Wood. ......................... 36

Example 5. Audio Examples 5a-c of a continuous record-playback process. .......................... 61

Example 6. Audio Examples 6a-d of an interrupted record-playback process. ....................... 61

Example 7. Joan La Barbara performing Alvin Lucier’s Palimpsest. ........................................ 66

viii
 Chapter 1. Introduction

The Four Themes

There are four themes that dominate the literature on the music of Alvin Lucier: non-

intervention, gradual process, universality, and listening. It should be plausible to those

familiar with Lucier’s music why these themes are used to write about his music. As for non-

intervention, Lucier’s performances of his pieces exhibit economy of movement and

sometimes involve no movement at all by the performer on stage; as for gradual process,

differentiation within the musical texture obtains relatively slowly compared to, say, a pop-

song or a classical sonata, and if you have heard or read Lucier commenting on his music you

are likely to have encountered his assertion of the importance of gradual process, of letting

sounds be and letting their development unfold unhindered; while the claim of universality is

anathema to many people, it is not hard to see how music that presents a natural process

without interfering in it could be construed as possessing some type of universal status,

particularly if that natural process has been given iconic status by the tradition of scientific

experimentalism; finally, to juxtapose the inactive body of the performer on stage with a

gradual, natural process easily suggests a state of listening.

The themes are intertwined. Though non-intervention serves to authorize gradual

process, universality, and listening, universality is implicit in the generality of how the other

themes are used in the literature: Lucier’s music is about listening-in-general; it is about the

very idea of a gradual process more than it is about any particular gradual process; it is about

non-intervention-in-general, not about replacing a common intervention (e.g. the selection of

notes and pitches) with a less common intervention (selecting a room to resonate).

All four of these themes have been used to analyze Lucier’s I am sitting in a room, a
canonical piece of American experimental music first performed in 1970. The piece exists in

many versions: as a published score, as commercial recordings, as performances involving the

playback of a recording, as live performances, and as a museum exhibition. This is his most

discussed work in the scholarly literature, his most recorded work, and probably his most

performed work.1 Its title has been used for numerous festivals and exhibitions. The

influential position of this piece both for the literature about Lucier’s music and about

experimental music more generally make it the central piece to grapple with in any attempt to

rethink Lucier’s music. For this reason, it is the focus of this dissertation.

Lucier is fond of quoting a line from Paterson by William Carlos Williams: “no ideas

but in things.”2 It is surprising, then, how little time the literature spends on “things.” For a

composer who ties his work to the material conditions of the production of music, very little

scholarship has appeared on the material conditions and how they are taken advantage of or

manipulated. Most scholarship leaps from either the listening experience or the score to

aesthetic and philosophical consequences. Often there is little to delineate the materially

grounded social position of Lucier or his music.3

The conditions for the production of I am sitting in a room have recently taken a new

form and the discourse surrounding it exhibits some of the tensions that this dissertation

addresses. In 2014 I am sitting in a room was acquired by the Media and Performance division

of the Museum of Modern Art. The museum also acquired Lucier’s Music for Pure Waves, Bass

Drums and Acoustic Pendulums (1980). While Music for Pure Waves will be exhibited as a live

performance, I am sitting in a room was collected by making a new recording and will be

1 The Alvin Lucier Papers contain evidence of roughly one performance per year. The records at BMI indicate
that on average there are 1-2 performances per year and that it is by far his most performed work. Alvin Lucier,
Alvin Lucier Papers, New York Public Library, Performing Arts Branch, New York, NY.
2 William Carlos Williams, Paterson: Books I-V (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1964). It is also the title of a

documentary about Lucier’s work, Hauke Harder, Viola Rusche, and Alvin Lucier, No ideas but in things: the
composer Alvin Lucier, DVD (Mainz, Germany: Wergo, 2013).
3 There are exceptions, of course. Two important ones are Caleb Kelly, Gallery Sound (London: Whitechapel

Gallery, 2011) and Andrew Dewar, “Handmade Sounds: The Sonic Arts Union and American Technoculture”
(PhD Diss., Wesleyan University, 2009).

2
exhibited by playing back that recording. Both pieces will circulate internationally as museum

exhibitions.

The first installation of the MoMA version of I am sitting in a room occurred 23 January

– 22 May 2016 as a loan to the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA). The

museum text describing the piece concludes by emphasizing the relationship between space

and sound: “This work, as it fills the gallery and reacts to its acoustic properties, transforms

the space with sound.”4 But, which gallery is the sound reacting to? The exhibition at

UMMA was not a live performance but involves playing back a recording made after hours

in an exhibition gallery at MoMA about a year earlier, on 20 December 2014. The room in

which the piece is recorded does transform the sound; but the sound of the playback of that

recording does not react to the gallery in which visitors to UMMA listened to the piece any

more than any other recording. The museum text seems to be about the live version of the

piece, or to refer to how the sound reacted to the MoMA gallery in which it was recorded. I

suspect this discrepancy results from the existence of different incarnations of the piece. The

ramifications of how different modes of production lead to different conceptions of the piece

have not been addressed in the literature.

I am sitting in a room is a piece that has repeatedly been transformed by technological

and aesthetic change. The MoMA version is a congealed history of that process. For example,

the first recording of the work was made late at night by Lucier in his living room, which had

shag carpeting and plush curtains. He sat in a big, comfortable chair to record his speech and

then put the loudspeaker in his place on the chair for the subsequent iterations of recording

and playback. The work-defining properties of MoMA’s version include the composer’s

specification that the room in which it is to be installed should be a sonically isolated room

4University of Michigan Museum of Art, “Alvin Lucier: I am sitting in a room,”

https://umma.umich.edu/exhibitions/2016/alvin-lucier-i-am-sitting-in-a-room,
accessed on 19 May 2018.

3
approximately the size of a large living room with comfortable chairs and heavy curtains

guarding the entrance from sound bleed. It is to be an intimate space. Never before have the

physical conditions of a living room constituted work-defining properties for the listening

experience of I am sitting in a room. The MoMA’s version also specifies that, ideally, a single

Meyer Sound UPJ-1 speaker hidden from view should project the composer’s voice at a

conversational volume. Never before has the work been prescriptively tied to a particular

make and model of speaker, or to hiding the speaker system. Historical material conditions of

the work are selectively incorporated into the work-defining properties: living room listening

conditions are rendered significant for the audience but not for the recording process; the use

of magnetic tape and Lucier’s original practice of splicing tape by hand have become

irrelevant, as have the original microphone and speaker choices. The new form of

institutional support MoMA offered Lucier makes for a rare opportunity to have

comprehensive control over the material conditions that constitute the work.

The performance practice—which could broadly be defined as the way musicians

interact with the material conditions of music—plays a crucial role in theories of Lucier’s

music. But it is frequently taken at face value: Those aspects of it that are 1) addressed in the

score or 2) evident from watching a performance as a member of the audience primarily

constitute the limits of the discussion of the performance practice.5 Anyone that has ever

performed a piece of music from a score knows that the information in the score is just the

beginning of what is needed to perform the work with anything like the results expected by

the composer or the community that sustains its musical tradition. There is a cascade of

decisions that must be made about how to interpret the score. Those aspects of the

performance practice that are not explicit in the score are generally part of an embodied

5The two most important exceptions to this are Volker Straebel and Wilm Thoben, “Alvin Lucier’s Music for
Solo Performer: Experimental music beyond sonification,” Organised Sound 19/1 (2014): 17–29; Christopher
Burns, “Realizing Lucier and Stockhausen: Case Studies in the Performance Practice of Electroacoustic Music,”
Journal of New Music Research 31, no.1 (2002): 59-68.

4
tradition sustained by performers.

The rhetoric of Lucier’s scores has shifted emphasis over his career. The early

experimental scores, such as Chambers (1965), combine a dizzyingly expansive poetics with

practical instructions. By about 1985 a matter-of-fact tone providing instructions came to

dominate the text scores; around that time the five lines of traditional Western musical

notation began to appear again, often in pieces that used acoustic beating. The infinity of

possibilities alluded to with long lists of objects and sounds that were found in the early pieces

ceased to appear. But the straightforwardness of the instructions of the post-1985 scores is

misleading. For those instructions often define a new performance practice, a performance

practice which has yet to have any sonic documentation. The tradition of this new

performance practice might reside for years in a single performer who commissioned the

piece.

It is here that a particular problem arises for the music of Alvin Lucier and, more

generally, for American experimental music. Much American experimental music is

composed through the definition of performance practices. The aesthetic value lies not just in

the resulting sounds but in the manner through which those sounds are obtained. This

suggests that the performance practice is a rich domain for scholarship within Lucier’s music.6

When one uses a performance practice from a piece of music by Lucier and keeps in

mind the four themes that dominate the literature, one encounters a tension between the

discourse and the practice. I will describe an example from my own experience in which I

was using the record–playback process from Lucier’s I am sitting in a room to perform a piece

for violin and electronics that I had composed. Jake Sachs-Mishalanie was performing the

electronics part while I performed the violin part. The process is described in the literature as

amplifying the natural acoustic resonances of the room. In rehearsal certain resonant

6 The activities involved may not be novel within the culture at large, but because they are taken from a different
cultural domain and put into the context of music, they are novel activities for the performers. Lucier has said
that many of his pieces involve taking the set-up of a scientific experiment and moving it into the art context.

5
frequencies were growing too fast for the pacing that I desired. That is, a couple frequencies

were coming to dominate the musical texture whereas I wanted a more even spectrum to

result. So I asked Jake to apply a filter to dampen one of the resonances. He laughed and said,

“This piece is supposed to amplify the room resonances and yet you want me to dampen

them?” I may have blushed.

A dutiful student of the literature, I had come to understand I am sitting in a room as

revealing the resonances of the room. Though adapting the process for my own aesthetic

aims, I still thought of my piece as transitioning from the music of the resonances of the violin

to the music of the resonances of the room. Whether or not he intended it, I felt that Jake was

calling “fake” on my performance practice. But committed to a type of sound, to a pace of

development, and to a method of achieving those sounds, we applied the filters.

I began to wonder about Alvin Lucier’s performance practice for I am sitting in a room.

It was a piece that, according to the literature and Lucier himself, was about the resonances of

the room. Although aware of the fact that the microphone and the loudspeaker and their

arrangement would have an effect on the sound of the piece, I had not thought through how

that should influence the interpretations that exist in the literature.

Lucier’s work has used acoustic resonance to alter the relation of the modes of

intervention to the resulting sounds. Therefore our aesthetic understanding of his music

should be shaped by an investigation into the modes of intervention. The next section lays out

a theoretical framework for such investigations.

An Aesthetic Based on the Modes of Intervention

This dissertation argues that the aesthetic discourse surrounding I am sitting in a room

should be based upon the modes of intervention. In this section the basic structure of the

6
approach is developed so that it might be applied more generally to Lucier’s music and to

other experimental music. The remainder of the dissertation focuses on applying the

approach to I am sitting in a room. Though an aesthetic based on the modes of intervention is

crucial to a scholarly understanding of I am sitting on a room, and to some other experimental

pieces, this aesthetic is not fundamental to all of experimental music in general, or even to all

American experimental music.

The motivation for the terminology modes of intervention

In the sizable literature on the music of Alvin Lucier there are only two articles that

give serious consideration to the performance practice. Christopher Burns has described in

practical terms the performance practice he used to perform I am sitting in a room live in 2000,

just at the time when the performance practice of that piece switched from using magnetic

tape to using software on digital computers.7 While offering important insights into the

performance practice of the piece, the article seems to have had little influence on subsequent

discussions of the piece. More recently, through a study of Lucier’s Music for Solo Performer,

Volker Straebel and Wilm Thöben have shown that a detailed study of the performance

practice is needed to demythologize experimental music history and that it significantly alters

the hermeneutic orientations available.8 These two articles stand isolated amidst the

predominant stance in the literature that emphasizes all that is not-done when performing

Lucier’s music.

My own experience with the performance practice behind I am sitting in a room

suggested that the depiction in the literature of a “hands-off” approach to performance was

an insufficient basis on which to theorize this piece. Inspired by the work of Burns and

Straebel and Thöben, it seemed that, rather than focusing on non-intervention, a study of the

7 Christopher Burns, “Realizing Lucier and Stockhausen.”

8 Volker Straebel and Wilm Thoben, “Alvin Lucier’s Music for Solo Performer.”

7
particular modes of intervention was needed to dispel certain myths about I am sitting in a room and

to theorize this foundational piece of experimental music in terms of the material conditions

and attitudes that make it possible.

Benjamin Piekut has already made a direct critique of Cage’s claims of non-

intervention by drawing upon the idea of the “modest witness” from science and technology

studies. Piekut shows how Cage’s discourse drew upon the language of objectivity of modern

science in order to claim a separation between his tastes and his methods of composition:

Cage positioned himself as a modest witness to the objective nature of sound itself, rather

than one who shapes it according to his taste.9

The structure of Cage’s self-description as a “modest witness” has reappeared in the

literature on the music of Alvin Lucier. Lucier is typically described as a “modest witness” in

all but name. Even more so than in the case of Cage’s music, the motif of the scientific

experiment has become a common metaphor and even a basis for theorizing Lucier’s music.

However, hitching the idea of non-intervention to the scientific experiment is problematic. As

I develop in more detail in the fourth section of Chapter 2, the modern scientific experiment

can be differentiated from the classical or pre-modern approach to the study of nature by its

focus on interventionism.

Given the importance that both Lucier and scholars of his music have given to the

metaphor of scientific experiments, it seems appropriate to introduce nomenclature that

honors the relation to scientific experiments while emphasizing the aspect of them that the

music literature has neglected. The modes of intervention is intended to be a term that casts the

net of analysis more broadly than would normally be understood by the term “performance

practice,” but also to make a cultural reference via the existing scholarship on Lucier’s music.

The use of the term “intervention” is also motivated by a prevalent attitude found in

9 Benjamin Piekut, “Sound’s Modest Witness: Notes on Cage and Modernism,” Contemporary Music Review 31/1
(2012): 3-18; Benjamin Piekut, “Chance and Certainty: John Cage’s Politics of Nature,” Cultural Critique 84
(2013): 134-163

8
scholarship on experimental music and sound art. For example, Christoph Cox argues that

sound art is aimed at bringing attention to the “general sonic flux of the world.”10 Focusing

on the “modes of intervention” puts a twist on Cox’s formulation: rather than making “sonic

flux” the aim of study, it is the ways of interacting with and altering the sonic flux that

becomes the object of study. Thus the “modes of intervention” honors the importance, within

the discourse, that is placed on all the sounds that existed prior to, during, and after a piece of

music.

The remainder of this discussion will be phrased in terms that allow an approach to

music through the modes of intervention to be applied beyond the music of Alvin Lucier.

The Definition Is Too Broad

I will use the term mode of intervention to refer to both the material conditions required

to perform a piece of music as well as the symbol-based discourses and embodied practices

(such as listening practices) that it relies upon. For example, the mode of intervention of a

keyboard toccata by Frescobaldi includes a harpsichord (or other keyboard instrument), a

keyboardist, a score, certain rules of tonality, the style of the composer, and certain rules of

performance practice that include norms about ornamentation and tempi. How much the

mode of intervention encompasses the broader culture is a matter of discretion that must

hinge upon the argument being made. Generally applied, the terminology is so exhaustive as

to be of no use. One might as well just say, “the music” instead of “the mode of intervention

of the music.” This terminology is superfluous for the study of most music because more

refined discourses already exist that are appropriate to their context.

But there are some types of music in which it is a useful addition to the lexicon. This

music is generally part of the traditions referred to as experimental or avant-garde. Even

10 Christoph Cox, “Sound Art and the Sonic Unconscious,” Organised Sound 14/1 (2009), 24.

9
within those categories, its true usefulness is for music that satisfies two criteria that express a

certain relation of the music to its material conditions.

Two Criteria for the Usefulness of the Term “Modes of Intervention”

The first criterion for when the modes of intervention may be a productive term is that

major compositional choices should be perceived as subordinated to or identical with the

establishment of a performance practice. This acknowledges a materialist orientation within

the analytical approach and supposes a materialist orientation within the composition and

performance of the music to be studied. The second criterion is that the aesthetic value

attributed to a piece of music should predominantly be derived from the ability of the piece to

make sensible the material conditions for the possibility of itself. In many cases this second

criterion is approximately equivalent to having the aesthetic experience centered on the

performance practice or the material conditions required for performance. Of course, the

material conditions involve congealed histories of cultural conditions. The satisfaction of this

criterion is predicted on the particular discourses of the culture that mark certain objects and

sounds as fundamental building blocks. For example, the sine wave is frequently understood

as a building block of all sound and thus foregrounding a sine wave can signify the basic

material condition of sound. In my framing, there is no claim that music whose aesthetic is

based on the modes of intervention in any way escapes culture. To the extent that it has a

privileged position within culture, for example by being considered fundamental, it achieves

this by association with objects or sounds that already have that privileged position. Music

whose aesthetic is based upon the modes of intervention often does shift the scales of time and

space through which it engages with culture. For example, a compositional gesture may

become the selection of a particular room for its resonant qualities and meaning within a

personal history rather than a selection of a sequence of notes within a well-established

10
instrumental performance practice. It is this shift in time and space that often gives the

impression of having escaped culture.

Experimental Music as an Aesthetic of the Modes of Intervention

This formalism suggests defining a type of experimental music for which the value

resides in the aesthetics of the modes of intervention. That is, the aesthetic experience centers

on an appreciation of the material conditions through which the piece is produced and the

material conditions through which it is produced are characteristic of the piece.

The second criterion in particular implies that locating the essential value of a piece in

patterns that are in an arbitrary relation to the material conditions diminishes the sense in

which the aesthetic of the piece is centered on the modes of intervention. For example, while

many of Helmut Lachenmann’s pieces are innovative with regard to performance practice

and are even identified with it (e.g. Guero (1970)), their aesthetic value is understood to reside

in formal patterns that stand more or less in arbitrary relation to the performance practice.

The formal patterns are essential in addition to the performance practice. In contrast, the score

of I am sitting in a room demands other texts because the text, while adding an interesting

dimension to the piece, is too arbitrary in its relation to the process. The formal patterns that

matter in I am sitting in a room—the resonances or melodies that arise—are a direct result of the

performance practice which, given my ethnographic work presented in Chapter 3, must be

understood to include all of the adjustments of the electronic system. As with Lachenmann,

Steve Reich’s music is also not experimental in the sense of basing its aesthetic on the modes

of intervention. While Reich’s music is associated with much experimental music through the

minimalist aesthetic and the structuring technique of the gradual process, very little of it is

experimental in the sense developed here because the formal patterns are not a result of the

performance practice. The most notable exception to this is Pendulum Music (1968), the

11
aesthetic of which does hinge upon the mode of intervention.

The formal patterns of a piece of music derive from the performance practice to

different degrees. The degree to which the formal patterns seem inevitable is, to a large

extent, a result of how much one accepts the script of the technology, be it a violin or a

microphone.

The modes of intervention and musical style in the 20th century

During the 20th century the tradition of Western classical music underwent a

profound shift of emphasis from being focused primarily on the sequence of sounds to also

being concerned with the mode of intervention. In the first decades of the 20th century

placing pitches in unprecedented orders (vertically or horizontally) was a radical act and was

understood to disrupt the tradition. By the end of the 20th century, no particular ordering of

pitches would seem to be capable of disrupting the tradition, though there is no lack of

development in this direction. The same might be said of rhythmic patterns. By mid-century

one begins to see how it was the developments in performance practices that began to

dominate the cultural territory of the avant-garde and the experimental.

The Western classical tradition in the 20th century can be characterized by a drastic

expansion in the modes of intervention. This includes embracing electronics, extended

performance techniques, as well as drastic changes in the time-scales or spatial-scales of

music. However, much of this music, including that which is part of the Lachenmann

tradition still does not attempt to reduce its aesthetic to the modes of intervention as we find

in Lucier’s music. That the possibility of a true reduction of the aesthetic to the performance

is impossible—there is no universal style that is immanent in the material conditions—does

not render this music meaningless. The attempts by composers and musicians to seek

reductions is the central problem that is productive for the music. These reductions are not

12
less interesting because they are not universal; their lack of universality resides in their

connection to social circumstances and this is in itself interesting.

Beyond Performance Practice

Although closely linked to performance practice, this new terminology is useful for two

reasons:

1) There are interventions that constitute acts of experimental music that do not

require shifts in performance. For example, Lucier’s Ricochet Lady (2016) uses conventional

playing techniques for glockenspiel and so cannot be considered to be an intervention

primarily through a shift in the performance practice. This piece is too conservative with

respect to performance practice to theorize its experimental or avant-garde credentials in

terms of performance practice. Nonetheless, the aesthetic value of the piece is centered on the

mode of intervention: the perception of the causal link between the resonances and the

performer is severed as the piece progresses. The resonances appear to take on a life of their

own. The resonances develop rhythms that are perceived to be independent of the

performer’s rhythmic activity.

Some types of pieces might be seen to lose their status of being experimental in this

sense when the basic performance technique is used over and over again in new pieces. For

example, the use of acoustic beating in the original 1973-4 version of Lucier’s Still and Moving

Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas allows it to be characterized as experimental in terms of

its mode of intervention. However, the revision from 1984 and Lucier’s subsequent “beating

pieces,” as a catalog of scores, suffered a kind of loss of their experimentalism as the number

of pieces proliferated.

The proliferation of works shifts the aesthetic focus from the phenomena of acoustic

beating to the different patterns that may be made from acoustic beating. Tonal key areas,

13
the 12-tones of the chromatic scale, and rhythms created with acoustic beating may all serve

as backgrounds upon which the beautiful is sought through formal patterns. The beauty that

can be achieved with each is distinct, but they are all concerned with the beauty of some

particular sequence that is not possessed by other sequences. Such pieces do not satisfy the

two criteria for when the mode of intervention is a productive term. The loss of status as

experimental (in this sense of the term) that can result from the proliferation of pieces using a

certain mode of intervention derives from the stabilization of the performance practice so that

it shifts to the background once again.

Some care must be taken here. The true reason why the score of the 1973-4 version of

Still and Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas aestheticizes the mode of intervention

more than the subsequent beating pieces is not its historical priority but because the score

refuses to value one type of interference pattern over another. This maintains attention on the

use of interference patterns and thus on the performance practice and the material conditions

that give rise to patterns in this piece. The subsequent beating pieces are essentially equally

experimental or non-experimental to each other, as no particular pattern of acoustic beating

should be considered to represent acoustic beating more than any other. However, this is

unclear from any individual score or from the collection of Lucier’s beating pieces with the

exception of the 1973-4 version of Still and Moving Lines of Silence. The fact that it does not

specify any particular pattern of beating indicates that the particular patterns that arise are

not central to the piece.

2) The second reason for the usefulness of this terminology is that there exist

interventions that are, at least at face value, so drastically open to any type of performance

practice that the act of composing cannot be said to take place through the specification of a

performance practice. The most famous example of this would be John Cage’s 4’33’’.

However, Cage said he no longer needed “the silent piece” and for my purposes it is not the

14
most useful piece to exemplify the need for distinguishing modes of intervention from

performance practice. More useful for understanding what is meant by the modes of

intervention is to consider Cage’s revision of 4’33’’ after being influenced by LaMonte

Young.11

Cage’s 0’00’’ (1962), which can be understood as a response to the developments in

word scores by composers such as LaMonte Young, is a move to codify the new emphasis on

the centrality of the modes of intervention. In that piece, the act of composition is the act of

intervening in the sonic flux of the world by acoustically amplifying a disciplined practice.

This does not account for the performance practice of the disciplined activity being amplified.

For example, when Cage premiered the piece by amplifying his act of writing the manuscript

of the score by hand, the performance practice was based around writing by hand. If he had

amplified himself and others playing a game of poker, there would have been a different

performance practice, to a great extent, although both would involve the performance

practice of amplifying sounds. Thus the mode of intervention of the piece must be considered

distinct from the performance practice because the identity of a piece of music can have a

dispersed relation to the performance practices involved. Ironically, while so much of

experimental music—and Cage’s music in particular—attempts to remove the hand of the

artist, the premiere performance of 0’00’’ magnified a very personal gesture. The original

performance has both the hermetic self-reflexivity of high-modernism and a fetishistic relation

to the manuscript score and to the signature of the composer.

There is some overlap between my approach and Dieter Mersch’s theory of Lucier’s

music as an “aesthetic experiment.”12 Mersch emphasizes that, like a scientific experiment,

Lucier’s pieces set up the conditions for phenomena to become sensible. I agree with this to a

11 The influence of Young on Cage is described in Branden Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the
Arts After Cage (A Minor History), (New York: Zone Books, 2008).
12 Dieter Mersch, “Art as Research sui generis: The Compositions of Alvin Lucier,” in Alvin Lucier – Illuminated by

the Moon, ed. Bernhard Rietbrock (Switzerland: ZHdK Records, 2017).

15
certain extent, but would argue that Mersch follows through on this observation in a way that

continues to put too much emphasis on all the ways Lucier has not intervened rather than

those in which he and the performers have intervened. Given that Number (1961) by Tone

Yasunao and Three Loops (1961) by Tony Conrad use the same experimental set-up as I am

sitting in a room, then either Mersch’s approach could not account for the distinctions between

these pieces or it needs to be modified to include how the experimental set-up is used.

Following the work of John Tiles on the importance of interventionism in the new Baconian

science of the 17th century, one should understand scientific experiments in terms of the

interventions that are made.13 This includes not just the set-up of the experiment being

studied in sufficient detail, but how the apparatus is manipulated and modified at all stages of

the experiment, including those made by the “curator of the experiment.” My choice of

terminology is intended to focus attention on the aspect of Lucier’s music that has been most

neglected in the literature.

Some of What Is Lost

In replacing non-intervention with the modes of intervention there is an important

implicit claim within the discourse of experimental music that is lost. The claim is that the

music is itself a critique of existing musical practices. It is through this stance that non-

intervention can become meaningful. To begin a discussion by saying what some piece of

music is not about is to assume a great deal about the expectations of those involved,

otherwise the list would be interminable. When non-intervention is discussed in experimental

music there is an implicit reference to how others are currently or have made music in the

past and that the experimental strain will avoid these or supplant them. The avant-garde

must always fight a rear-guard maneuver to make sure that it distances itself from any of its

13 J.E. Tiles, “Experiment as Intervention,” The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 44/3 (1993): 463-475.

16
innovations that are taken up by the broader culture.

The choices that Lucier did not have to make, or could not make, like which pitch

would dominate the harmony at the end of a performance of I am sitting in a room, eclipsed all

the choices that were made, such as which microphones to use, volume levels, microphone

placement, and EQ settings. But that rhetorical tactic only sustains meaning when it is

assumed that choosing pitches is the central job of the composer. This has ceased to be the

case for so many compositional approaches within the Western classical tradition that a great

deal of historicization is required to maintain the meaning of the depiction.

Outline

This Introduction presents the four major themes in the literature on Lucier’s music—

non-intervention, gradual process, universality, and listening—as well as my own analytical

disposition, theorized in terms of the modes of intervention.

Chapter 2 is an extended critique of how the four themes have been used in the

literature on I am sitting in a room. It is based almost exclusively on texts that have already

entered the literature. However, placing more weight on the performance practice—as it is

already documented in the literature—leads to new aesthetic associations and this broadens

the literature relevant to Lucier’s music. For example, considering I am sitting in a room in

relation to the minimalist visual art of Frank Stella and Sol LeWitt from the mid-20th-century

reveals its relation to what Stella praised as “executive art.” By looking in more detail at the

sounding results of the gradual process, I suggest replacing the rhetoric of “non-intervention”

with that of “transfers of agency.” This includes, for example, how the technological

possibility of the piece seemed to have independently asserted its own agency on a number of

composers, including Tone Yasunao and Tony Conrad, not just Lucier. The disparate

17
aesthetic results of the three pieces studied causes serious problems for the claims of a

universal musical style that are made about Lucier’s music. My critique of how passive

listening has been hitched to the culture of scientific experimentalism reminds us that, from

the beginning of the scientific revolution in the 17th century, an experiment was understood to

“force nature” into unusual states. Thus we cannot use the association with scientific

experiments to underwrite non-intervention. This motivates theorizing Lucier’s music in

terms of an aesthetic based upon the modes of intervention.

Chapter 3 theorizes Lucier’s music through the modes of intervention. The most

significant aspect of this is the recovery of the open secrets of the performance practice of I am

sitting in a room, as it has been performed since 2000 when the use of digital laptops came to

replace the use of magnetic tape. This new technological facility converted a studio piece to a

live performance piece in which the sound engineer has been a hidden performer. I approach

this task through the fieldwork of interviewing sound engineers that have assisted in

performances of the piece and by making new recordings that can demonstrate how the

performance practice affects the resulting sound.14 Some of them are Lucier’s close

collaborators while others have rarely interacted with him.

Any hint of universality is swept away by the deft hand of the sound engineer and the

congealed histories of the transducers. The interviews document variation in what performers

actually do and how they think about their practice. Combined with the analysis of the

literature in Chapter 2, this ethnographic work suggests that the modes of intervention might

be said to emplace living room aesthetics into concert hall acoustics. This suggests that the

position of I am sitting in a room within the soundscape of modernity has less to do with a

universal musical aesthetic and more to do with the modernist architectural ambition to

disarticulate sound and space and the practice within Hollywood to use reverb to represent

14The discussion of the new recordings takes place in the section Universality and the Transparent Composer of
Chapter 2 where it is already necessary to address a key aspect of the change in the performance practice with
the switch from magnetic tape to digital computers.

18
internal voices and thus identify the listener’s subject position with that of a character in the

film. These are novel reference points from which to construct the meaning of I am sitting in a

room.

Chapter 4 summarizes the new perspective of I am sitting in a room that has been

established. It also lays out the kinds of cultural knowledge that might be gained by studying

other pieces of experimental music through the modes of intervention.

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 Chapter 2. Transferred Agency

This chapter takes the form of an extended critique of how non-intervention, gradual

process, universality, and listening are used to theorize Lucier’s music. Though interrelated,

each theme warrants its own section. The chapter reveals certain problems with how these

themes are applied and motivates their replacement with an approach based on investigations

into the modes of intervention. This new approach, which is put into practice in Chapter 3,

involves a shift of emphasis with regard to who and what exerts agency in the acts of

composition and performance. This is relevant because agency exists as a thematic

undercurrent of all four themes.

While the literature shades each theme as an evasion of agency, a more productive

gloss is to see each theme as expressing a transfer of agency. I borrow this term from Jane

Goodall’s discussion of agency when humans and machines interact. In the context of

experimental music, it helps to disentangle the ways that agency can be perceived: we can

experience an object or process to have agency even if, upon questioning, we would deny that

it has agency, or at least the same kind of agency that the composer or performer possesses. In

the section Recursion and the Dream of Non-Intervention, the theme of removing agency is

developed in the context of visual art that, like I am sitting in a room, uses recursion as the

means of evasion. Through a close reading of some of the neglected phases in the gradual

process of I am sitting in a room, the section Gradual Process and the Transfer of Agency

explicitly develops and applies the idea of transferred agency. This shows that the transfer of

agency is an important aspect of the listening experience. However, the next section,

Universality and the Transparent Composer, shows that claims about transferring agency to

the material conditions are problematic. This is accomplished by comparing I am sitting in a

room to two pieces that predate it and use the same process to very different ends. This again

20
motivates a more detailed investigation into the performance practice to understand exactly

how and to where agency is transferred. The final section, Listening: The Modest Witness

and Experiment as Intervention, argues that, rather than evading the necessity to intervene,

the theme of listening, embodied in a “modest witness,” has eclipsed the interventions. By re-

examining the connection often drawn between Lucier’s music and scientific experiments,

this final section rounds off the historical and cultural basis for using the modes of

intervention as a theoretical approach to Lucier’s music. Thus the transfer of agency first

arises as a way of characterizing compositional intent, then shifts to forming the basis for

understanding the listening experience, and is ultimately supplanted by the modes of

intervention as a basis for theorizing Lucier’s music.

Before proceeding to address each theme through its own section, I will sketch how

the themes are intertwined in the literature. It is typical for a piece of Lucier’s music to be

depicted as consisting of a gradual process in which the composer does not intervene once the

process has begun. To distinguish Lucier’s music from that of Steve Reich, from which the

rhetoric of gradual process is borrowed, a piece of Lucier’s music is understood as using a

natural process, rather than a compositional process that the composer must carry out

himself.15 The fact that 1) the process is “natural” and 2) that Lucier and the performers do

not intervene are seen to authorize claims that the music presents something universal. Lucier

the composer/performer becomes transparent, or maybe even translucent. His refractive

magic generates references to ghostliness and to objectivity, the former associated with

transparent beings and the latter with transparent social positions. Telling for what it says

about the significance of a scientific understanding of nature for the reception of Lucier’s

music, the claims of transparency are most often associated with the pieces that involve the

greatest technological mediation and that allow performers to remain as physically inactive as

possible. This inactivity, whose highest ideal seems to inhere in Music for Solo Performer (1965),
15 Steve Reich, “Music As a Gradual Process,” Microphone, February 1972, 1-2.

21
with I am sitting in a room ranking a close second, has directed scholarship to theorize listening

as taking on a greater than usual importance within Lucier’s music. A well-publicized quote

of Lucier has aided this: “careful listening is more important than making sounds happen.”16

Thus inactivity in performance, aided by other more subtle cues, has become linked to

listening as performing.

Recursion and the Dream of Non-Intervention

The theme that has had the greatest impact on the direction the literature has taken is

non-intervention. In his essay “The eloquent voice of nature,” James Tenney writes that

Lucier “scrupulously avoids not only ‘self-expression’ but also what might be called

compositional intervention in the natural processes on which his pieces are based.”17 Variants

on this stance appear frequently both in program notes for concerts and scholarly essays.

I am sitting in a room (1969) begins with a spoken description of its own making:

I am sitting in a room different from 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 regard
this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to
smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.18

Layers of sound accumulate as the reverberant fingerprint of the room is stamped on

16 Alvin Lucier, “Careful listening is more important than making sounds happen: The propagation of sound in
space” in Alvin Lucier, Reflections: Interviews, Scores, Writings (Cologne: MusikTexte, 1995), 430-38. This is
republished in Caleb Kelly, Sound, (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2011).
17 James Tenney, “The Eloquent Voice of Nature,” in Reflections: Interviews, Scores, Writings 1965-1994, ed. Alvin

Lucier, Gisela Gronemeyer, Reinhard Oehlschlägel, and Armand F. Lucier. (Köln: MusikTexte, 1995), 12-17.
This phrase was also used by Cage to describe Tan Dun’s music. See Benjamin Piekut, “Chance and Certainty:
John Cage’s Politics of Nature,” Cultural Critique, 84 (2013), 143. Of course, the idea of a composer acting as
nature’s voice has a long history. See, for example, Linda Phyllis Austern, “‘’Tis Nature’s Voice’: music, natural
philosophy and the hidden world in seventeeth-century England,” in Music Theory and Natural Order from the
Renaissance to the Early Twentieth Century, edited by Suzannah Clark and Alexander Rehding, (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), 30-67.
18 The score is reproduced in Alvin Lucier and Douglas Simon, Chambers (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University

Press, 1980), 30-31.

22
the recording layer after layer, filtering the original sound of the voice. As the piece itself

describes, the only role of the electronics is to recursively record and play back. For example:

Record a bit of talk. Call that layer 1. Play layer 1 back into the room and, as this is done,

simultaneously record again; this new recording is layer 2. Play layer 2 back into the room

and, as this is done, simultaneously record again; this new recording is layer 3. Each new

layer has been played into the room one more time than the previous, each time the acoustic

signature of the room is convolved with the previous recording.

Non-Intervention and the Removal of Agency in Experimental Music

There are two basic ways in which non-intervention arises as a theme in discussions of

I am sitting in a room. 1) It is implicit in the score that, when making the recording, Lucier does

not intervene in the process in the sense that he does not apply electronic filters or fancy

editing techniques other than to concatenate the iterations in the order they were made. The

value of the piece resides in how the room filters the sound of his voice. 2) Although not

explicitly referenced, the background for the composition of this piece remains the Western

musical tradition in which Lucier was trained, having received a MFA in music from

Brandeis University where he composed pieces for traditional orchestral instruments through

conventional scores using the five lines of the staff. Thus part of what is understood in terms

of non-intervention is that Lucier is not directly choosing which pitches result from the

process. The pitches are commonly understood to be the result of the room resonances. That

is, the material conditions of the piece determine aesthetic features (such as pitches) that the

composer would normally select.

As the quotation by Tenney represents, in Lucier’s music non-intervention has been

crucial to vacating self-expression from the meaning of the music and replacing that with a

relation to nature. In this type of reading self-expression inheres at a certain time-scale,

23
roughly that of a few seconds, over which a composer traditionally made choices about which

notes would be heard. When intervention at this time-scale has been removed, it is often

claimed that Lucier’s authorship of a sequence of sounds has been replaced with his ability to

present nature, or sound-itself.

The valorization of non-intervention is not unique within Lucier’s music. It is a tenet

of experimental music as defined in Cage’s Silence (1961), where he stresses the importance of

“discovering means to let sounds be themselves.” For Cage, this is fundamental to the

endeavor of experimental music: “Those involved with the composition of experimental

music find ways and means to remove themselves from the activities of the sounds they

make.”19 Cage’s practice and his extremely effective moves to shape the discourse of

experimental music are deeply connected to the visual art of his contemporaries. Using

Cage’s discursive collaboration with Robert Rauschenberg as a point of orientation I will

explore the relation of Lucier’s work to the visual artists Frank Stella and Sol LeWitt.

Removing the Hand of the Artist

Branden Joseph has shown that Cage’s cultivation of indeterminacy—and this

involves a stance of non-intervention—was part of a joint project between Cage and the artist

Robert Rauschenberg.20 In his series of Black Paintings from the early 1950s, Rauschenberg

sought to create something “complex but inexpressive and therefore separate from the

anthropocentric realm of metaphorical meaning.”21 Rauschenberg’s approach in the Black

Paintings was to allow more indeterminacy into the painting process at a particular physical

19 John Cage, Silence: lectures and writings, (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press), 1961: 10.
20 Branden W. Joseph, Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde, (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press,
2007), 80-81. Rebecca Y. Kim has shown how Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, and Christian Wolff were also a
major influence on Cage’s approach to indeterminacy, though these mutual influences are not directly germane
to my argument. Rebecca Y. Kim, “In No Uncertain Musical Terms: The Cultural Politics of John Cage’s
Indeterminacy” (PhD. Diss., Columbia University, 2008).
21 Joseph, Random Order, 84.

24
scale through a process of painting on layers of crumpled newspaper.22 This was one

approach to give more agency to the materials and to develop an art that did not purport to

deliver the psychological state of the artist. Rauschenberg’s attempt to get away from the

mental state of the artist as a basis for making decisions was motivated by his inability to find

the psychological states purported to be expressed in the abstract expressionist paintings of

Kadinsky, Pollock, or Rothko.

Lucier identifies his encounters with Cage as foundational to his formation as an

experimental composer. This aligns Lucier’s work with the joint project of questioning the

agency of the artist or composer or choreographer that spanned music, visual art, and dance.

Moreover, Lucier became friends and collaborators with the conceptual artist Sol LeWitt,

eventually having a Wall Drawing by LeWitt installed in his living room. This social

connection—social in the sense of friendship but also in the sense of the social ties of

professional networks—is reinforced by the fact that Lucier’s work has been described in

formal terms that have been applied to both LeWitt’s work and the early paintings of Frank

Stella. Despite these formal connections, there are important readings of the visual art—

readings grounded in the formalism—that have not arisen in discussions of Lucier’s work. I

will not attempt to explain why the readings did not arise in the context of Lucier’s music. But

by studying the studio practices of LeWitt and Stella, and the implications read into them, we

can recover important implications for how Lucier’s compositional and performance

practices are more broadly situated within the cultural landscape through the lens of the

division of labor.

Many artists in the generation after the abstract expressionists were concerned with

the removal of their own gesture. In 1967 the artist and writer Robert Smithson summarized

this ethos in the demand that, “art should be empty and inert. Self-expression must be

22This technique is an amplification of a technique that Monet used. See Rosalind Krauss, “The Originality of
the Avant-Garde: A Post-Modernist Repetition,” October 18 (1981), 63.

25
voided.”23 Though it is not often specified, this should be implicitly understood to be relevant

only at a certain physical and social scale. As the tradition of removing self-expression and

aiming for objectivity progressed, artists built upon previous efforts. Ultimately this would be

reduced to the scale of the brushstroke. However, the removal of their own agency normally

did not interfere with their social position as artists, that is, with their ability to operate as the

authors of their works with the subsequent social benefits.

In the cases of Frank Stella and Sol LeWitt, both of whom rose into prominence in the

late 1950s and 1960s following the height of abstract expressionism, the reimagining of the

social position of the artist, in counterpoint to its configuration in abstract expressionism, was

important to their aesthetic. Their works that use recursive processes to remove the gesture of

the artist (at a certain scale) in deference to the material conditions of art bring out issues of

labor and social position that will be important to understanding Lucier’s work.

A recursive process is one that is broken into discrete steps such that each new step is

generated from the previous using the same procedure. Thus all decisions are reduced to two

aspects: 1) the starting point and 2) the procedure for generating each new step from the

previous. This reduction in the number of decisions that need to be made has obvious allure

for the composer or artist seeking to remove their self-expression.

By studying works by Frank Stella and Sol LeWitt that use recursive processes as a

means to enact the kind of self-removal for which Lucier’s music is frequently praised, we find

parallels to the two extreme readings of I am sitting in a room: one in which the human

intervention is seen as making a severely reduced contribution to the meaning24 and one in

which it is amplified.25 Though it is interesting to find parallels between various forms of the

arts, the importance of the works of Stella and LeWitt for my argument is that they bring out

23 Robert Smithson, “A Refutation of Historical Humanism” in Robert Smithson, The Collected Writings, ed. Jack
Flam (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2000), 336.
24 See the essay by Tenney quoted above or Benjamin Broening, “Alvin Lucier’s I am sitting in a room,” in

Analytical Methods of Electroacoustic Music, ed. Mary Simoni, (New York: Routledge, 2006), 89-110.
25 See, for example, Branden LaBelle, Background Noise (New York: Continuum Books, 2006), 123-132.

26
certain interpretations that are associated with non-intervention that have been lost in the

reception of Lucier’s music. In particular, Stella and LeWitt both participated in an aesthetic

inspired by the office executive, though the relationship to this social position is different for

each of them. As we will see when I discuss the performance practice of I am sitting in a room,

the executive aesthetic became more of a reality as the performance practice developed due

to changing technology. The greater demand for the piece and the new performance practice

both contributed to a delegation of agency to assistants. Furthermore, the qualities associated

with the executive position will also reappear when we look at the relation of Lucier’s music

to scientific experiments where, historically, there was a division of labor between the

experimental philosopher and the “curator of experiments” that mirrored socio-economic

divisions.

The task now is to describe how Stella and LeWitt used recursive processes, to

interpret these, to describe the cultural meanings that were associated with these works, and

then to describe the implications for the discourse surrounding I am sitting in a room.

Executive Art: Recursion in the Paintings of Frank Stella

In a generation that stripped down the avant-garde manifesto to the brevity of an

office memo or marketing copy, Frank Stella declared his removal of expression through the

motto “what you see is what you see.”26 Though at first glance flippant, this slogan came to

indicate serious philosophical ambitions. Looking back on the 1950s and 1960s, the time

during which Stella was using recursive processes to focus attention on the material conditions

of painting, Sol LeWitt depicted discussions among his circle as focused on “new ways of

making art, trying to reinvent the process, to regain basics, to be as objective as possible.”27

26 Frank Stella, quoted in Lawrence Rubin, Frank Stella: Paintings 1958-1960, A Catalogue Raisonné (New York:
Stewart, Tabori, and Chang, Publishers, 1986),18. Also see Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,”
Artforum 5, No. 10 (June 1967), 80.
27 LeWitt, Sol LeWitt Wall Drawings, 14.

27
 Even if self-expression is to be voided, the artist still needed a method or a means to

make “objective” statements. One approach to this problem was to employ a recursive

process. This seemed to offer the possibility of reducing the whole artwork to a small set of

choices in which could reside the objective statement. In his Black Paintings (1958-60), Stella

filled large canvasses with concentric stripes of black paint separated by small gaps of

unpainted canvas. The thickness of the stripe was determined by the width of the paintbrush.

This simple pattern was understood to be the result of a recursive approach to the process of

painting, at a certain scale. See Example 1. Frank Stella, Tomlinson Court Park (second version),

1959.As described by Michael Fried in 1969, “in each painting the stripes appear to have

been generated by the framing-edge and, starting there, to have taken possession of the rest of

the canvas, as though the whole painting self-evidently followed from, not merely the shape of

the support, but its actual physical limits.” Fried was influenced by the critic Clement

Greenberg who had championed abstract expressionist painting in terms of its ability to

relinquish the illusion of depth inherent in representation and to instead express the

(practically speaking) two-dimensionality of the medium of painting. Medium-specificity

became a mantra. Stella’s Black Paintings push this agenda forward by removing (or at least

reducing) the psychological/emotional dimension from painting that was considered central

in abstract expressionism.

28
 Example 1. Frank Stella, Tomlinson Court Park (second version), 1959.Enamel on canvas (7’ x
9’1’’) in Lawrence Rubin, Frank Stella: Paintings 1958-1960, A Catalogue Raisonné (New York:
Stewart, Tabori, and Chang, Publishers, 1986), 75.

In Stella’s Black Paintings, the most rudimentary inheritance of the material conditions

of painting—the rectangular frame of the stretched canvas—is subjected to a recursive

process. The structure of the painting is reduced to a visual reflection of the frame propagated

inward; the concept of the painting is a reflection on the material conditions of painting. The

implied analysis collapses the tradition of painting to the universal condition consisting of the

“actual physical limits” of the painting. Beginning in 1960 Stella began altering the boundary

conditions of the frame in the series of Aluminum Paintings. According to the logic associated to

his painting practice, this was essentially the only means available of creating variation

because all was to be determined by the boundary conditions. This is, of course, not literally

true. But the intent is to give the impression of this inevitability. Modifying the boundary

conditions to demonstrate the implications functions as an explanatory gesture to clarify that

it is the frame that determines the painting.

29
Example 2. Frank Stella, Marquis de Portago (second version), 1960.Aluminum oil paint on canvas
(7’ 9½“ x 5’ 11½‘’) in Lawrence Rubin, Frank Stella: Paintings 1958-1960, A Catalogue Raisonné
(New York: Stewart, Tabori, and Chang, Publishers, 1986), 109.

At least since the impressionists and through the abstract expressionists, there was a

unified conception of the painter. With Stella’s work, and others from the same period, the

role of the painter is cleaved in two. There is the conceptual labor of devising the recursive

process and the craft-labor of executing the painting.28 Caroline A. Jones’s work has shown

that Stella construed his social position using an ambivalent stance that straddled these two

roles of executive and worker. On the one hand, he would reference his experience as a house

painter as a major influence on his approach to painting canvases. On the other hand, he

stated his aspiration to make “executive art.” Portraits of him from the time of the Black

Paintings depict him both as office executive in a banker’s suit and in more casual clothes

painting the canvases in what was understood as the poise of a house painter, not an

28The division of labor within the studio of the artist is the norm over the long history of Western art. From that
perspective LeWitt’s division of labor is an intensification of the practices within the studio of the master artist.

30
expressive artist.29 The executive status was still aspirational. Stella’s practice was more

analogous to that of a small business owner who has to wear all of the hats within their

operation. But by structuring the labor of painting the canvas around a formal process, Stella

created a clear divide between his roles, if not between the bodies carrying out those roles. A

true executive art could not be realized while Stella was still painting his own canvases. It is

with Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawings that we’ll have an example of how the separation of

“conceptual” and “manual” labor becomes a bodily separation.

Recursion and Division of Labor in the Wall Drawings of Sol LeWitt

Sol LeWitt singled out the work of Stella and Jasper Johns that appeared in the show

16 Americans at MoMA in 1959-1960 as being influential on his thinking at the beginning of

his career as an artist.30 But oriented as he was toward “regaining basics,” as summarized by

Fried’s praise of media specificity, LeWitt deduced a problem with approaching the basics

through painting: “Painting, for instance, wasn’t flat—it was done on a canvas, the canvas

was on a stretcher, and the stretcher was on a wall—so, you were really working with a three-

dimensional object. To get down to basics, in terms of two-dimensional art, you would have

to do something directly on the wall with no intervention.”31 In 1958 he had made a series of

studies of Piero della Francesca’s frescos from art books. The fresco, painted directly into the

wall, provided a model for how to remove the sculptural aspects of the painted canvas. But it

wasn’t until October of 1968 that he made the first of his Wall Drawings. LeWitt’s Wall

Drawings consist of a set of instructions, that also constitute the title, designed by the artist.

The installation of a Wall Drawing is carried out by having assistants—not LeWitt himself—

follow the instructions by drawing directly on a wall in the location the work is to be

29 Caroline A. Jones, “Frank Stella, Executive Artist,” Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist,
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 114-129.
30 Sol LeWitt and Lindsay Aveilhé, Sol LeWitt Wall Drawings (New York: Artifex Press, 2018), 14.
31 Ibid, 47.

31
exhibited. As part of the title, the directions are often on display on an adjoining wall. They

are not part of the direct visual experience of the work, but reading them is part of the

experience of the Wall Drawing. Sometimes the drafters are amateurs, but most often they are

themselves artists and have an enduring relationship with LeWitt or, since his death, with his

estate.

The Wall Drawings extend the line of thought in Stella’s Black Paintings in two

significant ways. The first is to give the impression of moving closer to the two-dimensional

ideal by working directly on the wall. Of course, graphite marks on walls are three-

dimensional, but they appear to be two-dimensional in a way that Stella’s paintings on

stretched canvas do not. The second and more important aspect for this discussion is that

they introduce a new method for removing the hand of the artist: the artist specifies the

directions but leaves the actual drafting, and the decisions lying therein, to assistants. Such a

relationship is of course not in itself unprecedented in the history of art; but coming as it did

in the wake of abstract expressionism in which the bodily gesture of the artist was so central, it

constituted a notable break.

In March of 1972 LeWitt made Wall Drawing #123, the first in the “Copied Lines”

series. In this series the instructions define a recursive process for the drafters to carry out.

The instructions read:

Wall Drawing #123

The first drafter draws a not straight vertical line as long as possible. The second
drafter draws a line next to the first one, trying to copy it. The third drafter does the
same, as do as many drafters as possible. Then the first drafter, followed by the others,
copies the last line drawn until both ends of the wall are reached.

Many variations on this process exist within the Copied Lines series, but they all involve a

recursive process in which the irregularities of the first “not straight” line are propagated by

the process. For example, in Wall Drawing #797 a not straight horizontal line is used to

initiate the process and the points at which it is sharply bent propagate through the

32
subsequent lines creating the illusion of vertical lines that occasionally merge. These large-

scale vertical patterns emerge from the irregularities in the source material, the initial line.

Thus, unlike Stella’s recursive process that was initiated with a universal condition of canvas

painting, LeWitt’s process is initiated with something personal, just not personal to him. The

not straight line reintroduces bodily gesture, but not LeWitt’s bodily gesture.

Example 3. Copied Lines Wall Drawing #797 by Sol Lewitt.In this installation at MASS
MoCA, the irregularities of the initial line at the top of the drawing propagate through the
recursive process to create vertical patterns. Photograph by the author 2016.

Lingering in the LeWitt archive is an interpretation of his Wall Drawings consonant

with Stella’s dream of an executive art. In 1953 LeWitt moved to New York City to attend

the Cartoonists and Illustrators School, now known as SVA, or the School of Visual Arts.

Like Andy Warhol, who studied commercial art in college, LeWitt’s early training was

oriented more toward the commercial design world than the world of fine art. While in school

he worked the Photostat machine in Seventeen Magazine and in 1955 he worked for a year

as a graphic designer in the office of the architect I.M. Pei. During his time in Pei’s office he

assisted on the graphic and three-dimensional designs for the Roosevelt Field Shopping

33
Center in Long Island.32

In an interview LeWitt singled out these professional experiences as having a crucial

impact on his thinking about making art. “Working in an architectural office, meeting

architects, knowing architects had a big effect. An architect doesn’t go off with a shovel and

build his foundation and lay every brick. He’s still an Artist.”33 LeWitt points to the crucial

but delayed impact this had on his work: “It opened up a whole new idea of how art could be

made and it wasn’t until later in the 1960s that I became reinvolved in that kind of thinking,

but it was exemplary at the time.”34

Non-intervention in the form of the removal of the bodily gesture of the artist was

sought by Stella and achieved by LeWitt by developing formal processes derived from the

basic material conditions of painting and drawing. This type of move made a formal division

in studio practice between the concept and the production. It created a style of art that was

understood as both more conceptual and more firmly grounded in the basic material

conditions of the production process. For LeWitt, the artist was associated with the

conceptual side of the practice; the labor of making the art was delegated to assistants.

According to his later reflections, this configuration of types of labor—conceptual and

manual—was inspired by the hierarchical labor structure within I.M. Pei’s architectural firm.

LeWitt linked the social status of the artist to that of the commercial executive.35

These art works of Stella and LeWitt bookend the composition of I am sitting in a room

in 1969-70. Stella’s recursively structured paintings appeared in the late 1950s, almost a

decade before I am sitting in a room. LeWitt’s first Wall Drawing was made in 1968 and the first

32 LeWitt, Sol LeWitt Wall Drawings.

33 Ibid, 9.
34 Ibid, 10.
35 For the impact of social class on the production of art in the 1960s, one might also study the music of Giacinto

Scelsi. At Spectralisms 2019, Scelsi’s collaborator Frances-Marie Uitti said that Scelsi hired Vieri Tosatti to make
his scores because Scelsi felt that, as an aristocrat, the production of a score was below his social status. Robert
Morris, whose work has many social and aesthetic connections to that of LeWitt and Stella made the issue of
labor a theme of his 1970 solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of Art. See Julia Bryan-Wilson’s discussion of
the ambivalent and fleeting relation of Morris’s work to labor and to manual laborers, Julia Bryan-Wilson,
“Hard Hats and Art Strikes: Robert Morris in 1970,” The Art Bulletin 89/2 (2007): 333-359.

34
recursively structured one in 1972. Thus in 1969 the idea of using a recursive process to

remove the hand of the artist, or of the composer, was not new, but nor was it seen as an

approach whose possibilities had been exhausted.

Comparisons: To Collapse or Not to Collapse

In a paper presented at the Audio Engineering Society Convention in 2012, Jonathan

S. Abel and Michael J. Wilson argue that, in ideal experimental conditions of the process used

by Lucier, “only the strongest room modes will survive a large number of iterations.”36 That

is, the initial complex timbre of speech will converge to a relatively simple timbre consisting of

the strongest room modes. So Stella’s Black Paintings bring out an aspect of I am sitting in a room:

gradually reducing music and speech to the physical conditions of sound as idealized through

the theory of the Fourier transform confers universal status.37 But to have a true parallel

between these pieces by Stella and Lucier, Lucier would have had to work without the speech

and only recursively amplify the room sound itself—something like a mash-up of Cage’s

4’33’’ and I am sitting in a room.

This convergence to the strongest room modes through collapse is not heard in the

1981 Lovely Music recording. On the 32nd and final iteration of that recording (43’37’’) the

sound has not collapsed to the steady state of the room mode. The process transforms his

speech into slowly shifting tones whose fundamental frequencies and timbres are largely

dependent upon the acoustic properties of the room in which the recursive process takes

place. But the piece is stopped before the collapse of the broad spectrum that Abel and

Wilson theorized. As James Fei described in an interview, “the general guideline [for when to

stop the piece] is when the sound doesn’t vary much, at least perceptibly, between

36 Jonathan S. Abel and Michael J. Wilson, “Luciverb: Iterated Convolution for the Impatient,” paper presented
at the 133 Convention of the Audio Engineering Society (San Francisco, CA, 2012), 3.
37 The Fourier transform represents a sound wave in terms of a collection of sine waves, which are the basic

building blocks within the theory of acoustics. The effect of the room is to reinforce some of these constituent
sine waves and to diminish others.

35
iterations.”38 This is an element of the performance practice on which the score is silent, but

one that is characteristic of many performances and recordings. Stella’s paintings enact a

complete collapse of the boundary, and a collapse of the tradition of painting to the boundary

conditions of the painting. The performance practice of I am sitting in a room normally cuts

short the collapse of the sound to the room mode. However, the reduction of the musical

tradition to the conditions of sound is still commonly read into the work.

As the frame of Stella’s paintings appear to reverberate inward, structuring the

painting, so the sound of I am sitting in a room is structured by the reflections of the sound off of

the walls of the room in which it is recorded. Although not intended as such, Stella’s paintings

work like an illustration of acoustic reverberation, as exemplified by the cover of the 1966

paperback Dover Edition of Acoustics by the physicist Alexander Woods.39

Example 4. The cover of the 1966 paperback Acoustics by Alexander Wood.The image
represents acoustic resonance and formally resembles the Black Paintings of Frank Stella.
Alexander Wood, Acoustics (New York: Dover, 1966).

In LeWitt’s Copied Lines series, the recursive process selectively amplifies the

38 James Fei, interview with the author, 20 December 2017.

39 A similar pattern of nested rectangles also appears in Richard Anuszkiewicz’s Entrance to Green (1970). One
could develop a parallel between the conflicting perceptual cues for depth that are found aurally in I am sitting in
a room and visually in Entrance to Green.

36
irregularities of the initial line of the first draftsman made along the top of the wall. In

contrast to the Stella painting, which collapses in order to analyze the tradition of painting,

this wall drawing expands contingency to the level of form: the gesture of the hand of the first

draftsman—not LeWitt’s hand—is interpreted by the subsequent draftsman. Each draftsman

is then both the interpreter of the previous and the subsequent object of interpretation. Small

swerves of the pen propagate into form-defining vertical contours. In I am sitting in a room, the

irregularities of the initial speech propagate through the work and, despite the claim of the

text, are often the last features to be smoothed out.

These examples bring out two features of I am sitting in a room: the idea of reducing the

structure to a resonance of the boundary conditions and the selective amplification of human

irregularity through a gradual process to create form. However, unlike Stella’s system, in I am

sitting in a room the boundary conditions also create an element of contingency because of the

irregular resonances of most rooms and because of the variation of acoustic properties from

one room to the next. The predominance of the rectangular picture frame allows Stella’s

approach to be suggestive of a universal statement about all painting. But the same cannot be

said about Lucier’s approach due to the material complexity and the partially mechanized

approach. It should also be noted that, unlike LeWitt’s Copied Lines series which amplify the

very personal contours of the line of the drafters, I am sitting in a room is almost always

performed with Lucier himself as the speaker. Thus while he may have removed the note-by-

note compositional gesture, he has replaced that with something that is just as personal, his

own voice sounding in his living room.40 The removal of the bodily gesture of the artist

achieved by LeWitt does not occur for I am sitting in a room. Instead there is an exchange of one

type of gesture for another at a different scale, a swap that seems to rely on the use of the

40Lucier describes the personal nature thus: “It’s ideal for testing the resonant characteristics of a space because
it puts so much in all at one time. It’s also extremely personal. And since I've been acting in George Manupelli’s
Dr. Chicago films, I’ve started paying attention to the characteristics of my speech which are original to my
personality and don't sound like anybody else’s; you know I’m a stutterer.” Alvin Lucier and Douglas Simon,
Chambers (Middletown, CT: Weselyan University Press, 1980), 36.

37
electronic technology. I am sitting in a room should be characterized, not in terms of non-

intervention, but in terms of repositioning the compositional and performative gestures.

Agency Resurfaces: Room Selection as Compositional Gesture

Through the existing accounts of the early history of I am sitting in a room we can

already see how non-intervention is a problematic idea through which to approach this piece.

Lucier’s first attempt to make I am sitting in a room was during the fall of 1969 in the Brandeis

University electronic music studio using magnetic tape. He rejected the recording on aesthetic

grounds: “the resonant frequencies got reinforced very quickly after the fifth or sixth

generation, resulting in harsh, strident sounds.”41 The first recording that Lucier presented

publically was made in March of 1970 in the temporary faculty housing of Wesleyan

University in Middletown, Connecticut. Lucier had just accepted a faculty position there and

used the university recording equipment. He has described the significance of the fact that the

recording was made in the living room: “the [wall-to-wall] carpet and drapes cut down on the

production of the resonant frequencies so they took longer to achieve, but it gave us a more

beautiful result.”42 The recording consisted of 15 iterations and was released on SOURCE as

Record #3 in 1970. The successful production of the piece is tied to institutional access to

equipment and to a private, and quiet, living space, both of which arose through Lucier’s

position as a professor. In my interview with Nicholas Collins, who studied with Lucier in the

1970s and subsequently assisted him in performances, he described I am sitting in a room this

way: “I sometimes liken it to the rise of golden age painting where finally instead of just

venerating god you had these portraits of rich burghers in their houses surrounded by their

children and their possessions.”43 Collins is emphasizing the importance of Lucier’s social and

material position for the production of I am sitting in a room. This aspect of the social position

41 Ibid, 37.
42 Ibid, 37.
43 Nicholas Collins, interview with the author, 18 May 2018.

38
associated with a certain type of production of art has been left out of the literature on

Lucier’s music. While Lucier’s practice for the first recording resembles Stella’s painting

process in the sense that the divide between conceptual and manual labor is only formal; as

we will see, as the performance practice of I am sitting in a room evolved alongside changing

technological affordances and growing demand for a live version of the piece, the separation

of types of labor became embodied: Lucier stopped being involved in the labor of working the

electronics, though he has remained the predominant performer of the text.

The significance of the type of room used is often lost in the literature in otherwise

insightful discussions. For example, in Gallery Sound Caleb Kelly notes that Lucier’s

“compositions allow for the differing signatures of the various spaces to play out and create

new sonic experiences from performance to performance.”44 However he lumps together

Chambers (1968), Vespers (1969), and I am sitting in a room (1969) as all being predicated on “hard

flat surfaces and the unforgiving echo of the empty sounding gallery.” While the white cube

gallery is particularly well suited to Vespers, it can be a problematic space in which to perform

I am sitting in a room; galleries are likely to have reverberant responses closer to the Brandeis

Electronic Music Studio, which Lucier rejected, than his living room.

That shift from the electronic music studio to the living room signifies a shift in the

type and scale of compositional gesture. Lucier could have used electronic filters to try to

dampen the dominant frequencies that arose in the electronic music studio. But he didn’t. He

moved to another room. As the score instructs, when performing I am sitting in a room one

should “choose a room the musical qualities of which you would like to evoke.” The gesture

of the composer is thus shifted from the direct control of details—for example, by shaping the

spectrum through electronic filters—to the selection of the room, that is, to the selection of

the material conditions for the piece. Lucier’s aesthetic concerns stop short of universality: the

piece was not about all rooms, but about particular types of rooms that allowed non-
44 Kelly, Gallery Sound, 63

39
intervention and gradual process to coexist. The sounds desired by Lucier were immanent in

the living room, but not in the Brandeis Electronic Music Studio. That first recording to be

released was made in a room with a doubly-determined identity: it was both an intimate

living space in which friends and colleagues listened to music and an institutional space, being

the university housing accessible to Lucier as a recently hired faculty member.

Naturalizing the Living Room

The claim of non-intervention in Lucier’s music often leads to a subsequent claim that

the aesthetic results are natural. Madeleine Akrich has theorized that this is a common

occurrence in the introduction of new technologies to a social group: “new technologies may

not only lead to new arrangements of people and things. They may, in addition, generate and

‘naturalize’ new forms and orders of causality and, indeed, new forms of knowledge about the

world.”45 When the compositional gesture of room selection is ignored in discussions of I am

sitting in a room, the acoustics of his living room, which Lucier preferred over those of the

electronic music studio, are naturalized. As Akrich argues, “a large part of the work of

innovators is that of ‘inscribing’ this vision of (or prediction about) the world in the technical

content of the new object.”46 The end product is a script. I will argue in Chapter 3 that, in the

live performance versions, the performance practice is aimed at emplacing the aesthetic of

Lucier’s living room into other acoustic spaces through technological interventions such as

filtering and compression. The way that the literature has depicted the relation between the

aesthetic and the technical in I am sitting in a room suggests that Lucier successfully created a

script.

After making the recording of I am sitting in a room in March 1970, it was premiered for

an audience at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City later that month. This performance

45 Madeleine Akrich, “The De-scription of technical objects,” in Shaping Technology/building Society: Studies in
Sociotechnical Change, ed. by Wiebe E Bijker and John Law, (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1994), 207.
46 Ibid, 208.

40
consisted of playing back the recording from Lucier’s living room—what Collins referred to

as a portrait of the home. For the next 25 years, a performance of I am sitting in a room

consisted of playing back a living room recording in a gallery or performance space. In 1981

Lucier recorded it again, in his new living room in Connecticut, for Lovely Music, in a 45-

minute version consisting of 32 generations. The rate at which change occurs is much more

gradual in the 1981 than the 1970 version. The quality of signal and noise in the two

recordings is also drastically different, something you can hear even before the speech begins

on each recording.

There is a complexity to the performance practice used in I am sitting in a room which

makes non-intervention a poor basis for theorizing this piece. By examining recursive artwork

of Stella and LeWitt, this section showed that rather than removing agency, I am sitting in a

room shifts the scale of the compositional gesture and divides the labor in new and interesting

ways through its technological engagement.47 Just as the division of labor in LeWitt’s work

realized the executive dream within Stella’s, the performance practice of I am sitting in a room

after 2000 realizes the latent executive structure of its pre-digital manifestations.

Gradual Process and the Transfer of Agency

In this section I propose a reading of the piece that gives more weight to the

transitional regions. This involves a listening practice that requires one to pay closer attention

to the performance practice than is currently done in the literature on this piece, and is rarely

done with any of Lucier’s music.48 As I will expand upon in the latter parts of this dissertation,

47 The issue of cognitive labor has been discussed through the lens of cybernetics and post-humanism. See G.
Douglas Barrett, “Cognitive Labor and the Posthuman Brain in Alvin Lucier’s Music for Solo Performer,” Postmodern
Culture 27/3 (2017).
48 There are two articles which are important exceptions to this tendency: Volker Straebel and Wilm Thoben

“Alvin Lucier’s Music for Solo Performer” and Christopher Burns, “Realizing Lucier and Stockhausen.” I will
address the article by Burns in more detail below.

41
a more detailed understanding of the performance practice drastically changes the meaning

of Lucier’s music. This particular reading of I am sitting in a room is based upon the idea of

“transferred agency,” which will be critical for developing a more general theory about the

aesthetic of Lucier’s music that is based on the modes of intervention instead of non-

intervention.

Complementing the existing literature that focuses on speech as the origin and music,

sound, or acoustical presence as the destination of the piece, my analysis focuses on the

transitional regions in which subtle acoustic cues suggest that agency is transferred away from

the human performer and onto the machine through a recursive process. In this section I

argue this through a reading of the score and recordings. But in Chapter 3 I will extend the

idea of a transfer of agency to apply to how changes in available technology and related

aesthetic priorities exerted agency over Lucier and I am sitting in a room through Lucier’s

students, assistants, and collaborators.

Analyzing Away the Gradual Process

As an icon of American experimental music, I am sitting in a room has become so

important that, for some theorists, we should no longer listen to it. Author and performer

Seth Kim-Cohen suggests that

It might even be that close attention to the sonic results of I am sitting in a room
occludes the more pressing conceptual concerns raised by the piece. Thus I
might suggest that, in order to best engage it, one need not—perhaps even
should not—listen to I am sitting in a room.49

To replace a piece of music with the discourse enveloping it is to fall prey to the disciplinary

bias of the humanist scholar, or, more generally speaking, a linguistically dominated mode of

navigating the world. It suggests listeners will not reach the insight arrived at by Kim-Cohen

49Seth Kim-Cohen, In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art (New York: Bloomsbury Academic,
2013), 193.

42
when he listened: we will be unable to think, distracted by the beauty of the sounds. It implies

that Kim-Cohen has already extracted the most important concept. Harry Lehmann attempts

to supplant the actual piece with his own reading through a dialectically opposed path: He

dismisses the aesthetic quality of the piece as “quite poor” if compared with any piece by

Helmut Lachenmann.50 For Kim-Cohen, sonic phenomena overwhelm us; for Lehmann,

they underwhelm us. But in both cases the sensory experience is positioned as a distraction

from the crux of the matter: the idea. Their positions are contrary to the position that Lucier

takes when he reminds us that there are “no ideas but in things.”

In Tempus ex Machina, Gerard Grisey’s essay on time in music, he makes the simple

observation that listeners predominantly remember the beginning and the end of a piece of

music. The literature on I am sitting in a room seems to reflect that by developing numerous

hermeneutics that relate beginning to end through the transformation of language to music

(or sonic phenomena). The stance advocated by Kim-Cohen and Lehmann of replacing the

piece with its analysis is extreme but it is indicative of a subtle tendency in the literature on I

am sitting in a room to reduce the piece to a binary structure, to an exchange of categories in

which the end points are emphasized rather than the regions between. The emphasis on the

exchange of categories obviates the role of listening to the piece.51

What role does the gradual process have if the analysis reduces to an exchange of

categories? Migone argues for a shift from “sitting in the room” to the room “sitting in him

and in the room of the listener”;52 Kim posits a transition from “body” to “not-body”;53

50 Harry Lehmann, “Conceptual Music and The Gehalt-aesthetic Turn,”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXsc8_KOViU, accessed 29 March 2017. The discussion of I am sitting in
a room begins at 48:00.
51 When I gave the paper “Transferred Agency in Alvin Lucier’s I am sitting in a room” at the McGill Music

Graduate Symposium in Montreal, Canada, 18-20 March 2016 an audience member asked if it was important
to listen to the whole piece, or if just sampling various sections was enough to get the idea. They said that they
had dismissed the piece as uninteresting based upon their experience in a university seminar in which the
professor had played them the beginning and the end. Given the 45’ length of the version put out by Lovely Music
it seems likely that courses that refer to the piece rarely require students to listen to it in its entirety.
52 Christof Migone, “Sonic Somatic: Performances of the Unsound Body.” (PhD diss., New York University,

2007)

43
Vandsø follows a transformation from “the subject of enunciation” to “the space in which the

enunciation is performed”;54 Bulut pursues the implications of a transformation from “verbal”

to “musical,” though describes the piece as having a tripartite form;55 Broening emphasizes

moments of uncertainty, but maintains that “The musical argument of the work is the

creation of a continuum between speech as having semantic meaning and speech as sound.”56

However, though creating a “continuum between speech as having semantic meaning and

speech as sound” is the “argument” of the work, little time is devoted to what happens as the

listener progresses through that continuum. The analysis hops over that region of central

importance.

While the meaning of each pole of the binary structure varies between authors, the

move to reduce the piece to a transformation of two extremes is prevalent. That the literature

has developed in this direction is strange given that it is widely acknowledged that the piece,

and Lucier’s music more generally, is structured in terms of a gradual process. In the

literature gradual process looms authoritatively on the horizon, but not within the frame of

analysis.

The Gradual Process Suggests Transfers of Agency

Even though the form is repetitive as far as the recording and recycling
procedure is concerned, the listener hears something quite different, and that
is the climactic point at which the speech goes from intelligibility to
unintelligibility, or from words to music. What’s beautiful is that this point is
different for each listener; it’s kind of a sliding fulcrum on a moveable time
scale.57

Lucier describes his interest in the moment at which the intelligibility of speech is lost

53 Sun-Jun Kim, “Imaginal Listening: a quarternary framework for listening to electroacoustic music and
phenomena of sound-images,” Organised Sound, 15/1 (2010): 43-53.
54 Anette Vandsø, “‘I am recording the sound of my speaking voice…’ Enunciation in Alvin Lucier’s I am sitting

in a room,” Sound Effect, 2/1 (2012): 106.

55 Zeynep Bulut, “La voix-peux : understanding the physical, phenomenal, and imaginary limits on the human

voice through contemporary music,” (doctoral thesis, University of California, San Diego, 2011), 54.
56 Broening, “Alvin Lucier’s I am sitting in a room,” 105.
57 Lucier and Simon, Chambers, 39.

44
and the musical quality dominates, a moment whose arrival differs between listeners, and

even between listenings. But prior to this there are a number of dramatic moments that have

not been addressed in the literature. These moments involve two types of changes in the

sound. The first is that the reverb of one room appears to be imposed on that of another

room. The second is that the timbre of the voice changes. In this section I will argue that

these changes in auditory cues about who is speaking and where they are speaking create

transitional ambiguities that present uncertain agency. It is through these two types of

changes that I will flesh out some of the structure of the gradual process. My analysis is based

upon the 1981 Lovely Music recording.

The first moment of uncertain agency arrives when the human performer becomes

silent after the initial 1’15’’ of this 45’ work and yet the production of sound continues. Where

lies the agency if the human performer has fallen silent? This question is magnified in live

performance when Lucier sits, sphinx-like, on stage for the entirety of the piece, or even by

knowing that the work is sometimes performed live. The lack of activity of the performer

creates, as all acousmatic sound is wont to do, “an agency vacuum that must—automatically,

so to speak—seek to fill itself.”58 Jane Goodall has pursued the consequences of confusing the

roles of agency and energy in voluntary movement, despite the best efforts of William James

to distinguish them. In order to adapt some of her insights to a reading of Lucier’s work I

need to first distinguish different types of perceptions of agency.

Lucier wrote the text for I am sitting in a room only after committing himself to the

acoustic process, a process which he heard was used by the loudspeaker manufacturer, Bose,

to test if the frequency response of a loudspeaker was flat.59 The acoustic process exerted a

weak agency on Lucier in the sense used in Actor Network Theory (ANT). Benjamin Piekut,

58 Jane Goodall, “Transferred Agencies: Performance and the Fear of Automatism,” Theatre Journal, 49/4 (1997):
444. I am invoking Goodall in a way similar to how Kim invokes J. J. Gibson’s claim that “when faced with
inadequate information, our ‘perceptual system hunts’” and is provoked to imagine. In Kim, “Imaginal
Listening,” 46.
59 Alvin Lucier, Music 109: Notes on Experimental Music (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2012), 88.

45
drawing upon ANT, has urged the musicological community to “understand agency as the

result of events that produce subjects that act and objects that are acted upon” which in turn

“decouples agency from intention and will.”60 Bruno Latour theorizes an agent as something

that “makes a difference in the course of some other agent’s action.”61 In this weak sense, the

instrumental process used in I am sitting in a room attained agency by acting upon Lucier,

seeming almost to dictate the text to him. In an interview, he described the process of writing

the text: “I wrote that text in real time, almost, on the night I did the first recording. I just

decided to tell people what I was doing. The last sentence just sort of came out of the blue.”62

Weak agency can be located in the recursive process itself as it acts upon Lucier, compelling

him to write an idiomatic score for this electroacoustic instrument. Weak agency is indifferent

to intentionality and subjectivity.

Weak agency offers a productive mode for tracing chains of effective mediations. But

while this is how I prefer to theorize agency per se, the discrepancy between how I act and what

I think is itself an important feature of the perception of agency, and crucial to the role of

agency in I am sitting in a room. In listening to the piece, we also engage with our naïve

perceptions of agency. We ascribe agency to beings that seem to partake in some decision-

making process as part of their acting and this naïve agency is intertwined with notions of

intentionality. If examined it is problematic in every respect but useful in the representation of

how we often behave, even if it misrepresents the more carefully considered philosophies to

which we subscribe. We live in a state of tension: constantly ascribing naïve agency to objects

that we would only defend to possess a weak agency.

Goodall points out that the definition of energy in physics allows it to transform from

60 Benjamin Piekut, “Actor-Networks in Music History: Clarifications and Critiques,” Twentieth-Century Music
11/2 (2014): 194.
61 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor Network Theory (New York: Oxford University Press,

2005), 71.
62 Daniel Fox and Alvin Lucier, “I’m not hiding anything,” VAN Magazine, March 16, 2017, accessed 27 March,

2017, https://van-us.atavist.com/im-not-hiding-anything.

46
one state to another, e.g. from kinetic energy to potential energy, and that the conflation of

energy and agency leads us to perceive that “agency may…be in search of opportunities of

transference or transmission.”63 She sees this as a cultural anxiety that has its roots in the late

19th century, a period that also witnessed the invention of the microphone and loudspeaker. It

is a cultural anxiety that arises in the presentation of acousmatic music because we are

uncertain of the ethical relationship that exists when the agency of the actors is uncertain.

Two Key Moments of Uncertain Agency

In I am sitting in a room, the first moment of uncertain agency is when the human

performer finishes speaking and becomes silent, leaving the sound production to the

instrument. The uncertainty is produced by a transfer of naïve agency away from the human

performer, to the instrument. It can also be understood as a moment in which the weak

agency of the instrument is brought to the surface. Even in listening to a studio recording, we

know the human has stopped performing because they tell us so. In Vandsø’s framework for

analyzing this piece, the deictic shifters—the “I” and “you”—come to be appropriated by the

instrument. The human performer is no longer enunciating; the instrument has taken its

place. As we will see when I discuss the evolving performance practice, the versions of the

piece performed or recorded since 2000 reify the perception that the instrument has taken

over because the record-playback process is automated in real-time. In the versions made on

magnetic tape by cutting and splicing, the impression of the automated process is itself an

illusion.

The lack of activity on the part of the speaker, visually evident in live performance

and implicit in a recording, is accompanied by a change of location. Or so it seems. On the

second iteration the reverb of the room has been applied twice. The text tells us this, but we

63 Goodall, “Transferred Agencies,” 444.

47
have little experience with what this sounds like, except from pieces like this. In the second

iteration, the room sounds as if it is larger than before, as if the speaker were in a different

room. This continues for a number of iterations, giving the sense that the speaker keeps

shifting to grander and grander spaces. But these shifts are then interrupted by a new kind of

change in the quality of sound and a new moment of uncertain agency.

The next moment of uncertain agency arises when the “speaking voice” begins to

change timbre. Compare the first iteration to the sixth (0’00’’ and 6’46’’).64 As the room’s

reverberant fingerprint is embossed onto the reproduction of Lucier’s voice, it begins to sound

more metallic, more electronic, almost as if it were an electronically synthesized voice with a

poorly rendered “humanistic” halo of vibrato.65 This heightens the perception of a transfer of

agency because the instrument no longer speaks with the vocal timbre of the human

performer but, rather, with its own timbre that is shaped less and less by vocal chords, larynx

and mouth, and progressively more by the circuitry, loudspeaker, and room architecture.

When the text “I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now…” is

echoed by the circuitry it conjures a new agent that is speaking back to the human performer,

declaring its independence through a physical displacement in three ways: The first is simply

by appropriating the text with the implication of its literal, semantic meaning. The second

and more visceral displacement is that the deformed timbre suggests a distinct subject. Lucier

valued speech because it is “extremely personal.”66 During the gradual process the timbre of

his voice is progressively distorted so that, well before speech becomes music, his speech

sounds as if it is the speech of another agent. The third, already mentioned above, is that,

when the electronic instrument speaks back to the human performer, the reverb is augmented

by an additional layer with each successive utterance, providing the aural cue—now an

64 All timings refer to the Lovely Music recording which is available for purchase and can also be found here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAxHlLK3Oyk
65 One might think of Hal’s voice in 2001 Space Odyssey.
66 Lucier and Simons, Chambers, 36.

48
illusory one—that the speaker of this text (and at this point it is the “instrument as electronic

circuitry” that is speaking) is now in a room different from the one that the human performer

is in, or that the audience is in.67 The reverb functions like a materialist deictic shifter: we

perceive reverb as a cue to the nature of the acoustic space in which an utterance occurs. Like

the blank mask of the deictic shifter “I” that is placed over the face of a subject, the

recursively layered room reverb is placed over the recorded speech to shift it away—“in

space”—from its subjective origin.

Based on the timbral and reverberant changes that occur between the early iterations,

I have argued that one can perceive the gradual process in I am sitting in a room as presenting a

transfer of agency. This work presents subjective experience and agency through the

“extremely personal” medium of (recorded) speech and then transfers them away from their

normative locus as though, quoting Goodall, “agency could leak from bodies into machines

through the circuitry by which they were interconnected.”68 In contrast to Kim and Vandsø,

I am not arguing for the deconstruction of subjectivity and the move to non-body, nor

LaBelle’s perception of the “architectural object” that has taken on properties of the human

subject, but the perception of naïve agency being transferred to the instrument.69 I see this as

the rich transitional region that precedes the final destinations articulated by LaBelle, Kim,

and Vandsø.

The next stage of my argument is to critique the stance in the literature claiming that

non-intervention confers a universal status on Lucier’s music. My critique of universality will

suggest an alternative grounding for the aesthetic.

67 Compare to Stina Hasse, “I Am Sitting in a Room: From a listener's perspective,” Body, Space & Technology
Journal, 11/1, 2012 and LaBelle, Background Noise, 129, which both hear Lucier talking to himself, rather than the
instrument talking to Lucier and other listeners.
68 Goodall, “Transferred Agencies,” 441.
69 Jones points out that Stella spoke about his paintings is if they were the agents. Jones, The Machine in the Studio,

123.

49
 Universality and the Transparent Composer

In this section I critique the position in the literature that depicts the music of Lucier

as achieving a universal aesthetic by revealing the nature of sound itself. The composer

becomes transparent so that the music reveals to the listener an experience of nature,

materiality, reality, or pure sound that is not mediated by the composer’s expression, at least

in the traditional sense. Like gradual process, the claim to universality is predicated on non-

intervention: the revelation of something universal can happen because the composer does

not interfere with the phenomenon, which is itself posited as universal.

Claims of Universality

The type of claim made in the literature is that, when listening to a piece by Lucier,

we are not listening to an expression of Lucier’s, or of Lucier’s representation of something,

but that we are able to listen through Lucier to the very materiality of sound. According to

Bernhard Rietbrock, it was at a concert by John Cage and David Tudor in Italy where

“Lucier retrospectively locates his pivotal leap to a universalist way of composing, which

neither belongs to a specific culture nor to a traditional musical language.”70 While this is a

particularly bold claim to universality, the sentiment is commonly found in various forms

within the literature.71 This positions Lucier as a member of the culture of no culture. By

escaping all particular traditions, Lucier is placed in the locus of honor within the manifold of

modernity that authorizes him to comment upon the aesthetic conditions on which any

tradition might be based. Mersch writes, “Lucier’s works invent a specifically artistic mode of

70 Bernhard Rietbrock, “In Between Waves,” in Alvin Lucier – Illuminated by the Moon, ed. by Bernhard
Rietbrock (Zurich: ZHdK, 2017), 11. Piekut has already critiqued the idea of modest witness in Cage
scholarship. Cite Tom Johnson on whiteness and universality
71 For example, Christoph Cox and Seth Kim-Cohen, who otherwise disagree on many points, both make

claims of universality. Christoph Cox, “Beyond Representation and Signification: Toward a Sonic Materialism,”
Journal of Visual Culture, 10/2 (2011): 145-161 and Kim-Cohen, In the Blink of an Ear.

50
reflecting on the conditions of the aesthetic itself.”72 This is the highest compliment of cultural

modernism, the kind that Clement Greenberg paid to the abstract expressionists. In a musical

parallel to the trajectory of Stella and LeWitt, Lucier has arrived at the basics when ‘what you

hear is what you hear,’ and that, despite the tendency to dismiss representation, this music

now represents, or is able to comment upon, concepts or philosophical statements. Even

according to this line of thinking, the claim should not be that representation has been

avoided, but rather that the domain of representation has shifted to a ‘higher’ level, to the

level of the concept. But, of course, this higher level is revealed as nothing other than the

linguistic domain native to the theorists and writers. The traditional boundary between art

and theory is perforated by the claim that Lucier’s works already constitute a theoretical

statement.

But if Lucier works by the motto, “no ideas but in things,” how can the theorist

account for the implicit nature of the theoretical statement within the aesthetic experience of

a piece by Lucier? This is commonly done by claiming that the aesthetic results are immanent

in the material conditions of the piece of music. It is similar to a claim that a certain aesthetic

is idiomatic to an instrument, but much stronger. It is an organicist aesthetic that makes its

claim on the “natural” through the material conditions of the music. To what extent the

claims in the literature are supported by the actual performance practice will be explored in

Chapter 3.

In discussing the material conditions of I am sitting in a room, scholars focus on the

acoustics of the room and the voice of the speaker. However, Caleb Kelly points out that the

piece “cannot be produced without the use of recording technologies and as such it can be

approached through a critical reflection of the recording technology itself.”73 Within the

72Mersch, “Art as Research sui generis,” 30.

73Kelly, Gallery Sound, 69. The artist Canzona has created a version of I am sitting in a room that explores the video
codec through recursive encoding rather than room resonance. It brings our attention to the obscured grain of
video format, but such a perspective is rare within the scholarship. Canzona, “VIDEO ROOM 1000

51
literature on Lucier’s music, this is an unusual angle to take on I am sitting in a room, but one

that deserves further consideration. Normally the literature treats the recording technology as

transparent and its operation as singular.74 That is, the performance practice of Lucier’s

music is generally treated as a horizon to the domain of analysis rather than a subject of

analysis.75 Lucier himself has indicated an orientation in this direction by the fact that when

he made the original recording of I am sitting in a room he placed the tape machines outside of

the room in which the recording was being made. The piece was not about the medium of

recording technology—at least not from his perspective at that moment in time.76

The Form of the Critique of Universality

I critique these claims of universality using two approaches. The first is by looking at

works of Tone Yasuano and Tony Conrad from 1961 that use a similar record-playback

process as I am sitting in a room but achieve very different aesthetic results. The pieces show that

the performance practice that achieves the sonic results that are associated with the universal

in Lucier’s music does not follow automatically from the technological object—the

instrument. The second is to look at how small choices in the performance practice of I am

sitting in a room alter the sonic results. In particular, by making new recordings I show how the

rate of the gradual process changes dramatically depending on whether a continuous or an

interrupted process is used. In the 1970 and 1981 recordings of I am sitting in a room,

interrupted processes were used. Since 2000, the continuous process has become the norm.

Together these refute the claims of universality associated with this particular piece: that the

COMPLETE MIX – All 1000 videos seen in sequential order!” (accessed 3 November 2019).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icruGcSsPp0&t=89s. However,
74 In the context of film sound, Mack Hagood provides an excellent critique of the transparency of media and

suggests an alternative theoretical approach based on transduction. Mack Hagood, “Unpacking a Punch:
Transduction and the Sound of Combat Foley in Fight Club,” Cinema Journal 53/4 (2014): 98-120.
75 The most important exceptions to this in the literature are the articles by Straebel and Thöben (2014) and

Burns (2002).
76 Program note from Two Portrait Concerts at Sydenham St. United Church, Kingston, Ontario (2009), Alvin

Lucier Papers.

52
sounding music reduces to the equipment (including the room) to reveal the phenomena of

sound itself. Similar arguments should apply to other pieces.

Number (1961) by Tone Yasunao and Three Loops (1961) by Tony Conrad use the same

record-playback process as I am sitting in a room and but predate it by almost a decade. Neither

has been discussed in relation to Lucier’s work, but both emphasize the medium of magnetic

tape in a way that Kelly, quite exceptionally, sees as nascent in I am sitting in a room. But

beyond sharing a common instrumental technique—the record-playback process—Conrad

explicitly theorized Three Loops as a study of resonance and Tone’s piece clearly relies on

making the vibratory nature of resonance sensible to the audience. However, the drastically

different aesthetic results that Tone and Conrad derived from similar processes provides one

argument that Lucier’s approach, rather than revealing something universal, reinforces a

script that involves certain aesthetic preferences about the resulting sounds.

Number – Media as Instrument

Tone Yasuano’s first solo show was on 2 February 1962 at Minami Gallery, Tokyo.

The tenth work on the program was Number (1961).77 In a MoMA interview with Miki

Kaneda, Tone describes the piece: “I started by reading the numbers, one, two, three, four…

all the way to one hundred or two hundred. Once I had finished reading them, I recorded the

same recitation of numbers onto a tape at a very low volume. Next, I played back that

recording at a very loud volume while recording that plus a new layer of recitation. I repeated

this a number of times, always recording low and replaying high. On an open-reel tape, this

process produces so much distortion that the tape recorder (an old-fashioned reel-to-reel)

77 A program for the event is held in the MoMA collection and appears on a blog-post interview with Tone
Tone, Tone Tone and Miki Kaneda, “Sound Is Merely a Result: Interview with Tone Tone, 2,” Museum of
Modern Art, https://post.at.moma.org/content_items/476-sound-is-merely-a-result-interview-with-tone-Tone-
2?_ga=2.43364837.1594926796.1565078942-841047330.1564468966 (accessed 14 September 2019). In the
interview Tone mistakenly uses the name Days to refer to the piece Number (personal communication). It is
Number in which he used the recursive record-playback process that forms part of the pre-history of I am sitting in
a room.

53
placed on the stage literally starts jumping around.” After about “ten repetitions…you are not

just dealing with sounds. It’s about the action produced by the overstressed tape recorder

physically moving as a result of the layering of the tracks.”78 The auditory vibrations grow in

amplitude, surpassing the scripted bounds of the technological object, to move the object

itself.

Like the versions I am sitting in a room that existed in its first decade, this record-

playback process was carried out prior to the performance. Just as I am sitting in a room was

often presented to accompany a dance by the Viola Farber dance company, Number was

performed, as playback of a tape that caused the tape machine to dance, simultaneously with

a dance by Kawana Kaoru. Both pieces seek to bend the attention of the audience outside of

its normal zone: in I am sitting in a room this means focusing aural attention on the resonances

of a room. Room resonance is always present to a listener, at least at a subconscious level, but

is shifted to the foreground by Lucier. In Number, the attention is shifted first to the noise of

the instrument—the tape machine and tape—and then to the resonant behavior of the

equipment of reproduction, the tape deck itself. By recording low and playing high, the noise

immanent in the tape machine and the magnetic tape are amplified, brought into attention

and transduced into movement. This follows the sound art convention as described by

Christoph Cox: it brings aspects of the sonic flux, in this case noise inherent to the process of

using the tape deck, from the sonic unconscious to the center of the aesthetic experience.

However, Cox’s treatment of this feature of sound art obscures the role of media. This is also

true of the intellectual genealogy that he develops: his reference for discussions of the

perceptual unconscious is Leibniz. He does not comment on the highly influential discussion

by Walter Benjamin in the context of photography.79

78Tone and Kaneda, “Sound Is Merely a Result: Interview with Tone Tone, 2.”
79Cox, “Sound Art and the Sonic Unconscious.” Cox also ignores the earlier theory of a perceptual unconscious
by Nicole Oresme, though this is not nearly as well known and it would not necessarily alter his arguments
because Oresme, like Leibniz, theorizes directly about the senses instead of through a form of mediation, as is

54
 The importance of new technologies to bring aesthetic attention to aspects of

experience that previously were in the unconscious has been addressed by Walter Benjamin

in the context of early photography and, in particular, through the photographs of Eugène

Atget.80 The Atget photographs that Benjamin draws upon to make his argument have

images in which the time-scale of the exposure rendered human activity invisible. The effect

is to bring objects and urban settings, eerily devoid of people, into the foreground of the

aesthetic. Benjamin sees Atget’s Paris photographs as anticipating Surrealist Photography.

Atget’s approach was in itself an amplification of an effect that was seen to be inherent in the

medium of 19th-century photography: that the photograph would provide equal amounts of

detail for the eyes of a person sitting for a portrait and the folds in the background drapery.

This even degree of attention ran counter to trends in painting at the time and provided a

shock to artists such as Eugène Delacroix.81 It was perceived not as a leveling, but as a strange

amplification of background details.

Tone’s aesthetic foregrounds technological processes, it makes the technology sensible

by enormously amplifying the sound waves until they are visible in the movement of the tape

deck. In the interview with Kaneda, he cites the influence of Walter Benjamin’s essay “The

Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”: “The reason this essay resonated with

me so much is that I always felt that technologies of reproduction are not merely tools for

playback. I see them as technologies for production or creation.”82 The work aims to provoke

the audience to reflect upon the conditions of production. In Akrich’s term, Tone’s work

“descripts” the devices of reproduction to become tools for productions of originals. While Lucier’s

done by Benjamin. Daniel Heller-Roazen, The fifth hammer: Pythagoras and the disharmony of the world (New York,
NY: Zone, 2011).
80 Walter Benjamin, “A Little History of Photography,” in The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological

Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2008), 274-298.
81 Alexi Worth, “The Invention of Clumsiness,” Cabinet, Issue 54 “The Accident” (2006): 27-34.
82 Tone and Kineda, “Sound Is Merely a Result: Interview with Tone Tone, 2.” Walter Benjamin, “The Work

of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,” in The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility
and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard Univ. Press, 2008), 19-55.

55
text for I am sitting in a room focuses the attention on the technological process by describing it

over and over, the literature has generally ignored the role of the technology and focused

instead on the relation of the performer to the room and natural phenomena. Tone chose a

text, the ‘counting numbers,’ that would allow the text to fade into the background to make

room for contemplation of the technological process being used.83 But clearly of more

importance is the fact that the script that Tone established caused the machine to dance

around the stage, an unusual act for a tape machine and one clearly associated with

“descripting” a known technology.

Part of what is conducive to the perception of the technology as transparent in

Lucier’s work is the way in which his performance practices tend to stay within the scripts

established for technologies and instruments. However, Number reveals another potential of

the performance practice inherent in the record-playback process on magnetic tape. It is one

that also makes a basic statement about the material conditions of the production of itself. It

suggests replacing claims about the universality of I am sitting in a room with claims about

normative performance practices. Or at the very least, it suggests that we should investigate

the performance practice more carefully.

Three Loops, or “RESONANCE”

Going back to the 1970 Source recording of I am sitting in a room, I am struck by how

much noisier it is than the 1981 Lovely Music recording, how there is an (intermittent)

droning squeal of distorted feedback.84 It wouldn’t be altogether inappropriate to say that

“it…ultimately end[ed] in a sustained, enveloping, dronelike cacophony of feedback

83 In 1960, just the year before Tone composed Number, Jasper Johns had begun his ‘0 through 9’ series in which
the digits 0 through 9 are superimposed.
84 The affect of Lucier’s recitation of the speech also differs significantly between the two recordings. Such

differences don’t appear in the literature, which seems to always be directed at a Platonic version of I am sitting in
a room.

56
distortion.”85

But in that quote from Branden Joseph, he is not describing the 1970 recording of I

am sitting in a room. Rather, Joseph was describing the 18 December 1961 performance at a

Harvard-Radcliffe Music Club concert of Tony Conrad’s Three Loops for Performers and Tape

Recorders, a piece that used a live tape-loop to recycle the musical sounds produced by live

performers. This was a live version of the record-playback process used in Number and I am

sitting in a room. It wasn’t until 3 March 1995 that the first “live performance” of I am sitting in a

room would be given at Deutschland Radio in Cologne, Germany using two reel-to-reel tape

recorders and a long tape loop.

I am sitting in a room and Three Loops are connected not just through their common use

of the record-playback process, but because they share a common goal of exploring

resonance. Or, as Conrad emphasized in his compositional notes for the piece,

“RESONANCE.” There are three sections to the score, “Chant,” “Aria,” and “Din.” In

each, performers with pitched instruments play sustained tones or simple melodies based on

just-tuned intervals. In “Din,” the recorder’s volume controls are actively manipulated.

According to Joseph’s analysis of the recording of the concert, all three sections converge to

something like a “sustained, enveloping, dronelike cacophony of feedback distortion.”

Regardless of the patterning that distinguishes the activity of the performers in each

movement, they all converge to resonance. This is essentially the fate described by Abel and

Wilson in their analysis of the process used in I am sitting in a room, but unlike Abel and

Wilson’s account, this fate also brings out the dependence on the technological apparatus.

Conrad doesn’t differentiate between room resonance and the resonances of the microphone-

loudspeaker configuration that also have a significant impact on the process.

The compositional notes for Three Loops lay out an expansive conception of the formal

85Branden Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts After Cage (A Minor History) (New York: Zone
Books, 2008), 71.

57
possibilities latent in the use of a tape-loop for a live record-playback process. The piece

seems not to be conceived in terms of particular sounding results but in the exploration of the

possibilities latent in a technological configuration. A rarely discussed aspect of the score of I

am sitting in a room is how it also suggests many different versions of itself:

Make versions in which one recorded statement is recycled through many rooms.
Make versions using one or more speakers of different languages in different rooms.
Make versions in which, for each generation, the microphone is moved to different
parts of the room or rooms.
Make versions that can be performed in real time.

Although performers have made many versions of I am sitting in a room, these have tended to

stick closely to the script implicit in the recordings that Lucier has made. Effectively, the score

of I am sitting in a room has had little impact on the life of the work because the script implied

by the recordings has been so dominant. Switching from a technological to an aesthetic

perspective, we might describe the situation in terms of the status of I am sitting in a room as a

Werktreue. Lydia Goehr has argued that the “Werktreue is a demand not generically for a

work as such, nor even for interpretation per se, but, first off, for a specific sort of

performance because a particularly authoritative idea of the work is already held firmly in

place.”86 The authoritative idea of I am sitting in a room is guided by 1) Lucier’s recordings and

2) the idea of revealing the acoustic resonance of the room. These two aspects have been

tethered together so that the aesthetic preferences implicit in the recordings have come to be

seen as immanent in the material conditions. Implicitly, a certain script for the record-

playback process and certain types of acoustic spaces—living rooms—have come to represent

sound itself. But Three Loops, like Number, destabilizes this: it presents other aesthetic choices

that are tethered to the process of revealing to the listener acoustic resonance.

In the section “Din” of Three Loops dramatic manipulations are made of the volume

level of the recorder. This offers a comparison of the effects of the different components of the

Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (New York: Oxford
86

University Press, 1994), xxxii.

58
system on the accumulation of resonance. It also foreshadows an aspect of the live

performance of I am sitting in a room that is not addressed in the literature. In live performance,

as it is normally carried out by Lucier’s assistants, if the sound engineer left the system alone,

there would be a drastic drop in volume from the first to the second iteration of the speech.

An abrupt intervention, adjusting the level, is needed on the part of the sound engineer to

create an aural gradual process. The aural experience of a gradual process takes priority over

non-intervention. Such abrupt interventions into volume levels were incorporated into the

score of Three Loops and are fundamental to the compositional idea of Number.

These three composers participate in overlapping but distinct circles within

experimental minimalism. Comparing their work shows how, within a given circle, specific

aesthetic features are tethered to specific concepts. We can understand these pieces as

revealing these cultural articulations rather than revealing the underlying acoustic

phenomena.

Continuous vs. Interrupted Processes

Studying these other pieces destabilizes notions of universality that have accumulated

around I am sitting in a room. Such notions are also destabilized when the performance practice

itself becomes a domain for analysis. While Number and Three Loops both use the record-

playback process, they differ in that Number was constructed in advance in the studio and Three

Loops was performed live before the audience. I am sitting in a room essentially began its

existence with the performance practice of Number and transitioned to the live practice used in

Three Loops. Nicholas Collins describes the original version of I am sitting in a room, which was

made in Lucier’s living room and then presented at the Guggenheim Museum, as being

related to studio editing techniques of cutting and splicing rather than the “performing to

tape” tradition that came out of the San Francisco Tape Music Center. Collins suggests that it

59
was only later that students of Lucier were eager to turn it into a live performance piece. The

studio editing approach is an interrupted process that is spliced together to sound as if it

happens continuously, as if it were happening live. But there is a significant difference in how

the resonance of the system—the record-playback system and the room—behaves in each

case and this leads to an interesting relation between the themes of gradual process and non-

intervention. The relation suggests an understanding of the piece that is not predicated on a

universal aesthetic, but on certain preferences about pacing and timbre. The issues of pacing

and timbre will be taken up again in more depth in Chapter 3 when I present the results of

my interviews with sound engineers that have performed the piece live.

I will now show how the pacing of the process depends on whether a continuous or an

interrupted process is used. Audio Examples 5a, 5b, and 5c and audio examples 6a, 6b, 6c,

and 6d present excerpted iterations of two recordings of an abbreviated version of I am sitting

in a room. The recordings in Audio Examples 5a-c were made by using a Pure Data patch to

automate the record-playback process. They represent the first, second, and 16th iterations of

the process. The recordings in Audio Examples 6a-d were made using the record-playback

process without automation: after each iteration the process was stopped and there was a

delay of about 10 seconds before the next iteration was made. The audio examples represent

the first, second, 16th, and 32nd iterations of this interrupted process. The interrupted process

is similar to the studio-editing practice used in the 1970 and 1981 recordings; room resonance

essentially does not accumulate from one-iteration to the next. The automated continuous

version is essentially the live performance approach, except that no audience was present.87 In

my recordings, for the interrupted process, the first iteration is a copy of the first iteration

from the continuous version. Thus both versions have the same starting point and the

differences in how they evolve should be a result of whether or not resonance was allowed to

87The live automated approach has become the standard even for recording sessions. For example, it is the
approach that Lucier, with the assistance of James Fei, used for the recording made at MoMA that constitutes
part of the acquisition by MoMA of the work.

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accumulate from one-iteration to the next.

Example 5. Audio Examples 5a-c of a continuous record-playback process. The first, second,
and 16th iterations of an abbreviated version of I am sitting in a room using an automated and
continuous record-playback process. These can be heard in Audio Examples 5a, 5b, and 5c.88
The audio is available at: https://archive.org/details/audio-example-5a-continuous-iteration-1

Example 6. Audio Examples 6a-d of an interrupted record-playback process. The first,

second, 16th, and 32nd iterations of an abbreviated version of I am sitting in a room using an
interrupted record-playback process. These can be heard in Audio Examples 6a, 6b, 6c, and
6d. The audio is available at: https://archive.org/details/audio-example-5a-continuous-iteration-1

These recordings exemplify how the continuous process involves a faster build-up of

resonance. While the recordings of Audio Examples 5a and 6a (first iterations) are essentially

the same, and those of Audio Examples 5b and 6b show little difference (second iterations), in

Examples 5c and 6c, the 16th iterations, there is a drastic difference: the continuous version

has grown significantly in volume while the interrupted version has not. In fact, I stopped the

continuous process after the 16th iteration because the signal was on the verge of going into

the red. In contrast, the interrupted process was able to continue until the 32nd iteration

without significant changes in the volume and thus could have continued longer.

What this suggests is that the (continuous) live performance version is inherently a less

gradual process than the (interrupted) studio version. How did the performance tradition

respond to this? As we will see in Chapter 3, the general approach has been to make subtle

88 The image does not represent the actual placement of the microphone and loudspeaker for these recordings; it
is simply used as an icon for the recordings.

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but crucial interventions so that the degree of gradualness that obtained in the studio versions

could be reproduced live, when possible. Other types of interventions also became common.

Once again, this destabilizes the idea that I am sitting in a room is music that is immanent in a

room, or even in the system comprised of the room and electronic equipment. This in turn

undermines the claims of universality and turns our attention to the importance of the types

of interventions that are made in order to obtain the desired aesthetic results.

Interestingly, the over-abundance of certain resonances in the continuous process that

must be tamed, are the basis of some of Lucier’s more recent works are founded. For

example, Tapper (2002, violin), Ricochet Lady (2016, glockenspiel), and Halo (2019, one or more

violins) all use room resonances without electronics by accumulating sound energy through

repetitive gestures.

Authorizing What Is Natural

Studying the work of Tone, of Conrad, and the difference between continuous and

interrupted processes shows how the piece might have been otherwise. These vantage points

suggest other scripts and destabilize what has been naturalized within the discourse of

Lucier’s music. “After the event, the processes involved in building up technical objects are

concealed. The causal links they established are naturalized. There was, or so it seems, never

any possibility that it could have been otherwise.”89 Akrich’s depiction of the socio-

technological domain is apt for the aesthetic as well, though with a twist. In the aesthetic

domain, authorship, or at least an “author function,” is necessary to the existence of a work of

art.90 In the case of I am sitting in a room, the inevitability associated to a certain script for the

production of music with descripted technological objects of reproduction essentially attempts

89 Akrich, “The De-scription of technical objects,” 222. One might compare this with Adorno’s idea of cultural
objects falling into nature.
90 Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, ed. Donald Preziosi,

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 299-314.

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to switch Lucier’s role from author to one who is authorized to represent nature and, in turn,

authorizes what is natural.

The final section of this chapter takes a closer look at the relation of technology and

nature and its role in the construction of social positions. Interestingly, the literature seems to

find Lucier’s work that is most highly technologically mediated to also be the work that brings

us closest to nature or natural phenomena. This aligns with scientific practice in which the

closer to nature theory ventures, the more highly mediated by technology must be the

interaction. In contrast to the literature on Lucier’s music, which tends to emphasize the ways

in which scientific experiments involve non-intervention, the historical origins of experimental

philosophy and the work of Francis Bacon suggest that, if we are going to relate Lucier’s work

to scientific practice, it should be based upon the various modes of intervention.

Listening: The Modest Witness and Experiment as Intervention

The fourth major theme in the literature addressing Lucier’s music is listening. The

discourse around his music has configured listening as an outwardly passive but inwardly

active behavior: the listening involved does not intervene in the sounds made but does work

on the self that is listening, both in terms of the aspects of sounds one attends to and the

conceptual and affective attitude toward them. In this section I aim to modify the outwardly

passive depiction of listening in Lucier’s music to show how listening in fact has an outwardly

active role in changing the sounds. In traditional music this is prosaic: performers listen to the

sounds they make and modify them as they play through conscious and unconscious

adjustments. But the idea of listening in the literature on Lucier’s music is permeated by the

theme of non-intervention: the lack of intervention of the composer/performers makes

listening take on a new character. It is just listening, not listening in order to modify the

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sounds you are making. As with gradual process and universality, it is through non-

intervention that “listening” is authorized as a theme. As Lucier has said of some of his pieces,

“performing is more a matter of careful listening than of making sounds happen.”91 Of

course, Lucier’s statement is about the relative balance, not an absolute distinction. However,

in discussing his early work Chambers (1968), he suggested that anyone listening—anywhere, at

any time—with the proper attitude was performing Chambers.

My argument will proceed in stages, beginning with the examples of ostentatious

listening and moving to an example in which the physical act of listening modifies the

resulting sounds. Having shifted the description of Lucier’s music to one in which listening is

used to modify the sound, I then look at how substituting listening for intervention has been

tied to the performance of scientific experiments. This problematic link to scientific

experiments will be replaced with an alternative relationship in which intervention is central.

Ostentatious Listening

The performative possibilities of ostentatious listening that arose in the 1960s are

captured in an anecdote about Cage going to hear Robert Morris’s new work, Box with the

Sound of Its Own Making (1961).

When Cage arrived at Morris’s studio, he reacted to the Box as to a private

concert, seating himself and listening to the entire tape. ‘He was the first
person in New York that I asked to come see the Box with the Sound of Its
Own Making,’ Morris recounted to Jack Burnham. ‘When he came I turned it
on. I said this is something I made. I turned it on, and he wouldn’t listen to
me. He sat and listened for three hours. And that was really impressive to me.
He just sat there.’92

Cage silently out-performed the sounding box; he exported the careful listening practices of

the Classical concert hall to the social spaces outside the hall.

91 Elie Siegmeister, Alvin Lucier, and Mindy Lee, “Three Points of View,” The Musical Quarterly 65/2 (1979):
289.
92 Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate, 117.

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 To address ostentatious listening, or the theater of listening, within Lucier’s work I will

draw on both I am sitting in a room and the related piece, Palimpsest (2014). In Branden Labelle’s

discussion of I am sitting in a room, he draws our attention to how “the original voice softens and

gives way to the acoustical presence of the room.”93 On the way toward this transition from

speech to acoustic presence, Stina Hasse and LaBelle both depict Alvin Lucier as talking to

himself.94 Hasse also points out that I am sitting in a room (and other pieces that share its

process) “can be seen as material manifestations of listening as performance.”95 Rather than

perceiving Lucier as talking to himself, we might perceive Lucier as listening to himself,

particularly in live performance when Lucier might spend 45 minutes sitting immobile on

stage performing ostentatious listening.

My understanding of I am sitting in a room—in particular the role that listening plays in

the work—was altered by hearing Lucier’s Palimpsest performed live by Joan La Barbara in its

world premiere at the 2014 Avant Music Festival.96 Ever since then, I have listened to I am

sitting in a room through Palimpsest, a piece in which the same recursive record-playback process

is used. But in this piece, La Barbara, following Lucier’s instructions, delays her loss of agency

by continuing to read out loud the same text even as the recorded version plays back, creating

layers of speech displaced along multiple dimensions, similar to Tone’s Number. La Barbara’s

performance is informative for the current discussion because of how she performs after she

finishes speaking.

93 LaBelle, Background Noise, 129.

94 Hasse, “I Am Sitting in a Room – from a listener’s perspective” and LaBelle, Background Noise, 129.
95 Hasse, “I Am Sitting in a Room – from a listener’s perspective.”
96 The text is by Lydia Davis and describes images from an outdoor wedding. For my discussion the text is not

significant.

65
 Example 7. Joan La Barbara performing Alvin Lucier’s Palimpsest. Still image from the
video of the World Premiere, 2014 Avant Music Festival. Courtesy of the Avant Music Festival.

As shown in Example 7, La Barbara’s head is tilted. This may reflect an activity of

silently reading along with the text, as if she were still performing it with an inner voice. But

equally well, it might register with the audience as listening carefully, the way one listens and

follows along in a musical score. The tilted head and downcast eyes have long been in our

published record of poses that illustrate careful listening. In Palimpsest, as in I am sitting in a

room, listening becomes the dominant mode of performance.

One might perceive Palimpsest and I am sitting in a room as enacting a transition from

performing sound-production-through-speech to performing listening.97 The human

preserves their agency despite their apparent loss of action and energy by switching from

sound producer to listener.

Transfering the Agency of Listening

But if the agency of sound production can leak from human to machine, as argued

above, then maybe the agency of listening can also leak through the microphone and into the

instrument.

Listening requires processing—something more than sound waves reflecting off or

passing through. If we speak to a person, we know they have listened to us if they can

97Stina Hasse makes a similar argument in Stina Hasse, “I Am Sitting in a Room – from a listener’s
perspective.”

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reiterate what we said. To know that they have understood us, we expect the listener to do

more than parrot our exact words but to be able to reiterate what we said in their own

words—to have processed what we said and return it to us, after a meaningful pause, in an

altered but recognizable form.

It is in this sense that I am sitting in a room gives the impression that the instrument is

listening; and not just listening to the speech of the human performer, but listening to its own

speech.98 Though I agree with Vandsø that this instrument cannot distinguish speech and

noise, I perceive the successive layers as an interaction as if the instrument could. Each time it

speaks, it is with a different timbre, offering the possibility of presenting a different subject;

each time it speaks, it is with a new reverberant aura, representing presence in a different

room. The perception of time and space are distorted: the instrument gives instructions to its

future-self. One might even have the sensation that this computing, electronic instrument

understands what it is asking of itself (to be in a “different room” in the version for recordings)

as it seems to transport itself—through the aural cue of reverb—from acoustic space to

acoustic space—an effect that required Lucier to use a text that reads like a Delphic

prophesy.99 The “I” is the instrument in the present and the “you” is the next instantiation of

the instrument.

In I am sitting in a room we can perceive a listening-instrument as receding away from

the realm of human speech toward a reverberant vanishing point. It narrates its journey to us

step-by-step, and with each new step insists on its presence in a room different from the one

98 The idea of an instrument listening to itself has become increasingly common. A recent incarnation of this can
be found in Adam Basanta’s A Room Listening to Itself (2015), “a sound installation that includes software
controlling a feedback network involving microphones, speakers, and gallery visitors.” It would appear to be
similar to Lucier’s Empty Vessels (1997).
99 My reading of the change in meaning when the instrument enunciates the text is similar to the reorientation of

the deictic pointers in the myth of Echo. See Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. David Raeburn (New York: Penguin
Classics, 2004), 109-116. When Lucier performs the piece live, he alters the text to “I am sitting in the same
room that you are in now…” My reading would require alteration in order to deal with this text. I intend here
to admit that, as a listener, I listen through the live and recorded versions I have already experienced, no matter
which one is at hand presently, but that in theorizing the work it is worth distinguishing the contributions that
each makes to our idea of the piece.

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you are in with a voice of a different timbre; but now the “you” could be taken to be the

human performer-listener and other spectators. (Here the text benefits from the Yankee’s

failure to distinguish singular and plural second person pronouns.) The words of the human

performer are passed to the instrument. They are like a sorcerer’s spell that the automaton

has learned to incant—and listen to—thus perpetuating itself.

We have always been accustomed to instruments uttering sound, but how rare a thing,

in 1970 at least, to play an instrument that seems to listen to the human performer or to itself.

Key to the ability to perceive the instrument as listener is the minimalist tic to slow down the

progression of events so as to lay bare the normally unperceivably fast reaction of an

instrument to the human performer. I am sitting in a room is a reenactment of microphone-

amplifier feedback, but the slow-motion-pacing lets us perceive how the instrument is

listening, as if carrying on a relationship with itself.

In this reading, the theater of ostentatious listening and the minimalist’s aesthetic

preference for slowing processes down allow a reading of the piece in which listening plays a

central role. This reading describes how the theater of listening gives cues that bring out the

transfer of weak agency from the human performer to the electronics and the room. The

importance of listening has often been addressed in the literature on Lucier’s music, but not

in this way and not by treating it as a theatrical gesture. Lucier’s performance of listening has

been naturalized.100

Congealed Histories of Listening

The literature has also not addressed how, in I am sitting in a room, the electronics do

not listen transparently, but rather exert particular biases through their listening. This comes

100 A potentially productive approach to the study of Lucier’s development of his performance persona would be
to study his performances as an actor in the Dr. Chicago films. In interviews Lucier has commented on the
importance of this aspect of his career.

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about because the microphone embodies a “congealed history” of listening practices.101

Microphones are not perfect transducers. A microphone is sold with documentation that

shows its frequency response, that is, the filtering of the spectrum of a sound that will take

place when the microphone transduces the acoustic vibrations to electromagnetic ones. The

same is true of loudspeakers. Thus in the “background” of this piece is a history of listening

practices represented by the filtering that each piece of equipment applies to sound. Among

performers that have collaborated closely with Lucier, it is not uniform that the most neutral

microphones are preferred. (See Chapter 3 for details.) A similar analysis could be applied to

Quasimodo the Great Lover (1970) that uses multiple microphone-loudspeaker pairs (without any

delay) relayed in series through multiple rooms. Lucier presents the piece as an exploration of

room resonance, which it no doubt is. But it is also an exploration that is filtered through the

listening practices congealed in the transducers involved.

I use the terms “congealed history” and “background” in the sense developed in Sara

Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology.102 Her work serves as a theoretical framework through which to

relate the perceptual, the bodily, and the material to the historical and the social. She

addresses how the orientation of the philosopher is predicated on and eclipses the work of

women that often remains in the background. Ahmed writes about perception with an

emphasis on background in two senses that can contribute to an understanding of Lucier’s

music: 1) the momentary background of perception, such as that which is in the periphery of

your vision and 2) the historical background of objects and people that provide the conditions

of possibility for perception, with particular emphasis on the hidden labor that makes it

possible, for example, for a philosopher to have a cleared desk on which to write.

Like the early 20th-century world of continental philosophy that Ahmed analyzes, the

101 Sound engineering is of course heavily concerned with how transducers, such as microphones, filter the
sounds they are meant to transmit. But while this point is obvious from a sound engineering standpoint, it is not
addressed in the literature on Lucier’s music.
102 Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology (Duke University Press Books, 2006).

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world of sound engineers performing I am sitting in a room is a male-dominated world. I do not

develop the themes of queerness or of women’s labor that are central to Ahmed’s project. Nor

do I intend to suggest an ethical equivalence between my work and Ahmed’s. Rather, she

establishes through her ethically oriented analysis a theoretical framework that clarifies the

essentially aesthetic arguments of this dissertation.

What is in the background arises from an orientation: we are oriented toward some

objects and not others and this orientation has a history. I adapt this framework to theorize

how performance and listening practices are reoriented in American experimental music that

makes acoustic resonance a theme. The performance practice of I am sitting in a room has

hidden the labor of sound engineers in order to naturalize aesthetic preferences. This labor

can include careful listening for resonances that might grow out of control and, subsequently,

the application of filters to dampen them in order to prolong the gradual process and

maintain a broad spectrum. I take an ethnographic approach to recover that hidden labor.

Each iteration within a version of I am sitting in a room is a congealed history of all the

previous iterations. The piece brings awareness to the background condition of room

resonance by accumulating a history. But while the piece focuses our attention on

background within its own time frame, it obscures another kind of background: the labor

involved in producing it, at least in the live versions, or really in any version in which the

person performing the speech part is assisted in running the electronics.

Listening Makes Sound Happen

There are other pieces by Lucier where listening takes on an unusually central role

and does so through a performance practice in which the technology is used in such a way

that standard listening practices cause crucial interventions into the sound. This occurs, for

example, in Lucier’s early electronic piece Bird and Person Dyning (1975). For this piece, a

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performer wears a pair of binaural earphones that are routed through a limiter and then a

loudspeaker. In addition to this audio feedback loop, there is an electric toy bird that chirps

periodically. The levels of the system are adjusted to allow feedback when the bird chirps.

The performer moves around the space seeking different types of feedback. This system is

extremely sensitive to the position of the earphones so that, by tilting the head, as one does to

focus on the directionality of a heard sound, the performer changes the sound of the

feedback. Thus the listening practice—tilting one’s head to focus on the direction of the

sound—intervenes in the production of sound.

Species or Monsters?

The literature focuses on the acoustic phenomena while maintaining the importance

of Lucier’s authorship. This has the effect of converting Lucier from author to one who

authorizes what is natural. What is natural, in practice, includes the cultural preferences for

certain kinds of spectral filtering that are encoded in transducers. Tellingly, it is his most

technologically mediated pieces that are most associated with nature and acoustic

phenomena. This would appear to result from how the category of the natural has come to be

produced through the technological interventions of science. Likewise, the social position of

“modest witness” that Lucier occupies when he and the technology used are understood as

transparent, also have their origin in the rise of experimental science.

The aesthetic stance of non-intervention in the literature on Lucier’s music positions

him as a “modest witness” in the sense developed by Donna Haraway in discussing how the

origins of the modern scientific experiment also involved the production of social positions.

Benjamin Piekut used this and related work from science studies in his critique of Cage’s

modernist ontology in which the human subject is cleft from objective nature. In terms of

Cage’s aesthetic this involves a split between ‘in here,’ which “included one’s taste, memory,

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intention, history, and ego” and ‘out there’ where “existed the favored qualities of chance,

fluency, change, purposelessness, and disorder.”103

This discourse has strongly influenced the approach to Lucier’s music. The relation to

scientific experiments is even more relevant for a discussion of Lucier’s music because it has

become a major theme in the literature. For example, Dieter Mersch theorizes Lucier’s music

in terms of “aesthetic experiments” that are modeled on but distinct from scientific

experiments. According to Mersch, Lucier’s “artistic process makes perceptible a philosophy

of experimentation.” His pieces “transform the sensory dimensions of physical phenomena

and scientific procedures into veritable aesthetic phenomena.”104 Mersch emphasizes that

aesthetics is traditionally related to that which is sensible. This puts Lucier in the position of

modest witness of what is made sensible and as author of the aesthetic experience.

As Piekut points out, “The problem with modesty is its self-invisibility, which causes

open and contingent decisions about structuring the world appear to be closed and beyond

dispute.”105 The literature on Lucier’s music that stresses non-intervention reproduces this

problem. As has been argued by Marie Thompson, this is a larger problem within the

ontological turn in the philosophy and aesthetics of experimental music.106

But there is another formulation of what it means to conduct a scientific experiment

that can offer an alternate approach in which self-invisibility is no longer valorized. It is to be

found in the writings of Franics Bacon on the types of nature and on experimental philosophy

from the beginning of the 17th century.

The philosopher John Tiles argued that it was a “policy of interventionism” that

distinguished the new Baconian practice of science from the Aristotelian. While Aristotelian

103 Piekut, “Sound’s Modest Witness;” Piekut, “Chance and Certainty: John Cage’s Politics of Nature;” Donna
Haraway, “Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium,” in
Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™ (New York: Routledge, 1997), 23-
45.
104 Dieter Mersch, “Art as Research sui generis,” 28.
105 Piekut, “Sound’s Modest Witness,” 15.
106 Marie Thompson, “Whiteness and the Ontological Turn in Sound Studies” Parallax 23:3 (2017), 266-282.

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science mainly examined Nature in its “free” state, the experimental philosophy that

coalesced in 17th century Europe required the extraction of secrets. At the beginning of the

scientific revolution, Francis Bacon theorized that nature had three states: Nature could be (1)

free, (2) forced by impediments, or (3) totally constrained and molded. Bacon argued that the

second possibility, which he called “monsters,” provided the proper model for scientific

experiments.

The stance of non-intervention of the white, male modest witness hides, for ideological

reasons, the crucial role of intervention. This eclipse of the role of intervention bestowed upon

the experimental philosophers authority over nature itself, rather than of a particular

experimental practice that involved the operation of machinery such as an air pump. To

carry out an experiment involved making increasingly precise interventions in order to

receive increasingly precise behavior. However, like the division of labor that was sought by

Stella and realized by LeWitt, in the 17th-century in the Royal Society of London, the modest

witness was assisted by a “curator of experiments” who ran the experiments for the fellows of

the society to observe. There was a class distinction between those that did the work and

those that witnessed the results “publically.” For example, Stephen Pumfrey has shown that

while today “we have evaluated [Robert] Hooke as a leading experimental philosopher,” “the

Royal Society treated him as a servant.”107

There are two lessons that we can take from this work in science studies and apply to a

theory of Lucier’s music. The first is that we should replace the discourse based around non-

intervention with a study of the modes of intervention. The second is that, even if the

interventions are carried out by a “curator of experiments” who may be off stage, that doesn’t

make the interventions any less crucial to the performance of the music. Aligned with

Ahmed’s approach to phenomenology, our approach to Lucier’s music should be looking for

Stephen Pumfrey, “Who Did the Work?: Experimental Philosophers and Public Demonstrators in Augustan
107

England,” The British Journal for the History of Science, 28/2 (1995), 135.

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the labor that is carried out in the background in order to create the material conditions of

possibility for the music. In short, we need to pay more attention to the performance practice

of Lucier’s music, where that practice must include the crucial contributions of sound

engineers even if they don’t have a stage presence.

Furthermore, some of Lucier’s music, including I am sitting in a room, and particularly

the versions that use live processing, should be understood as something like a Baconian

monster where the natural acoustic resonance of a room is forced by impediments into an

unusual state. The type and degree of intervention used depends on the acoustic and cultural

context: is the process carried out in an acoustically muffled living room or a fiercely resonant

gallery? What interventions are used to ensure a sufficiently gradual process? What mode of

intervention is acceptable in order to achieve the desired timbres? And when we think of

intervention in experimental music, we must not restrict ourselves to the actions of all the

performers involved—on or off stage—but we must also trace the aesthetic interventions

embedded in the choices of rooms and the choices of transducers. Much of experimental

music grapples with the role of the composer in the face of the changing technological

landscape. I will address these issues in Chapter 3.

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 Chapter 3. The Modes of Intervention

A Short History of the Performance Practice of I am sitting in a room

During the period when magnetic tape was the most readily available technology for

recording and playing back sound, numerous recordings of I am sitting in a room were made,

but a “performance” consisted of playing back a recording that was made elsewhere, a point

that is indicated by the text, “I am sitting in a room, different from the one you are in

now.”108 As discussed in Chapter 2, Alvin Lucier discarded his first recording using the

process that would come to define I am sitting in a room because he didn’t like how it sounded.

He attributed the undesirable qualities of the sound of that first attempt to the acoustics of the

room that housed the Brandeis Electronic Music Studio, not the microphones or other

electronic equipment, which Lucier has praised as being state-of-the-art. In interviews he has

mentioned that the equipment included a pair of Nagra tape decks that he borrowed from the

Music Department at Wesleyan University.109 The first recording that he kept was made in

1970 in his living room, the acoustics of which were much less reverberant. He used a cut-

and-splice editing technique to put the successive iterations into sequence, with one “original”

recording of his voice and 15 copies, for a total of 16 iterations. This was released on the label

Source.110

The first “performance” was given at the Guggenheim Museum on 25 March 1970 as

part of a Sonic Arts Union concert and was accompanied by a projection of photographs by

Mary Lucier that applied an analogous recursive technique to the process of photographic

108 For the story of the recording in his living room, see the program note from 2009 for Two Portrait Concerts
at Sydenham St. United Church, Kingston, Ontario. Lucier joined the part-time faculty at Wesleyan University
in 1968 and then was appointed to a fulltime position in 1970. Alvin Lucier: A Celebration, 21.
109 Lucier and Simons, Chambers, 36-37.
110 Alvin Lucier, I am sitting in a room, Source Record Number Three (Sacramento, Ca: Source Records, 1970).

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development. The initial image was of the chair that he had sat in to record himself speaking

and in which he subsequently placed the loudspeaker to record the further iterations. But like

one of Atget’s Surrealist photographs of Paris, the chair is empty. The concert was reviewed

in The New York Times by Theodore Strongin who explained that a “one-minute speech of

Mr. Lucier’s was repeated over and over, gradually increasing in electronic resonance.”

Strongin summarized the piece as “pleasant, restful, and undemanding except as to length (25

minutes).”111 The recording was actually closer to 15 minutes, but we can allow that it may

have felt like 25 to Mr. Strongin.

There are a few performances from the 1970s documented by program notes or

concert flyers in the Alvin Lucier Papers. For example, Lucier made a longer version of the

piece in 1972 to accompany the dance Dune, choreographed by Viola Farber for her company

and premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on 21 April 1972.112 He served as the

Music Director for the Viola Farber Dance Company and Nicholas Collins, who was his

student at Wesleyan, worked as his assistant. During the 1970s, Lucier’s compositions

continue to explore different ways that electronics can be used to make music.

I suspect that the recording that has had the greatest circulation and which has

represented the piece for the most listeners is the 1981 release by Lovely Music. The

recording was made in Lucier’s living room in Middletown, CT in 1980 over the course of

two days.113 The 32 “generations” play out over 45 minutes, nearly triple the time of the

original 1970 Source recording. As one measure of the dominance of this recording in the

reception of the piece, we might note that since TrilobiteJuice posted this version on

YouTube in 2012, it has had 239,335 views.114 The A Channel posting from 2017 of the

111 Theodore Strongin, New York Times, 26 March 1970.

112 Alvin Lucier, Lucier program copy, new version (1980), Alvin Lucier Papers.
113 Nicholas Collins, liner notes to I am sitting in a room: for voice on tape, by Alvin Lucier (New York, NY: Lovely

Music LCD1013, CD, 1990).

114 Accessed 21 August 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAxHlLK3Oyk

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same version has 13,166 views.115 In contrast, a Vimeo posting from 2013 using the 1970

Source recording with original video by Brodo has approximately 59,000 views.116 However,

throughout the 1980s and 1990s, other versions were made. For example, in 1986 a

performance at the Musik und Sprache festival advertises performances of the original version

and a “Berliner Version 1986.”117

Despite the numerous recordings and “performances” in the era of magnetic tape,

very few live performances were given in which the record-playback process happened with an

audience present. In a live performance, using magnetic tape, at the Emit Time Festival in

December 2002 in Bern, Switzerland, a small difference in the speeds in the two tape

machines caused the tape, which was stretched across the stage, to sag. This triggered a

tension sensor in one of the tape machines and triggered the machine to stop—midway

through the piece.118 This may indicate that the level of difficulty of giving a live performance

of the piece, while not insurmountable, was a substantial hindrance to live performance.

Magnetic tape may not have allowed a level of technological ease to ensure a sufficient rate of

success for Lucier’s tastes. However, Nicholas Collins also suggests that, “it was never

intended to be a live performance, initially. It was this idea that you did it in one space and

you presented it in another one. So it was like a portrait.” Collins added that it was Lucier’s

“technically adventurous” students who pushed for the piece to be performed live. This

required rewriting the text to read, “I am sitting in a room, the same one you are in now.”119

The first “live performance” of I am sitting in a room was eventually given on 3 March 1995

when it was performed at Deutschland Radio in Cologne, Germany using two reel-to-reel

115 Accessed 21 August 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhtO4DsSazc

116 Accessed 21 August 2019. https://vimeo.com/55279047. Vimeo lists the number of times watched as
“59K.”
117 Concert Program, Alvin Lucier Papers.
118 Nicholas Collins, interview with the author 18 May 2018.
119 Ibid. For the new text, watch, for example, the performance at Issue Project Room on 9 November 2017.

https://vimeo.com/280769396.

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tape recorders and a “long tape loop.”120 This live performance using tape occurred shortly

before tape would become a dated technology.

The year 2000 was a big year for I am sitting in a room. As part of the American Century

retrospective at the Whitney Museum of Art in 2000, Stephen Vitiello curated the sound art

exhibition “I Am Sitting in a Room: Sound Works by American Artists 1950-2000.” Lucier’s

piece was understood by some prominent artists and curators as to be sufficiently important

as to represent half a decade of exploring sound in art. Unfortunately, the catalog for the

show does not include any information about the sound works from the exhibit.121

In the late 1990s, inexpensive or free live audio processing software such as

Max/MSP and Pure Data that could run on commercially available general-purpose

computers became available. In comparison to the use of magnetic tape, this introduced a

new degree of technological ease for the performance or recording of I am sitting in a room. It

also signaled a change in the culture: it became fashionable to use live processing and this

seems to have created a kind of cultural suction that pulled I am sitting in a room into the era of

live processing.

Beginning in 2000, live performances of I am sitting in a room using digital audio

processing became common. In that year alone there were two performances in which Lucier

was involved and one he was not. All of them used digital audio instead of magnetic tape.

One of the live performances was at ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany and involved carrying out

the process live, simultaneously in eight rooms.122 Lucier gave another performance, with the

assistance of Nicholas Collins, in Galvin Auditorium at Loyola University.

Without Lucier’s participation, Christopher Burns performed the piece in 2000 as

part of his Masters thesis at Stanford University and published an article describing his

120 Concert Program, Alvin Lucier Papers.

121 Alan Licht, “Sound Art: Origins, Development and Ambiguities,” Organised Sound 14/1 (2009): 3-10.
Although there is a catalogue from the exhibition at the Whitney, none of the sound works were included in it.
122 Alvin Lucier, I am sitting in a room/ZKM version, on Surround Music by Pascal Pons, Nils Tannert, Alvin Lucier,

and Ludger Brümmer (Mainz, Germany: Edition ZKM, 2004).

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performance practice.123 He used a desktop computer running Pure Data for the recursive

process. His article is an important and unusual contribution to the literature on I am sitting in

a room because he details his performance practice, including the kinds of timbral filtering that

he used. At the moment of the switch from magnetic tape to digital audio, his article initiates

the discussion of the performance practice of the piece. But the literature failed to respond.

James Fei, a former student and longtime collaborator of Lucier, attributes the new

life of I am sitting in a room in part to Explorations of the House (2005). Lucier was commissioned

by the SEM Ensemble to write a piece for orchestra to be performed in Zankel Hall, which

was fairly new at the time. He wanted to use the same process as in I am sitting in a room but

apply it to fragments of Beethoven’s overture The Consecration of the House which would be

played live by the ensemble in a chamber orchestra arrangement. Fei wrote a MAX patch to

do this and, because it was now easy, they started performing I am sitting in a room on the same

program as Explorations of the House.124

The programs available in the Alvin Lucier Papers at the New York Public Library

document approximately one live performance per year since 2000. In almost all of these,

Lucier is listed as the performer. Sometimes Nicholas Collins, James Fei, Ron Kuivila, or

someone else is listed as an assistant, though the title of the assistant varies. But frequently it is

only the person that reads the text that is listed as a performer.125 The records at BMI

indicate that there are 1-2 performances per year, on average between 2007 and 2018 and

that I am sitting in a room is by far Lucier’s most performed work. The BMI records only

account for performances under a BMI license in the US and its territories. As the Alvin

Lucier Papers document a significant number of performances in Europe, it seems that a

minimum estimate for the number of performances can be placed at closer to two per year

since 2007.

123 Burns, “Realizing Lucier and Stockhausen.”

124 James Fei, interview with the author, 20 December 2017.
125 The assistant is listed more frequently for performances in Europe.

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 While the Museum of Modern Arts first major exhibition of sound-art, Soundings: A

Contemporary Score (2013), focused on recent works and thus did not include I am sitting in a room,

one of the pieces it featured, AION by Jakob Kirkegaard, could, given the openness of the

score of I am sitting in a room, be considered a performance of Lucier’s piece rather than an

original work by Kirkegaard. As it is, the museum text and their preview materials

acknowledge Lucier’s piece as inspiration.126

The most recent major event in the performance history of I am sitting in a room is the

acquisition of it by MoMA in 2014 as an original work distinct from the score and the many

commercially available recordings. This acquisition involved Lucier and Fei recording a live

version in a MoMA gallery as well as a standard interview with the composer. While

MoMA’s blog indicates that the acquisition includes documentation to enable future

performances, my enquiries at MoMA show that this documentation has yet to be made. The

version of I am sitting in a room now owned by MoMA is a curious example of a “congealed

history.” The recording was made using the continuous process on a laptop with Fei running

the electronics. An installation of the piece is a playback of that record in a museum gallery

that is made to resemble a living room and in which comfortable seating—something like the

chair Lucier sat in to record the piece and that is immortalized in Mary Lucier’s

photograph—is placed.

In Chapter 2 I argued that non-intervention was an insufficient starting point for a

theory of Lucier’s music and that this should be replaced with its near opposite, a theory

based upon the modes of intervention. I will now present my investigation into some of the

modes of intervention that define I am sitting in a room as it has been performed and recorded

using digital audio to automate the record-playback process. As outlined above, this

performance practice accounts for the majority of the performances and recordings from

126Museum of Modern Art,

https://www.moma.org/momaorg/shared/pdfs/docs/publication_pdf/3185/Soundings_PREVIEW.pdf,
accessed 15 September 2019.

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2000 to the present. The most recent specific performance that my investigation addresses is

from 2017.

Despite Burns’s contribution to the literature at the beginning of this period, the

performance practice has remained on the horizon of the analyses of this piece. It is often not

clear which recording a writer is referring to, or whether they are addressing a version of the

piece made with digital audio or magnetic tape. The only clue as to whether they are

referring to a live or an acousmatic version is whether they reference the text as being

“different from the one you are in now” or “the same one you are in now.” With the

exception of Burns’s article, which is rarely referenced in the Lucier literature, the

performance practice has become a black box. This has serious implications for our

understanding of the piece. Akrich argues that “the conversion of sociotechnical facts into

facts pure and simple depends on the ability to turn technical objects into black boxes. In

other words, as they become indispensible, objects have to efface themselves.”127 It appears

that I am sitting in a room has become indispensible to the discourse of experimental music and

sound art. It has arrived at this position, in part, through the effacement of its performance

practice. I will now build on Burns’s auto-ethnographic report to recover that performance

practice.

Akrich argues that in order to look inside the black box, it is useful to find the

potential for breakdown: “The methodological problem is that if we want to describe the

elementary mechanisms of adjustments, we have to find circumstances in which the inside

and the outside of objects are not well matched. We need to find disagreement, negotiation,

and the potential for breakdown.”128 This can be found within the performance practice

thanks to the popularity of the piece. The demand to perform it widely means that it has been

performed in rooms that the Lucier of 1969 might have rejected because of the aesthetic

127 Akrich, “The De-scription of technical objects,” 221

128 Ibid, 207.

81
qualities of the resonance, just as he rejected the recording from the Brandeis Electronic

Music Studio. It is the performances of the piece in highly resonant spaces such as The

Wintergarden and ISSUE Project Room that tell us the most about the mechanisms of

adjustment.129

The Interviews

As you know if you’ve studied how I am sitting in a room works, there are a lot of things
at play besides just the acoustics of the room. It’s the curve of the speaker and the curve of the
microphone and it’s the relative distance of the microphone from the speaker and the
walls…These weren’t things that concerned Lucier very much.130
-Nicholas Collins

This section investigates the live performance of Alvin Lucier’s I am sitting in a room

using my interviews with five people who have run the electronics for it: Bob Bellerue,

Nicholas Collins, James Fei, Ron Kuivila, and Daniel Neumann. Some of them, such as

Nicholas Collins and James Fei, are central to the performance history of the piece. The

interviews reveal that, despite the literature’s depiction of the composer stepping aside so that

the room can ‘sound itself,’ the person running the electronics often intervenes to force the

room into sonic states that allow for a gradual process and a broad sonic spectrum. That is,

certain aesthetic preferences for the resulting sound (pacing and timbre) are used to guide

how the electronics intervene.

The role of the people interviewed has been depicted in concert programs in various

ways. Some programs list them as “assistants” or “technical assistants.” In other programs

they are listed along with other performers, with their instrument indicated as “digital delay

129 The Wintergarden performance was part of the Bang on a Can Marathon from 17 June 2012. The Issue
Project Room performance was in November 2017 as part of a two-day festival celebrating Lucier’s music and
will be discussed in detail below.
130 Nicholas Collins, interview with the author, 8 May 2018.

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system,” “système sonore,” or “sound.”131

The Interview Subjects

Lucier’s relationship to these individuals varies significantly. Two of them, Nicholas

Collins and Ron Kuivila, studied with Lucier as undergraduates at Wesleyan University in

the 1970s, shortly after Lucier began teaching as a professor fulltime and shortly after the

composition of I am sitting in a room (1969). Collins returned after one year to complete a

Masters degree with Lucier. Both have collaborated extensively with Lucier since then.

Kuivila is now a professor of music at Wesleyan University, where Lucier held a professorship

from 1970-2011. Nicholas Collins is currently a professor of sound art at the School of the Art

Institute of Chicago.

James Fei began studying with Lucier at Wesleyan for a Masters degree in the late

1990s and began assisting him in performance shortly after beginning his studies. Fei is

currently a professor of electronic arts at Mills College. Since 2000, Fei has worked closely

with Lucier on numerous occasions. In 2014, when the Museum of Modern Art purchased I

am sitting in a room as a “unique” installation work, Fei assisted Lucier with the new recording

made at MoMA that would serve as the sound element for that installation.

In contrast, two of the individuals, Daniel Neumann and Bob Bellerue, have had

much less interaction with the composer. Inspired by I am sitting in a room, Neumann had used

a multi-channel digital delay process for his Masters thesis-project at the Academy of Visual

Arts, Leipzig in 2007. He subsequently heard Lucier perform I am sitting in a room live at

Columbia University but has never worked closely with Lucier. In 2014 he ran the electronics

for a performance of I am sitting in a room at PS1 MoMA as part of their Sunday Sessions. The

performance was in the VW Dome, a geodesic dome tent in the courtyard of the museum.

131 These examples are drawn from programs in the Alvin Lucier Papers.

83
Olga Bell performed the speech part. Lucier was not present for this performance.

On the 8th and 9th of November in 2017, ISSUE Project Room in Brooklyn, NY held

two concerts celebrating the release of Illuminated by the Moon, a boxed set of records, CDs,

photos, interviews, and essays dedicated to the music of Lucier.132 The pair of concerts

culminated with the 86-year-old composer giving a live performance of I am sitting in a room.

Bob Bellerue ran the electronics.

Bellerue had worked with Lucier in the past on a few occasions, but never at the level

of involvement required for I am sitting in a room until the performance at ISSUE Project

Room. He had known the piece for years, first encountering it as an undergraduate. Bellerue

had used recursive digital delay processes for his own compositions at ISSUE Project Room

prior to performing I am sitting in a room. In preparation for the performance, he was in email

contact with James Fei and Nicholas Collins to find out how they performed the piece live.

My choice to study the performance practice by interviewing the sound engineers was

predicated on the idea that Lucier, even when performing the speaking part, had delegated

the technological choices for how to perform I am sitting in a room to his collaborators. Collins

depicted Lucier’s relation to technology this way: “One of the things you should understand is

that Lucier, as opposed to say Gordon Mumma or [David] Behrman, who were in the same

Sonic Arts Union, was never a very technologically oriented composer. He came from an

instrumental background.” In interviews Lucier has expressed ambivalence about the

adoption of laptops to perform I am sitting in a room. According to Collins, “he knew what he

liked the sound of, he wasn’t always sure how he was getting it. And he has been, so to speak,

at the mercy of various engineers and assistants along the line.”133 Fei and Kuivila similarly

indicated that Lucier did not involve himself in choices of microphones and speakers. Thus to

understand how the piece is performed we must turn to Lucier’s collaborators to whom he

132 Alvin Lucier, Illuminated by the moon, (Zürich: Zurich University of Arts, 2017).
133 Nicholas Collins, interview with the author, 18 May 2018.

84
delegated the performance practice of the electronics.

While the score directs the performer to “Make versions that can be performed in real

time,”134 Collins suggested that, in practice, the drive to perform it live did not originate with

Lucier:

Lucier, who is a very amenable man—I think he sometimes got browbeat into
doing it as a live piece. People would say, we’d really like you to do it live and
he’d say, oh, OK. I don’t know if it was necessarily his druthers. He liked the
fact that the piece was being done and that people were recognizing it. But my
impression was that he had concerns about it—possibly because it not really
being the original piece, but also because technically it was challenging on a
couple of levels and things could go wrong: distortion, tape breaking, this and
that. He had to sit on the stage without doing anything for the duration of the
piece without speaking. And then there was that possibility that the audience
would sort of cough or sneeze and even start playing the piece, so to speak, by
intentionally making noises. So I think he had mixed feelings about doing it
live.135

As the possibilities for manipulating sound through electronics have burgeoned since

the days of magnetic tape, Lucier’s pieces have tended to use less electronics. There is a multi-

decade trend in his work toward instrumental pieces that do not involve electronics at all.

Most of these instrumental works involve close tunings that create acoustic beating. But even

though he continued the exploration of room resonance, he has tended to do so through

traditional orchestral instruments without electronics. Therefore it is through his assistants

that we need to explore the performance practice of the electronics used in I am sitting in a

room.

Equipment

The existence of I am sitting in a room as a live performance piece is, with few exceptions,

predicated on digital signal processing via specialized audio software, such as Max/MSP,

Pure Data, and SuperCollider, that runs on general purpose portable computers. This is not a

134 Alvin Lucier, I am sitting in a room, (New York: Lovely Music, Ltd., 2014).
135 Nicholas Collins, interview with the author, 18 May 2018.

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technological necessity but a historical fact and points to how it is not just technical capacity,

but a certain level of ease or efficiency that is required for the widespread adoption of a

technological process.136

When I am sitting in a room is performed using digital computers, the basic signal path is

as follows. One or more microphones transduce the sound waves to an analog electrical

signal. The microphones are connected to an audio interface that converts their analog signal

to a digital signal. This digital signal is sent to the computer. On the computer, the specialized

audio software (e.g. Max/MSP) can record, process, and playback the digital audio signal and

return it to the audio interface. The audio interface then converts the new digital audio signal

back to an analog signal and sends it to one or more loudspeakers. The loudspeakers

transduce the analog electrical signal back to sound.

In order to perform I am sitting in a room live, Nicholas Collins, Ron Kuivila, James Fei,

and others, including myself, have written patches (that is programs) in Max/MSP or Pure

Data that automatically carry out the digital delay process that Lucier had originally achieved

by cutting and splicing magnetic tape. Collins has made a stand-alone piece of software that

can run on any PC that carries out the record playback process. The program is freely

available on his website.137 Such a patch is considered relatively easy to make and variations

in design are not considered to have a noticeable effect on the sound of the performance.

The signal chain described above is the digital equivalent of the equipment that

Lucier used for the original 1970 recording, which consisted of a microphone, loudspeaker,

amplifier, and a pair of tape machines. In the era of live performances of I am sitting in a room,

filters such as EQ, limiters, and compressors are commonly inserted into the signal chain.

These filters, which manipulate the spectrum of the sound signal, can either be implemented

via software on the laptop or as hardware that would mediate between the output of the

136 Jonathan Sterne makes a similar point about perceptual coding in Jonathan Sterne, MP3: The Meaning of a
Format (Durahm, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2012).
137 Nicholas Collins, http://www.nicolascollins.com/software.htm.

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audio interface and the loudspeaker. The introduction of these filters is not commented upon

in the score for I am sitting in a room. The score specifies the necessary equipment as “one

microphone, two tape recorders, amplifier and one loud speaker.” Thus the introduction of

filters, which were available in the 1960s and frequently used by other experimental

composers, was not a part of the original conception of the piece, or a part of its performance

practice prior to the digital turn at which point Lucier had delegated the performance of the

electronics to assistants.

I will next summarize the choices that the interview subjects made with respect to the

different components of equipment in the signal chain. This includes loudspeakers,

microphones, and the microphone and loudspeaker placement. The other major component

of the signal chain, the filters, will be addressed when discussing the sound check, the

adjustments made during performance, and the aesthetic criteria.

Loudspeakers

The loudspeakers have tended to be the components over which the sound engineer

has had the least discretion. For most performances the venue has a house PA system and this

is what is used. When asked about how the loudspeakers were chosen, Collins replied: “How

were the speakers chosen? That we never had any choice over because of course the speakers

would be the PA speakers that were in place for the whole concert series.”138

Fei has indicated that he prefers to use a single loudspeaker, but that he will use more

if the space is large and greater volume is needed. Sometimes the loudspeaker is part of the

permanent PA system, but other times he will request the placement of a single loudspeaker

behind Lucier “so it’s a little more tied to his location on stage.”139 This loudspeaker

placement continues to direct attention back onto Lucier, who, after the initial recitation, is

138 Nicholas Collins, interview with the author, 18 May 2018.

139 James Fei, interview with the author, 20 December 2017.

87
sitting silent and motionless on stage. Having Lucier remain on stage is not an obvious

consequence of the score. But it is part of the theater of the piece that has developed in live

performance. When I asked Kuivila about the theater of the performance practice he argued

that the role of theater “generally, is to encourage people to pay attention in different ways.

But how you pay attention is completely different if you’re working on a Romantic model of

communication of the spirit as opposed to a kind of postmodern model of a kind of

interaction with the physicality of sound to enable you to circumnavigate all those

preconditions and trainings.”140 Lucier’s presence on stage is used to discipline the audience

in order that they should listen silent and motionless so as not to start “playing the piece,” a

possibility that Collins suggested Lucier was intent to avoid. Lucier’s performance of listening

positions him as a virtuoso listener. This tends to be contextualized in the literature, not

according to a Romantic model of the virtuoso recital, but in terms of the role of the scientific

experimenter who acts as a ‘modest witness’ to the unfolding of natural events.141 Studying

the performance practice uncovers the hidden labor of the sound engineer that preserves the

inactivity and modesty of the visible performer on stage.

For the session at MoMA in 2014 during which Fei and Lucier created the recording

to be used as part of the installation version that the museum was acquiring, Fei used a Meyer

UPJ-1 loudspeaker that he valued for its flat frequency response and uniform polar pattern.

Characteristics such as these—flatness, uniformity—represent the ideal of a transparent

system that would reveal properties of the acoustics of the room. These are the technological

equivalent to the modest transparency of the performer. However, Fei also comments, “it’s

not a laboratory situation where we’re trying to ping out the acoustics of the space to do

architectural acoustic corrections. So as long as it doesn’t stick out as an artifact of say, a

140 Ron Kuivila, interview with the author, 1 May 2018.

141 As I argued in Chapter 2, the literature has taken this model of the ‘modest witness’ much too literally. There
I showed that this social dynamic has close parallels to the experimental culture of the Royal Society in 17th-
century England that was used to transform ideals of masculinity.

88
speaker nonlinearity, it’s fine, it’s part of the system.”142 All of the sound engineers I

interviewed communicated a similarly pragmatic approach.

The VW Dome at PS1 MoMA has a sound system with eight speakers made by Jim

Toth. For the performance of I am sitting in a room in 2014 for which Neumann ran the

electronics, the performance was to be in the round and so Neumann at first tried using all

eight speakers during the sound check. However, he explained, “I decided not to use all of

them. [S]omehow in rehearsal it didn’t work. It went through the iterations too quickly. And

then it erased part of the rhythmic structure too quickly. I think it turned into sine waves too

quickly. But something about reducing the number of loudspeakers helped [in] giving the

piece enough time to generate more of a complex soundscape rather than diving immediately

into sine waves.”143 In the end he decided to use only two of the loudspeakers. His reason for

using two, as opposed to one, relates to the relative positions of microphone and loudspeaker

and will be addressed below. But this already brings out the question of naturalness. Given

the geometry of dome, it seemed natural to Neumann to use a radially symmetric array of

loudspeakers that would approximate that symmetry. He found that the piece developed “too

quickly;” this betrayed an aesthetic criterion of the piece: the gradualness of the process.

While the literature unanimously acknowledges gradual process as central to the aesthetic of I

am sitting in a room, it locates that as immanent in the room. Studying the performance practice

shows that it in fact requires certain types of technological or instrumental choices in order to

recover a gradual process from spaces with acoustics that differ significantly from that found

in the living rooms where Lucier made the first two major recordings.

Microphones

The sound engineers agreed on the importance of the microphone for determining

142 James Fei, interview with the author, 20 December 2017.

143 Daniel Neumann, interview with the author, 11 December 2017.

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the sound of the piece, though their microphone choices differed, as has the number of

microphones used. The simplest configuration has a single microphone into which Lucier (or

another performer) would speak and which would also be used for the digital delay process.

However, in large halls and as Lucier’s voice has grown softer, the sound engineers have

begun to use one microphone to amplify the initial reading of the text through loudspeakers

and one microphone for the digital delay process. Part of the reason for having distinct

microphones is so that, while the microphone for the initial speech is to be placed directly in

front of the performer reading the text, the positions of the microphones used in the digital

delay process are determined during the sound check. The most common configuration in the

digital performance era seems to have been to have one microphone that Lucier speaks into

and another for the recycling process. I will refer to these as the speech-mic and the recycling-mic.

The speech-mic is considered of lesser importance because it has less impact on the

sound of the piece. It is used initially to record the speech, but then becomes inactive. In

contrast, the recycling-mic processes the sound signal repeatedly and thus its characteristics

are reinforced. Collins chose a speech-mic based upon audience expectations: “for the vocal

input at the beginning a cardioid mic gives you the kind of sound quality people expect—of a

sort of mic’d voice.”144 Collins later indicated that the microphones were often provided by

the venue so that “if you were in Germany it would be some beautiful Neumann and if you

were in America it would be an SM-58.” Fei recalls using a Shure Beta 58 for the speech-mic

during the MoMA recording session but added that the speech-mic is not “critical.” The

Shure 58 Beta is a higher-end version of the SM-58 series, but still relatively inexpensive at

$160. Shure promotes the microphone as featuring “a shaped frequency response ideal for

close-up vocals”145 Neumann also recalls using a “regular 58” for the performance at PS1

MoMA.

144 Nicholas Collins, interview with the author, 18 May 2018.

145 http://www.shure.com/americas/products/microphones/beta

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 As Collins indicated, the audience’s perception of the ‘natural’ sound of the voice is

shaped to a great extent by extensive experience of hearing voices through certain types of

microphones. Although the speech-mic is of lesser importance than the recycling-mic, it still

impacts the sound of the piece, both for the quality of the initial speech that the audience

hears and for the development of the piece. Vocal microphones such as SM-58’s are designed

to filter the voice. The frequency response curve provided by Shure, the manufacturer,

indicates that the response diminishes uniformly below 100Hz and increases nonlinearly

above 1000Hz. As Maedeline Akrich has written, “new technologies may…generate and

‘naturalize’ new forms and orders of causality and, indeed, new forms of knowledge about the

world.”146 Thus the ‘naturalness’ that is used to select microphones is based upon a cultural

tradition of amplified voices accustomed to certain types of filtering. Knowledge of the

amplified voice is encoded through aesthetic choices designed into the SM-58. Collins’s

description of the selection process shows that the sound of the piece will vary due to

differences in naturalized forms between Germany and the US. These differences correlate

with expense: An SM-58 costs around $100 and ‘beautiful’ Neumann vocal microphones

begin at around $700. This undermines the tendency for the literature to depict I am sitting in

a room in terms of universal aesthetics. The reasons for these technological differences are

complex, but two factors that contribute are different levels of governmental financial support

for the arts and the difference between how technological quality is valued in the

experimental music cultures of the two countries: in the US, experimental music culture is, in

part, imagined as a culture of tinkering and DIY electronics.147

When it comes to the recycling-mic, Kuivila summarized the sentiment of all of the

interviewees: “The microphone completely matters.”148 However, beyond noting its

importance, there was not a consensus on which type of microphone was most desirable.

146 Akrich, “The De-Scription of Technological Objects,” 207.

147 Andrew Dewar, “Handmade Sounds: The Sonic Arts Union and American Technoculture.”
148 Ron Kuivila, interview with the author, 1 May 2018.

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Kuivila, Collins, and Neumann all stated preferences for omnidirectional microphones.

Collins, in particular, cited this selection “because it made for a flatter process of recycling. I

don’t think that really ever occurred to Alvin.” But Fei expressed a preference for cardioid

microphones, the very microphone that Collins rejected because of the unevenness in its

response. The circular floor plan of the VW Dome at PS1 MoMA suggested to Neumann

that the polar pattern of the microphone for recycling should be omnidirectional. He selected

a vintage Neumann M58 capsule with an (omnidirectional polar pattern) on a MicroTech

Geffel tube body, a microphone whose cost is around five times that of the vocal mic he used.

He valued the microphone “in terms of coloration, in terms of directness and clarity” and, he

continued, “I felt, if we get this omnidirectional field, we will have more of what the space is

actually doing with the sound and less what the loudspeaker is doing.”149 While giving priority

to the effect of the room acoustics, Neumann was also clear that one should understand the

resonances as being constituted by the system as a whole, including not only the room, but

also the microphones, mixers, amplifiers, and loudspeakers.

Even though Kuivila also preferred omnidirectional microphones, he did not share

the preference for such sensitive, flat, and expensive microphones: “a not-great omni voice

mic is a fantastic feedback mic precisely because its bass response rolls off. If you use a

condenser microphone then you have lots more difficulty. So if you have a microphone that is

extremely accurate then you’ve got a lot more trouble keeping the regeneration under

control.”150 He continued, that it was helpful if the microphone “has its own built in

compression to some degree. So people might go for a condenser mic for the accuracy in the

high end and that can be beautiful, but in a concert situation I might make a different choice

just for safety.” Thus in contrast to Neumann, Kuivila valued the filtering built into the

microphone for controlling the recycling process in I am sitting in a room. Akrich describes how

149 Daniel Neumann, interview with the author, 12 November 2017.

150 Ron Kuivila, interview with the author, 1 May 2018.

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“many of the choices made by designers can be seen as decisions about what should be

delegated to a machine and what should be left to the initiative of the human actors.”151 In

the case of I am sitting in a room, delegated choices have been accepted by the sound engineers

to different degrees. They mainly agree on delegating to the manufacturer choices of filtering

for the speech-mic, in part because these choices have become naturalized through the

common experience of audiences thanks to the market domination of certain brands of

microphones in each country. However, at the level of the recycling-mic, Kuivila indicated

willingness to delegate the filtering to the machine whereas Neumann did not. As we will see,

the choice to minimize filtering in the recycling-mic is compensated for at a later stage when

the sound engineer uses EQ or other adjustable filters.

As indicated above, Fei expressed a preference for using a cardioid condenser

microphone with a small diaphragm. In the case of the MoMA recording it was an Audio

Technica 4051. But he tempered any overly specific microphone selection: “It’s not about

using the absolutely flattest microphone because any discrepancy in the room will outweigh

any of the smaller anomalies in the reproduction system by a good margin.”152 He also noted

a preference for small diaphragm microphones in live situations because “visually it’s less

obtrusive.” Like the choice in live performance of positioning the loudspeaker behind Lucier

to tie the sound to him, the choice of microphone size is used to prevent attention from being

pulled away from the stage.

Michel Chion uses the term synchresis to describe how in film the “the viewer-hearer

will automatically link synchronized sound and image from disparate sources.”153 This is

commonly used in fight scenes to marry the sound of a baseball bat hitting a side of beef to

the image of a man punching another man in the ribs. Although less dramatic, Fei’s

preference for visually unobtrusive audio equipment points to keeping the audience’s visual

151 Akrich, “The De-Scription of Technological Objects,” 216.

152 James Fei, interview with the author, 20 December 2017.
153 Hagood, “Unpacking a Punch: Transduction and the Sound of Combat Foley in Fight Club,” 106.

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attention tied to the human performer on the stage, so that there is synchresis between the

human performer and the sound. One can imagine a performance of I am sitting in a room in

which the performer is not on stage when they speak, or in which they leave the stage after

speaking. Although not part of the score, the performance tradition of the piece has

informally but very strictly codified the practice of having the performer remain on stage as

the exemplary listener. Building on the analyses of LaBelle and Haas, in Chapter 2 I

theorized this in terms of listening practices and transferred agencies. We can now see that,

with one of Lucier’s closest collaborators, subtle technical details of the performance

practice—the size of the microphone—are geared to reinforce the theater of musical

performance: Lucier performs listening and this pulls the experience away from the room

itself back towards a particular point of audition. The point of audition is a crucial variable in

the performance of this piece, not just visually and psychologically as described here, but

sonically through the microphone placement.

Microphone and Loudspeaker Placement

All of the interviewees acknowledged the importance of microphone placement

relative to the loudspeakers. As noted above, the loudspeakers are often the PA system of the

venue and so moving them is not an option. Thus the choice reduces to where to place the

recycling-mic. Collins indicated the dominant factor guiding this decision: “Mic placement is

obviously the thing that is critical to adjust how fast the piece develops.” He noted that in live

performance situations he “would very often place it nearer to the speakers to slow down the

buildup.” Unlike contemporary movie theaters which are acoustically damped so that the

sound mix is not distorted by additional reverberation, the performance spaces in which I am

sitting in a room tends to be performed are fairly resonant. These spaces include concert halls,

auditoriums, museum galleries, the fiercely reverberant theater of ISSUE Project Room, and

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even the Winter Garden at the World Trade Center for the Bang on a Can Marathon. This

last venue presented sufficient acoustical challenges that Fei and Lucier had to carefully

consider whether to accept the invitation to perform the piece in that space. So in contrast to

the assumption in the literature that reverberant spaces are ideal for I am sitting in a room, they

actually create challenges for the piece that Lucier did not encounter when he first made the

piece in his living full of shag carpeting and plush curtains. Kuivila said, “depending on the

room it can be very touchy. If you’re in a reverberant room, it can happen too quickly...that

piece is conceived as a version of music as a gradual process so you have to tune it in a way

that enables it to be a gradual process. You want to have the impact of the resonance reveal

itself over time.”154 Kuivila expresses the responsibility to obtain certain aesthetic qualities

that are not immanent in a particular room. As we will see, the sound engineers heavily rely

on microphone placement to compensate for strong resonances.

The basic theory of the placement of the recycle-mic is that, the closer it is to the

loudspeaker the more it is recording the sound directly coming from the loudspeaker and the

less it is recording the sound as it is reflected off of the surfaces of the room. The further away

the recycle-mic is from the loudspeaker, the more reverb is added with each iteration. The

choice of the microphone position is the choice of the “point of audition” as theorized by

Rick Altman in the context of sound in film. In film we are accustomed to the dissociation of

the point of audition and the point of view. We may hear a conversation between two

individuals as if we were standing next to them even if the camera angle places them at a

great distance from us. In I am sitting in a room, the point of audition is heard primarily in terms

of the amount of resonance that is added with each iteration and this is primarily tied to the

distance of the microphone from the loudspeaker. After some number of iterations, the aural

cues of the point of audition would be very difficult for a listener to track. But the

consequences for how the piece develops are significant.

154 Ron Kuivila, interview with the author, 1 May 2018.

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 In photographic documentation of the recording session at MoMA, one can see that

the recycle-mic is inches from the speaker and that the gallery would have strong

resonance.155 Fei said that he had placed the mic closer than he ever did for a live

performance. The score for I am sitting in a room directs the performer to “choose a room the

musical qualities of which you would like to evoke.”156 For the recording that would become

part of the MoMA installation, Fei said that the choice of the particular gallery was based not

upon its particular musical qualities, but upon it being quieter than the other galleries. For

even though the recording session occurred after visiting hours, the museum was full of staff

cleaning and performing maintenance. Some gallery spaces were ruled out because you

would occasionally hear an elevator bell. In others the HVAC system was deemed to generate

too much white noise. We have here a concrete instance of how the live performance practice

differs from Lucier’s original approach. Whereas he originally switched from an electronic

music studio to his own living room in order to have less “strident” resonances, the live

performance practice has developed a tendency to make alterations in the electronic system in

order to compensate for acoustic properties that might run counter to the aesthetic goals,

such as maintaining a gradual process. The primary choice the engineer makes is the

placement of the microphone, that is, the point from which the system listens to the room.

Beyond simply the distance of the microphone from the speaker, Kuivila indicated

more refined decisions that could support the aesthetic goals of the piece: “You want to be in

a position where you’re favoring no particular fundamental note and so you’re kind of

making a guess based on that. Because obviously if you are in some terribly symmetrical

location, okay, now that fundamental resonance is going to own you and that’s not really the

155 Martha Joseph, “Collecting Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room,”

https://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2015/01/20/collecting-alvin-luciers-i-am-sitting-in-a-room/,
accessed on 21 May 2015.
156 Lucier, I am sitting in a room, 2014.

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goal.”157 I will address this more fully in the section on aesthetic criteria, but suffice to say for

now that this shows how there are certain points of audition through which the room will

hear itself that are deemed inappropriate for the piece.

Neumann said that in the VW Dome at PS1 MoMA he had placed the single

recycling-mic “at least five meters” from the speakers and asymmetrically between them

because this would reinforce resonances of slightly different frequencies. He explained,

“having two different distances has a little more beating, which to me makes for a more

complex sound.”158 As with Kuivila’s attitude, we find a desire to increase the complexity of

the sound rather than to converge to a narrow set of frequencies.

In the performance at ISSUE Project Room Lucier had directed Bellerue to place the

recycling-mic extremely close to the loudspeaker so that the sound did not “saturate” too

quickly. Bellerue reflected in hindsight, “But it would also have been good to be able to try it

out with different mic positions too. Because in the end, I think, the resonance, in a way, of

the speaker, kind of ended up dominating the results. Because the microphone was so close to

the speaker.”

After the performance Lucier was signing a recently released album. When Bellerue

approached him to say “nice working with you,” Lucier exclaimed: “That was the weirdest

thing I ever heard!”159 The recording from ISSUE Project Room is rather anomalous in how

quickly the resonance built up and in the fact that it converges to a very limited frequency

range. The comments of Kuivila and Collins indicate that the fast convergence is something

that one must often work to overcome through microphone placement. However, at ISSUE

Project Room placing the recycle-mic close was not enough. As I will describe below, the

sound engineers sometimes need to use EQ in order to filter out the most dominant resonant

frequencies, even though the text for the piece indicates that it is the reinforcement of these

157 Ron Kuivila, interview with the author, 1 May 2018.

158 Daniel Neumann, interview with the author, 11 December 2017.
159 Bob Bellerue, interview with the author, 14 February 2018.

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frequencies that is the purpose of the piece.

Rehearsal and Sound Check

[Lucier] was concerned about how the piece would sound. And if it didn’t
sound good he’d say, “can you please fix it.” But it wasn’t like he was deeply
involved in the technology of fixing it.
-Nicholas Collins

During the sound check at ISSUE Project Room, Lucier also directed Bellerue to not

use any EQ. In retrospect, Bellerue expressed regret at not having had an EQ ready. But he

also pointed to the fundamental paradox of sound checking I am sitting in a room for live

performance: “the only way to really tech it is in the room with the people.”160 All of the

interviewees indicated that even if you ran through I am sitting in a room during a sound check

and were completely satisfied with the results, the performance might differ drastically from

this because of the presence of the bodies of the audience which would filter the sound and

alter the resonances in the room. At ISSUE Project Room the theater was filled to capacity

with people crowded in, standing around the edges of the seating and sitting on the floor.

Bellerue conjectured that the effect of this would have been to filter out the higher frequencies

leaving only the low frequencies to which the piece rapidly converged. Kuivila, like Bellerue,

also found that the audience tends to attenuate the high frequencies and not impact the lower

frequencies. In contrast, Fei hesitated to say “that there is any consistent way that the

audience affects the piece.”161

House sound engineers typically have EQ in the signal path of the house PA system.

They use it to dampen the natural resonances of the room that, for most music, is considered

external or a type of noise that interferes with the signal of the music. Neumann remembered

mostly allowing the house EQ systems to continue dampening some of the room resonances,

160 Bob Bellerue, interview with the author, 14 February 2018.

161 James Fei, interview with the author, 20 December 2017.

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but made the dampening more mild because of the nature of I am sitting in a room. This

exemplifies the pragmatic compromise between adhering to the theory of how the piece

works physically—the room resonances are reinforced—and the aesthetic demands for a

gradual process and a complex sound in the sense of having a broad spectrum. As I will

return to in the section on the Adjustments During the Performance, Neumann may have also

adjusted the EQ during the performance because “there is a huge difference to play the piece

in an empty room versus a filled room, and it was pretty full. So the piece worked very

different. Much more sine wavy.”162

Kuivila emphasized the importance of “tuning the system” during sound check:

“there’s a funny way in which what you do have to do is, for example, you may elect to roll

off the bass just a little bit, because that will load things up and of course big low frequency

resonances particularly in concert halls can predominate. So there’s, in a sense, the purity of

the process and then there’s the necessity of performance adjustments in order to not have

that go off into the weeds. So there’s a balancing act.”163 To “roll off the bass” or to use any

other EQ, is a form of filtering the sound signal. In this piece, the effect is to cause the

electronics to ignore certain room resonances so that they don’t dominate after many

iterations. It is a manner of reshaping the sound of the room. Thus, as is often done in the

literature, to sustain the position that “to perform the work requires no interpretation, no

translation, no manipulation on the part of the performer”164 clearly contradicts the actual

performance practice. While Lucier may remain passive on the stage after he has spoken the

initial text, in live performances the sound engineers must manipulate the acoustics of the

room in order to maintain a gradual process involving a broad spectrum. As we will see, the

manipulations are not limited to the sound check.

Kuivila further pointed out differences between types of performance spaces: “The

162 Daniel Neumann, interview with the author, 11 December 2017.

163 Ron Kuivila, interview with the author, 1 May 2018.
164 Kim-Cohen, In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art, 188.

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concert hall is engineered to project out into the space and now when you’ve got this

regenerative loop, well the regenerative loop is from whatever the slap back is, and the slap

back isn’t from down in the seating anyway. It’s going to be more off the ceiling or the back

wall.”165 So the audience presence has much less effect in a concert hall than in a gallery

space or in the theater at ISSUE Project Room.

One of the key functions of the sound check is for the sound engineer to learn how

much of a drop in loudness occurs between the second and third iterations. The existence of

this drop in volume is agreed upon by all of the interviewees. During the sound check the

sound engineer figures out how many decibels to boost the gain in between the second and

third iterations during the performance. This boost is invisible to the audience, but without it

they would hear a sudden drop in volume that is considered to be a distraction from “the

process.” The boost is part of the hidden labor of the sound engineer. This exemplifies how

the idea of the sounding process as depicted in the literature gives a false sense of naturalness.

While the sound engineers all express a clear objective to interfere as little as possible

with the sound of the room, interferences are often deemed necessary. Fei, like Kuivila,

referred to “tuning” the system during sound check. In addition to adjusting microphone

position, he will use EQ to dampen harsh frequencies that would build up and become

painful. He clarified that the filters applied would not focus on narrow frequency bands, but

broad regions. This is in part because if you try to remove a very narrow frequency band that

was building up quickly, then the effect of the filter will be to shift that quick build up to a

nearby frequency. However, a more broadly focused dampening of frequency bands using

EQ does prevent the process from quickly being dominated by only a few frequencies, as

happened at ISSUE Project Room. The significance of the sound engineer to the existence of

I am sitting in a room as a live performance piece is brought into relief: whereas Lucier directed

Bellerue to not use EQ, his closest collaborators do use it in order to achieve the sound
165 Ron Kuivila, interview with the author, 1 May 2018.

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qualities that Lucier expects.

Collins summarized the importance of having an unusually long amount of time for

the sound check: “The problem with I am sitting in a room is that to know what’s going to be

problematic you kind of have to run the piece multiple times which means a serious chunk of

time is required. But for most stage performances we simply never had that luxury. We just

sort of had to go with what we could get. And just hope that in the course of the piece if

something started to peak that you could get in there with some EQ in real-time and try to

soften it up a bit.”166 The next section will explore the kinds of “real-time” interventions that

Collins deems so critical to the live performance.

During sound check Fei and Collins sometimes place limiters and compressors into

the signal path as an emergency safeguard against the rapid build up of energy. Fei compared

his use of compression to the way that limiters are used in a broadcast situation, that is, as a

ceiling to prevent the signal from clipping and creating a percussive artifact that would, in the

case of I am sitting in a room, be perpetuated through the recycling process. This is similar to

automating the process of using EQ during the performance to prevent any frequency band

from getting significantly louder than the others. Kuivila also noted the usefulness of a limiter

but conjectured that Lucier would prefer to have the system tuned so that one is not needed.

This demonstrates how time-scale becomes a key issue in the balance between the aesthetic

commitment to a gradual process and the commitment to not intervening. To tune, or maybe

temper the system is an initial intervention that takes place before the experiential time of the

performance. It becomes naturalized as part of the system whose automated behavior is

meant to be strictly repetitive, that is, the electronics are doing the same thing with each

iteration. In contrast, a limiter or compressor points to an intervention that will be made

during the experiential time of the performance and will alter the behavior of the electronics

at particular moments. It appears that, according to Kuivila, this time-based intervention is

166 Nicholas Collins, interview with the author, 18 May 2018.

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more objectionable than an initial distortion of the room acoustics—either through built in

microphone EQ or EQ settings adjusted during sound check—that can be naturalized as part

of a well-tempered system.

In describing his process for the sound check Neumann said that, “For warming up

the muscles you can just play the piece forever and just let it do its thing. Then you can

navigate it so that the volume drops over the course of 20 minutes and then you can pick it

back up and bring it up again. It can really go on forever.”167 I asked if this was something he

actually does during a sound check. “Yeah. I love doing that. Especially after 45 minutes,

there’s nothing left of the original sound and it’s just the room resonant, or system resonant

frequencies.” Asked how this version compared to the version that came out in the

performance, he emphatically responded: “it was much better during rehearsal.”

Adjustments During the Performance

Non-intervention is one of the major themes in the literature on Lucier’s music,

including that which is devoted to I am sitting in a room. The previous sections have shown how

the live performance practice involves various modes of intervention prior to the experiential

time of the performance. There are also significant modes of intervention that occur within

the timeframe of the performance. Existing documentation of performances suggests that the

sound engineer is normally not on the stage for the performance and so what is described

here is hidden from the audience. But it is an open secret. None of the sound engineers

showed hesitancy to describe the kinds of interventions they have made. They approached

the interview with the attitude that it was obvious that they would make these kinds of

interventions. Yet the literature has been completely silent on this crucial aspect of the mode

of existence of I am sitting in a room as a live performance piece. This detachment of the

167 Daniel Neumann, interview with the author, 11 December 2017.

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scholarly community from the performance community has caused distortions in the

scholarly and public understanding of this piece, a piece which has taken on a foundational

status both in experimental music and sound art. This section will detail the interventions that

are performed during the experiential time of the music.

The most crucial action of the sound engineer during the performance is to boost the

gain between the second and the third iterations by a number of decibels determined in the

sound check. Without this, the electronic delay system on its own would undergo an abrupt

drop in volume between the second and the third iterations. If the sound engineer correctly

makes that boost in gain, then the audience will perceive the third iteration to be equal in

volume to the second, thus focusing their attention on the subtle change in reverberation. But

more than that, if the sound engineer does not boost the volume sufficiently, then with each

successive iteration the sound will grow more faint; before the resonances of the room can

dissolve the recorded speech, the sound will fade to inaudibility.

As noted in the previous section that addressed the sound check, the presence of the

audience can, in some spaces, alter the room resonance enough that the gain and EQ set in

the sound check will no longer keep the system balanced at an even volume level. In addition

to this, as Kuivila explained when I interviewed him, the reverberation of the room

accumulates over time, which can cause the volume to increase with each successive iteration,

leading to painfully loud volumes if the sound engineer does not carefully monitor the volume

level throughout the performance and subtly decrease the gain over successive iterations.

Collins summarized it as follows: “If you’re not loud enough on playback, it fades off and it

won’t recycle. If you’re too loud on playback, it overloads. So it is not easy to run as a live

piece.”168 Even though the process is intended to be gradual, Collins pointed out that the

sound level can “jump 6 decibels from one generation to the next—it will double in volume”

so that “you had to be really, really careful riding the gain on the thing. Because if you got a
168 Nicholas Collins, interview with the author, 18 May 2018.

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peak that distorted in it then that would be remembered for the rest of the cycle and you’d

have this distorted plonk that kept recycling.” Thus, in order for the room to ‘sound itself,’ as

is so often depicted in the literature, the engineer must perform a delicate juggling act of

balancing gain levels and adjusting EQ settings to stave off sonic disaster.

Neumann also pointed to the need to make EQ adjustments in real-time because the

presence of the audience “deadens” the room, causing the dominant frequencies to come out

more and the piece to converge to a single sine wave. “If I hear one particular frequency

being amplified noticeably more than everything else then I notch that frequency. Because

otherwise in the next round, that frequency will be 3 or 4 times amplified and over two or

three rounds it will only be like one frequency and to me the piece is over.”169

More than the others, Fei described a performance practice during the course of the

piece that required the least intervention. However, like the others he emphasized the tricky

adjustments in gain that need to be made during the first few iterations. He cited rare cases

where, if a plosive in the initial speech causes “a big pop” in the recording, he will sometimes

“ride it out quickly on a fader,” performing a kind of audio equivalent of air-brushing out a

blemish in a photographic portrait. More typically he’ll be closely monitoring the gain

throughout the performance, often decreasing the gain little by little “because there is a

tendency for the level to go up because of the resonance.”170 In these terms, one of the sound

engineers main jobs becomes to mitigate the very resonance of the room that the piece is

meant to reveal.

I argue that Alvin Lucier turned to acoustic resonance as a means of distancing the

resulting sound from the score-based prescription of disciplined action. The interference

patterns that underpin acoustic resonance allow the composer to maintain sonic complexity

while reducing the kind of gestural complexity that they prescribe in the score. As the advent

169 Daniel Neumann, interview with the author, 11 December 2017.

170 James Fei, interview with the author, 20 December 2017.

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of live audio processing came to dominate the aesthetic interests of the experimental music

community, the push to perform I am sitting in a room live has pushed the sound engineer into a

delicate position of reproducing the subtleties of living room acoustics in other spaces. The

gestural complexity has been transferred to the sound-engineer-as-performer, though this is

not indicated in the score and is absent from the literature.

While Fei said that he rarely has to adjust EQ throughout a live performance of I am

sitting in a room, it does happen.

The times that I’m EQing in real time, either it’s a problematic room where it
tends to go to these frequencies where you hear a boomy ummmmm. It
centers on one and if I can hear it starting to happen I will notch that, I will try
to tune that out, in that case I will be trying to tune it out little by little if I can.
The tricky thing about doing it live is that it’s a gradual process so you really
can’t do anything too dramatic. You kind of get to know the piece so that if I
hear a thing emerging I have a pretty good idea this is going to be bad or
become very prominent in, say, 3 iterations, and you want to catch it early so
that you don’t have to make a drastic cut where it becomes very obvious to the
audience that something happened that didn’t seem like it was part of the
process. But the goal is to not have to EQ during the performance and I would
say that is the case most of the time.171

The idea of a “problematic room” is foreign to the literature.172 The idea that the

sound engineer is managing the audience expectations in order for it to “seem” like a gradual

process, rather than be a gradual process, complicates the tendency to use I am sitting in a room

to exemplify the ontological turn in sound art and experimental music.173 The scholarly

discourse projects an acoustic normativity based on the kind of living room acoustics that

Lucier used for the first two commercial recordings of the piece, released in 1970 and 1981.

The scholarship naturalizes the aesthetic by locating it as immanent in the living room. It has

become the role of the sound engineer to perform the interventions required to emplace living

room acoustics in public performance spaces.

171 James Fei, interview with the author, 20 December 2017.

172 However, note that LaBelle depicts the architectural acoustics as a neutral domain onto which the problems
of a body may be transferred. LaBelle, Background Noise.
173 Cox, “Sound Art and the Sonic Unconscious.”

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Aesthetic Criteria

I now look more closely at how the sound engineers that I interviewed depict the

aesthetics of I am sitting in a room. What arise are aesthetic criteria that involve balancing ideas

of nature, intervention, and agency through the relation of the sonic results to the

performance practice. While the previous four subsections on the interview subjects,

equipment, sound check, and adjustments during the performance contribute to the literature

by demonstrating the modes of interventions (e.g. the selection of equipment, the use of EQ),

I now show how those constitute the aesthetics of I am sitting in a room.

When asked about his aesthetic reference points Neumann replied using a set of

negative interventions aimed to avoid cul-de-sacs within the range of sonic possibilities of the

piece:

No, it’s my own taste, but also to…keep the system afloat, to treat the system
so that the piece doesn’t die and so that the feedback doesn’t take off, and that
you don’t end up with straight sine waves after three or four iterations. Those
are my guidelines. Maybe those are kind of negative guidelines, what I don’t
want to have happen, but if you apply those, and apply those, and apply those,
then you get into this interesting space where it’s this balancing act. It’s the
result of that struggle.174

I asked him if he considered the piece as a performative piece for the sound engineer? “I

would think so. To ignore that would ignore a whole part of the set-up.” The aesthetic is

characterized as one of vigilant balancing that prevents the process from diverging to either of

the two extremes. That is, the aesthetic is not just sonic, but is understood in terms of the

performance practice of the sound engineer. This aspect of the performance practice has

almost always been hidden from the audience and so is distinct from the theater of the music

addressed above that is focused on Lucier (or Olga Bell in the case of the PS1 MoMA

performance) sitting on stage and listening.

Kuivila also depicted the aesthetics in terms of balance. “One way of imagining [I am

174 Daniel Neumann, interview with the author, 11 December 2017.

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sitting in a room] would be that the goal is to accurately render the relationship of all the

resonances. Where really the goal is to activate all of the resonances in a manner that, in a

sense, is as democratic as possible. Equal opportunity for room resonances. That’s actually

tuning it. One of these fundamental recurring problems is people imagine that the acoustical

premise supersedes a musical premise. The musical premise being, what is going to lead to

the most revelatory aural experience of this phenomena. You want it to be a piece of music

for God’s sake! You make those choices not in a spirit of acoustical measurement but in a

spirit of musical exploration. But it’s a musical exploration where you’re also accepting the

discipline that you want to minimize the extent to which you put your finger on the scale.”175

Kuivila’s position points to the necessity of intervening in a natural process—the

resonance of the room—in order to make its less obvious characteristics sensible to the

audience. In order to hear “all of the resonances,” the sound engineer must intervene through

the selection of the point of audition (the microphone placement) and via filtering (imposed by

an EQ in the signal chain or inherent in the selection of microphones) in order to diminish

the dominant resonances and allow the more subtle ones to become audible. Rather than

celebrating the removal of gesture, we must investigate the reconfiguration of the

compositional and performative interventions. If we relate the music to scientific experiments,

it should not be as music that reveals nature in a free state. It should be as music that forces

the resonances of the room by impediments into unusual states—“monsters” in Bacon’s

terms, not “species.” The type and degree of intervention used depends on the acoustic and

cultural context, including the aesthetic predispositions of the performers.

As discussed in Chapter 2, the literature on I am sitting in a room has maintained a

characterization in which Lucier is a ‘modest witness’ to the room sounding itself. This is

misleadingly accurate with regard to the live versions: It is accurate because Lucier sites on stage

listening without moving; it is misleading because there is a sound engineer intervening in the
175 Ron Kuivila, interview with the author, 1 May 2018.

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process so that the sound meets certain aesthetic criteria. It has naturalized aesthetic

properties (e.g. gradual process and a broad spectrum) that in practice require very particular

positions of listening and technological interventions or room selections. In much of the

literature, the idea of the natural resonance of the room has become detached from the form

of mediation through which it is accessed. The situation exemplifies Adorno’s observation

that “natural beauty is ideology where it serves to disguise mediatedness as immediacy.”176

Chapter 2 argued that the ideological position within the literature on I am sitting in a

room that has precipitated can be understood using the critiques by Benjamin Piekut (within

experimental music) and Donna Haraway (within science and technology studies) of the

subject position of the ‘modest witness.’ Rather than abort the relation to experimental

science, I argue that historicized engagement with scientific experimentalism can accurately

and productively ground the aesthetic discourse of musical experimentalism, at least in the

case of Lucier’s music. Describing the performance practice provides necessary groundwork

from which to approach the aesthetics of experimental music through its modes of

intervention.

The balancing act within the performance practice of I am sitting in a room is not just

one that must avoid the two extreme sonic possibilities of silence and a shrieking sine tone.

What is also in play is a balancing act between a performance practice ideal of non-

intervention and a belief that the “the most revelatory aural experience of this phenomena” is

made accessible to the listener through certain aesthetic properties that require interventions,

whether those interventions consist of selecting the acoustic space or using EQ to reshape the

acoustics of a space. Collins emphasized that Lucier approached rehearsing “on an aesthetic

rather than a technical level.” The modes of technical intervention were delegated to the

sound engineer. Laughing, Collins continued, “A common comment [from Lucier] about

pieces of this era is ‘I don’t like that frequency, can you get rid of it?’ But it’s like, well, it’s not
176 Theodore Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 94.

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quite that easy!”177

In contrast, Fei averred that “for Alvin, the idea is not to overcome the architecture,

or, it might include the sound system.” By reminding us of the sound system, Fei points to a

key issue. While much of the literature ignores the sound system, the aesthetic dialog within

the performance practice readily acknowledges it, even if its relation to the aesthetic criteria is

difficult to describe. As Fei put it, “it’s difficult thinking about aesthetic qualities. There’s a

little bit of a…it’s a somewhat blurry line.”178 While such blurriness is not exclusive to I am

sitting in room, the way that the piece blurs the outline of its aesthetics by bringing out tensions

between ideals of sonic beauty, composerly agency, nature, and intervention makes it serve as

an interesting locus for reflection on these themes. That the piece has been purchased by

MoMA and has begun to circulate through museums worldwide makes it more pressing that

the scholarship on the piece accurately depicts the material practice that supports it. The

basis of this approach is an investigation of the performance practice, but it also requires

tracing influences farther out into the social field than would normally be considered to be

properly part of the performance practice.

I am sitting in a room and its Modes of Intervention

In this section I reframe the aesthetic of I am sitting in a room in terms of the modes of

intervention.

Lydia Goehr has pointed out that the idea of the Werktreue “demands submission to

the work just as it displaces authority onto those (conductors and performers) who claim to be

most submissive.”179 Such a dynamic has arisen in the discourse around I am sitting in a room.

177 Nicholas Collins, interview with the author, 18 May 2018.

178 James Fei, interview with the author, 20 December 2017.
179 Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, xli.

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Within the oral discourse of the sound engineers this takes a practical form; no performing

situation is ideal; no performance of the piece is ideal. There is a submission to each situation

and an attempt to balance the aesthetic criteria at different levels: to adjust the equipment as

little as possible during the performance but to do so if it helps to maintain certain sound

criteria such as a broad spectrum and a gradual process. There is a clear awareness among

the sound engineers that they are submitting to an aesthetic vision of Lucier’s. Submission to

the aesthetic vision confers authority on the sound engineer and, because of the rhetoric of

the piece, authority to represent the sounds of rooms. The literature then extends this to a

new level, which is a pure submission to nature and acoustic phenomena.

In place of an ideal of purity and submission, let us follow up on Burns’s article in

which he describes the performance practice he used for I am sitting in a room, and describe the

work in terms of the modes of intervention. These have been revealed through the interviews

with the sound engineers, which include some of Lucier’s closest collaborators. Having

identified a given intervention we should ask, At what scale does it occur? How does the

intervention at one scale afford non-intervention at another? I pursue these questions with

Akrich’s framework as a guide: what are the “elementary mechanisms of adjustments” that

are needed when the “inside and the outside of objects are not well matched,” thus creating

the possibility of breakdown?

The first possibility of breakdown in Lucier’s telling of the story of the composition of I

am sitting in a room is when he didn’t like the sounds obtained in the Brandeis Electronic Music

Studio. The elementary mechanism of adjustment was, according to his telling, not the

adjustment of the equipment but the replacement of one room with another: He selected the

acoustic conditions that produced the desired aesthetic results. What the desired aesthetic

results are has been clarified by the demand for live performance in which room selection was

no longer possible and the mechanism of adjustments shifted to the equipment. The range of

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rates of change that counted as sufficiently “gradual” and the degree of broadness of the

spectrum came into focus when they were in conflict with the demand for non-intervention.

Having intervened through room selection, Lucier had freed himself of making

interventions within a certain time-scale of the piece. What is the time-scale of non-

intervention? The original process involved starting and stopping the machine between

iterations and cutting and splicing at those end points. Intervening during each iteration was

made unnecessary by intervening at the scale of room selection. Thus the fundamental time-

scale of intervention is the duration of one iteration. Interventions should not be made during

that time, if possible. This is implicit in the literature up until now. But in the interview with

Fei he states that this is an explicit goal: when possible, adjustments to the levels of the system

are only made between iterations, not during.

What other interventions came to be needed to maintain this time-scale of

intervention when there was a mismatch between the acoustics of the space and the aesthetics

of the piece? One is the selection of certain kinds of equipment: this included the preference

for high fidelity equipment as well as certain polar patterns of microphones, though which

polar pattern is not consistent between performers. Another intervention is the placement of

the equipment in space, which normally reduced to the position of the microphone since the

loudspeakers are often not movable given the constraints of the programming of which the

piece is a part.

Another intervention revealed by the mismatch was the adjustment of EQ or the use

of compressors, both of which are approaches to filtering the spectrum of the sound. There is

a certain amount of interchangeability between these: different microphones will require

different types and amounts of EQ in order to achieve the desired aesthetic results. There

seems to be a desire within the performance practice, and we can imagine that same desire

within the literature if it had addressed the performance practice, to avoid the adjustment of

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EQ and instead to push it off into the microphone. This is a matter of time-scale. The

preference to not have to make EQ adjustments for a particular performance is a preference

to defer to the congealed history of listening embodied in the transducers that constitute a

natural state for electronic music. This pushes the intervention to a much larger time-scale,

that of decades, over which microphones have come to encode listening practices.

All of this needs to be understood as being aimed at not piercing the fundamental

time-scale of intervention, the length of an iteration. It is this time-scale that is inviolable for

the piece because, in part, it marks a safe distance away from what is traditionally considered

to be the basic time scale of the compositional gesture—the phrase. Karlheinz Stockhausen

put the traditional musical phrase at the time-scale of about eight seconds.180 In order for

Lucier to not be seen as composing all of the notes and rhythms of the piece, intervention into

notes and rhythms must be kept at a time-scale larger than that of the traditional musical

phrase. While the initial speech certainly determines rhythms at a much shorter time-scale, it

is the way that this highly personal and controlled sound is transformed that constitutes the

piece. So really it is the transformations that must not be controlled at a time-scale below eight

seconds.

The sense of inevitability of the sound of I am sitting in a room is tied to how the piece

relies on the well-established scripts for microphones and loudspeakers and equalizers that

exists within the cultural practice of the sound engineers involved. The sense of technological

ease that arises by having the activity of the sound engineer off stage also contributes to this. If

we watched the engineer make the abrupt jump in levels that is needed to maintain constant

sound level in the early iterations, then the aura of inevitability of the sound of the piece

would be tinged with intervention.

The basic rhetoric of the piece, explicit in the text, is to transfer the agency of making

“Four Criteria of Electronic Music,” in Stockhausen on Music, ed. Robin Maconie (London: Marion Boyars,
180

1989), 94.

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sound to the room, or more accurately, the room and electronic equipment. This agency is

transferred through the listening practices encoded in the equipment and in the authoritative

idea of the work. But the agency has also been transferred to the sound engineers that run the

piece for Lucier. According to Collins, these assistants, who mostly were students of Lucier’s,

exerted their own agency over the piece and over Lucier through their desire for live versions

which the score is open to but demands of others: “make live versions.”

In two very distinct ways the piece has become a process of putting the reverb of one

room into another. 1) According to my reading in Chapter 2, the first stages of the gradual

process involve making one room resonate like another: on the second iteration the doubled-

up reverb makes it sound as if the speaker is in another room. This continues through the

iterations, though at some point a kind of saturation is reached and one loses track of the

distinction between the source of sound (the voice) and the resonance of the room. 2) The

adjustments of equipment are used to emplace living room aesthetics into gallery acoustics.

These aspects of the piece suggest an illusionistic element that has significant implications.

Basing the description and analysis of I am sitting in a room on the modes of intervention

suggests cultural groundings that have not been explored in the literature. In the next section

I will begin to develop two such possibilities relating to Hollywood film sound and modernist

architectural acoustics. Retrospectively, it would seem that the discussion of them should be

in Chapter 2 where I am sitting in a room is given a cultural grounding through developments in

visual art and experimental music. So why displace the discussion to appear here, separated

from my other attempts to culturally position the piece? The justification is that the

connections to Hollywood film sound and modernist architectural acoustics would be

unmotivated and would seem capricious given the understanding of I am sitting in a room that

has existed prior to this Chapter. The cultural groundings for which I argue in Chapter 2 are

still based on the existing literature. Those of the next section are justified only after we come

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to understand the piece through its modes of intervention. For that reason I have delayed

introducing them until after establishing the performance practice of the sound engineers.

The discussion of them that follows is not complete, but points in two of the directions that

might be pursued as we continue to make meaning out of I am sitting in a room.

I am sitting in a room and the Soundscape of Modernity

“the falsest judgments are the most indispensable to us”

Friedrich Nietzsche181

In this section I look at I am sitting in a room through the lens of modernist architectural

acoustics and sound in Hollywood film. These two cultural practices become relevant to the

prehistory of Lucier’s music only through the understanding of the performance practice that

was established earlier in this chapter. It is for this reason that they appear here and not in

Chapter 2 where I dealt with the cultural position of Lucier’s music by drawing upon the

existing literature. Without using the particular contours of the modes of intervention that are

made available through the interviews, the connection between modernist architectural

acoustics and sound in Hollywood film on the one hand and I am sitting in a room on the other

hand would be unmotivated. The former would appear too artificial and too interventionist.

But with a more nuanced understanding of the performance practice of I am sitting in a room,

there is now motivation to reconsider how Lucier’s work is situated within the soundscape of

modernity.

Seen through the lens of its performance practice, I am sitting in a room reproduces, in

181Friedrich Nietzsche, quoted in Thomas Mann, “Nietzsche’s Philosophy in the Light of Recent History,” in
Last Essays, transl. Richard and Clara Winston and Tania and James Stern (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1959),
158.

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the aesthetic context, “not so much a demonstration of a physical fact,” but an engineering

practice fundamental to the soundscape of modernity. The essential character of the

soundscape of modernity, as theorized by Emily Thompson, is the dissociation of sound and

space. Thompson’s work deals not with the sounds of machinery and HVAC systems that

dominate the public street, or the banality of acousmatic listening, but with a new set of

architecturally oriented engineering practices that achieved a new flexibility between the

visual and auditory experience of indoor spaces.

The manipulation of room reverb is central to the creation of the modern interior

sound. This new emphasis on manipulating reverb creates a dissociation of visual and aural

components of architecture that is constitutive of the 20th-century soundscape. I will draw

upon two examples of how room reverb was manipulated in the years leading up to 1970

from Thompson’s The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in

America, 1900-1933 to situate I am sitting in a room in the broader audio culture of the 20th-

century.182 The first example is the reconstruction of the St. Thomas church in 1913 using

specially designed acoustic tiles that allowed for instructive schoolroom acoustics within

magisterial, Gothic-looking visual architecture. The second is the use of reverberation

chambers in conjunction with “mixing” and “dubbing” sound for film and radio production.

Each of these exemplifies an approach to solving, through technological interventions, what

was deemed a reverberation problem. They exemplify the background of cultural concerns

and technological affordances that reappear in I am sitting in a room as it rides waves of

technological change from magnetic tape to live digital audio processing, arriving at a

performance practice where room reverb is both the content of the work and the noise that

needs to be filtered out.

Thompson shows that the modern interior sound “was characterized first and

Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-
182

1933 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004).

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foremost by its lack of reverberation.”183 The motivation for this was two-fold. In the

information theory dialectic of signal vs. noise that was fundamental to 20th-century

engineering, reverb fell into the category of noise and thus was a form of inefficiency to be

eliminated. From an aesthetic perspective, reverb was not something to eliminate, but control

through artificial means. Rather than rely on the acoustic resonance of a given music hall or

theater, films sought venues with as little reverb as possible so that the amount of reverb

heard could be controlled from within the soundtrack of the film. This was important to

maintain intelligibility of speech within the films and also because of the increasing role of

reverb in films to give acoustic cues about the point of audition and both physical and

affective properties of spaces and scenes.

When I first encountered Thompson’s work on the soundscape of modernity, I am

sitting in a room appeared to be a critique of the zero-reverb doctrine she described. Lucier’s

piece required a reverberant room—or so it seemed.184 It was only after re-thinking the piece

through the details of the performance practice that I saw the piece as participating in the re-

articulation of aural and visual spaces that is central to the modernist architectural project

and to the production of sound in Hollywood film. Thus rather than positioning I am sitting in

a room as a critique of the soundscape of modernity, this section builds on the understanding of

the performance practice to describe it as a product of the soundscape of modernity.

St. Thomas Church

One of the first buildings to make a modern re-association of sound and space was the

St. Thomas Church at Fifth Avenue and 53rd St. in Manhattan. A fire in 1913 presented an

opportunity for this well-funded house of worship to reconstruct itself with something like

independently designed auditory and visual spaces. The architects Cram, Goodhue, and

183 Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity, 171.

184 The seeming need for a reverberant space is also expressed in Kelly, Gallery Sound, 63.

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Ferguson introduced the influential acoustical engineer Wallace Clement Sabine to the tile

manufacturer Raphael Guastavino Jr. to specially design acoustic tiles that were highly

absorbent. The collaboration resulted in the Rumford Tile, which could absorb an

unprecedented 29% of sound while still having the appearance of stone. This allowed the

reconstruction of St. Thomas to emplace schoolroom acoustics into a Gothic-looking space.

The visual grandeur could inspire without swamping the sermon in reverb and rendering it

difficult to understand.185

I am sitting in a room thus follows in a modernist tradition of emplacing one acoustic

space into another. Like the St. Thomas architectural project, the live performance practice

of I am sitting in a room aims to tame reverb. Instead of thinking of Lucier’s piece as putting

sound under a microscope—a common metaphor used to valorize 20th-century music—we

might think of it as putting under a microscope the 20th-century preoccupation with

controlling reverb.

The “eerie thought feeling” and Reverb Rooms

The second connection between I am sitting in a room and the soundscape of modernity

is through film and radio sound-mixing. A 1945 article by M. Rettinger of RCA Victor

Division presented to the Technical Conference in Hollywood the benefits and possibilities of

using reverb chambers for “dubbing” or “rerecording” in film sound.186 A reverb room was a

room that was empty except for a microphone and a speaker. It was used to add a layer of

reverb onto speech, music, or sound effects. The recording of dialog for a film could be piped

into the room through the loudspeaker. The microphone would send the signal to be

rerecorded, now with the reverberant fingerprint of the room added to it. According to

Rettinger, whereas the electronic forms of reverb available at the time only reproduced the

185Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity, Chapter 5.

186M. Rettinger, “Reverberation Chambers for Rerecording,” Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers 45/5
(1945): 350-357.

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decay characteristics of room reverberation, the use of reverb rooms could capture the growth

characteristics as well. As with the performance practice of I am sitting in a room, one of the few

interventions that can be made is the adjustment of the distance of the microphone from the

loudspeaker. Given the setting in which the sounds are supposed to occur in the film—a small

room or a large church—the distance between the microphone and the loudspeaker can be

adjusted in order to reproduce the expected level of reverberation.

In 1945, the same year as Rettinger’s report to the conference of sound technicians in

Hollywood, Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound was released. In the film Dr. Constance Peterson

seeks to discover the identity of a murderer, who turns out to be her superior, Dr. Murchison.

In the scene at the end of the film when Dr. Peterson hears Murchison’s voice play back in

her head repeatedly, it sounds as if each time the voice repeats it has more reverb. I conjecture

that the effects mixer recursively played the voice through a reverb room so that, each time

the voice repeats, it has another layer of reverb added to it. That is, the same process was

used in Spellbound as in I am sitting in a room.187 As opposed to the use of the process in Number

and Three Loops, the use in Spellbound produces a quite similar affect to that in I am sitting in a

room, but is not carried out as many times.

The affective aims of the production team remind us of another aspect of I am sitting in

a room that is neglected in the literature. The “re-recording” for the climactic scene described

above was done by James G. Stewart at RKO Studios. According to an inter-office memo of

Selznick Studios, the intention was to give an “eerie thought feeling” rather than a realistic

effect.188 As 20th-century American subjects we are well-conditioned by Hollywood sound

culture in which artificial reverb is often used to give the impression of interiors of the mind,

187 I have not found any documentation of this. Given the searches that I have had a research proxy carry out in
the Selznick papers, David Selznick being the producer of the film, it seems unlikely that documentation exists
there. However, the actual re-recording for that scene was carried out at RKO studios. It is possible that in the
RKO Studios archive at UCLA there would be documentation of how the sound effects of the scene in question
were carried out.
188 Hal Kern, “Inter-Office Communication of Selznick Studios to Mr. Selznick,” 20 October 1945, Selznick

Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin Texas.

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not just interiors of architectural spaces. How much of the conceptual depth that is read into

Lucier’s piece in the literature is contingent on our having been conditioned to associate a

repeating voice doused in reverb with the interior voice, with the voice of thought, with a

voice that reveals the secret to a mystery? So while the piece may seem to put us in touch with

the Deluzian virtual flux of sound (Cox’s reading), it’s ability to do so may be predicated on

our cultural conditioning through sound mixing practices in Hollywood film.189

The theme of the unconscious, which I discussed above in response to Cox’s reading

of I am sitting in a room, is also key to the plot and visual aesthetic of Spellbound. In the film, the

reverb on Murchison’s voice (as remembered by Peterson) creates a sense of delving into the

unconscious of Dr. Peterson in order to recover a memory. Dr. Peterson is a psychiatrist

trying to help a man suffering from amnesia to clear his name of murder. In a crucial scene

he is hypnotized to recover a memory that might reveal who the true murderer is. This leads

to a dream sequence whose set design and costumes are inspired by the work of the iconic

Surrealist, Salvador Dalí. As discussed in Chapter 2, Walter Benjamin has pointed out the

importance of the surrealist photography of Eugène Atget for how his Paris photos revealed

the optical unconscious. I am sitting in a room has been discussed as bringing into the

foreground the often unconscious perception of room reverb. The use of the process in both

the film, which is conjectural, and the music has been understood as revealing an experience

of our unconscious perceptual lives. Lucier makes the connection between exploring the sonic

unconscious, acoustic resonance, and Surrealism explicit in a later piece, The Silver Streetcar of

the Orchestra. This work for amplified solo triangle adapts its name from Luis Buñuel’s

surrealist text Orchestration (1922) in which he gives a brief description of each instrument in

the orchestra. The triangle is described as “A silver streetcar through the orchestra.”190 In

Lucier’s piece, the performer uses a gradually varying ostinato to explore the acoustic

Cox, “Sound Art and the Sonic Unconscious.”

189

Luis Buñuel, An Unspeakable Betrayal: Selected Writings of Luis Buñuel, transl. Garrett White, (Berkeley, Cal.:
190

University of California Press, 2002), 8.

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resonances of the folded metal bar.

What these connections to film sound and modernist architectural practices do is to

resituate I am sitting in a room, and Lucier’s music more generally, within the broader auditory

culture of the 20th century. Whereas his music is often described as both highly unique and

universal, we should instead understand it as a personal deformation of existing practices

within the soundscape of modernity. The mode of intervention is not just situated in a

performance practice but in a listening practice that is built upon the popular culture of

Hollywood films.

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 Chapter 4. Conclusion

From Acoustic Resonance to the Modes of Intervention

This project began with the aim of studying experimental music in which acoustic

resonance was a central theme. When proposing it to my adviser, committee, and colleagues,

I was repeatedly faced with the question, why are these pieces of music about acoustic

resonance more than any other piece of music? After all, every sounding piece of music

involves acoustic resonance. It became clear that it was necessary to trace the strategies used by

composers, performers, recording engineers, critics, and scholars that would shift acoustic

resonance from playing the role of the ground upon which music is built to a theme of

particular compositions. That is, I needed to pay attention, not just to the material conditions

that allow for certain types of acoustic resonance, but to how these pieces were mediated by

existing musical traditions and theoretical discourses.

The issue of mediation barely appears in the literature on Lucier’s music. In Chapter

2 I argued that this absence is a result of the emphasis on non-intervention. Rather than

throwing critical attention onto an analysis of the media through which Lucier did not

intervene, the literature has tended to position Lucier as something like a 19th-century spirit

medium who could channel the vibrations of pure sound or pure idea. I exaggerate, but not

without implicating myself. As a concertgoer I have often felt like I was hearing ghosts at

performances of Lucier’s music. This led me to investigate the performance practices that

underpinned such conjuring tricks.

Thus I sought a theoretical framework that could be used to address both the physical

mediation as well as the cultural mediation. Through my critique of the literature, and in

particular the literature’s recourse to the language of experimental science, arose the idea of

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focusing on the modes of intervention of each piece as a basis for theorizing Lucier’s music. I

developed this through the example of I am sitting in a room.

In the case of I am sitting in a room, this involved two stages. The first stage, carried out

in Chapter 2, was to develop a critique of the stance that I am sitting in a room was, in some

sense, natural or universal. My argument shifts the task of the scholar from that of deriving

meaning from the piece as if it were in itself a natural process, to delineating the particular

forms of mediation involved in the production of the music. This leads to the second stage,

which was carried out in Chapter 3. The form of mediation was made legible by

documenting the open secret of the performance practice. This renders certain interpretations

of the piece in the literature problematic. More importantly, it results in a different set of

cultural articulations. Whereas Chapter 2 critiqued the claims of naturalness, the aim of

Chapter 3 is to accept that such claims are made and to reconstruct some of the cultural

conditions that both motivated such claims and made them tenable.

Given the understanding of the performance practice established in Chapter 3, it is

reasonable to say that through impediments, I am sitting in a room forces acoustic resonances

into unusual states. The performance practice since 2000 involves an approach to sound in

which the visual and auditory spaces are dissociated: living room aesthetics are emplaced in

gallery acoustics. This parallels the interventions made in modernist architectural acoustics

and that accrue meaning through the cultural conditioning of Hollywood sound practices. As

layers of reverb accumulate we sink into the recesses of the mind of the “internal auditor.”

The “internal auditor” is the term Rick Altman uses to describe the point of audition in film.

He continues, “We are not asked to hear, but to identify with someone who will hear for

us.”191 Since 2000, Lucier has proved to be a compelling stage presence whose performance

191Rick Altman, “Sound Space,” in Sound Theory, Sound Practice, ed. Rick Altman (New York: Routledge, 1992),
60.

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style has turned him into our internal auditor.192

The theater of Lucier’s performance practice—whether his speech or his bodily affect

onstage—has succeeded in its attempt to be neglected, so that, at least as evidenced by the

literature, we identify with him as a transparent, if expert, listener. But by focusing on the

modes of intervention we find that, rather than removing the compositional gesture to reveal

sound itself, the piece shifts the scale of the compositional gesture to the level of room

selection, microphone placement, and it uses an exaggeration of film-sound technique whose

meaning was secure a quarter century before Lucier hit record on a Nagra tape deck in

Middletown, CT.

Further Possibilities

What are the possible benefits of studying other experimental music through the

modes of intervention? This cannot be answered in specific terms about the cultural

knowledge that might be gained. But, having worked through an extended example, it is now

possible to say more clearly what kind of knowledge might be gained and for which kinds of

pieces the approach can be useful.

As laid out in the Introduction, approaching the study of a piece of music through the

modes of intervention should be productive when the composer has attempted to derive

compositional choices from the material conditions on which the music is predicated and

when the piece has been valued aesthetically for its ability to make the material conditions

sensible. These attempts will always fail to achieve the sought after directness. There will

192 Within the study of Lucier’s music, it is surprising that no one has pursued the connection to film. From at
least the interviews in Chambers, Lucier has commonly referred to his experience of acting in the Dr. Chicago
films as a significant influence. I have often heard people comment on the importance of Lucier’s on-stage
persona to the success of his pieces. There may be much to learn about Lucier’s on-stage persona by studying his
film acting. Similarly, there may be something to learn about Lucier’s style by investigating his work in the
theater. Before his experimental turn in the 1960s, he wrote music for the professional theater. Some
documentation of this exists in the Alvin Lucier Papers.

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always be a seam separating the material conditions and the compositional choices. But that

is not a problem for the scholar; it becomes the object of study. By approaching the music

through the modes of intervention the scholar is made sensitive to the failures of directness.

One should always eventually discover that the compositional decisions are stitched to the

material conditions through a cultural rubric. In addition, the ability to make the material

conditions sensible to the listener is predicated on the status of certain objects and processes as

icons that already signify particular material conditions prior to our opportunity to sense

them within the music in question. The microphone is transparent to the sound it detects. The sine wave

is fundamental or pure. A voice with the right reverb is the internal voice of thought. Thus, the process of

composing this kind of music and reflecting upon it precipitates out the cultural assumptions

that had been accepted as natural assumptions, or as inevitable states of affairs. Investigating

the modes of intervention helps the scholar to understand how ideas of the natural and the

universal are the result of congealed histories.

The attitude cultivated by investigating music through the modes of intervention is

that it is only by experiencing a piece of music through a great variety of its instantiations can

one begin to understand which are the key concepts. This attitude is in stark contrast to those

taken by Kim-Cohen and Lehmann. They worry that the aesthetic experience of music is in

danger of either overwhelming or underwhelming the concept. In contrast, I claim that

concepts can only take on fundamental status in experimental music after one has divided out

by the multiplicity of the variation made possible through the forms of mediation. And one

must first get a handle on that multiplicity before one knows by what to divide. A single

recording or a single performance is insufficient if the aesthetic is based upon the modes of

intervention.

When I asked James Fei if he had a favorite space for performing I am sitting in a room,

he replied:

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 I don’t know. I haven’t thought of the piece as desiring…the right location. For me it’s
also having performed this piece…so many times in different venues. I guess what I’m
interested in is…the difference and adapting to a new space rather than having an
idealized space and performance in mind. …I’m more interested in seeing what a new
space does, or a different performance, or a different set up in a particular space, than
having favorites.193

Fei reminds us that experimental music is conceived as a practice that invites variation.

Whatever types of perfection experimental music might seek, those types do not

inhere in the particular sequence of sounds. They will not even inhere in a particular concept

associated with a piece if, as is the case with I am sitting in a room, the performance practice of

the piece is allowed to adapt to technological and cultural developments. As Collins pointed

out, it is not just that new digital technologies became available, it is that a new generation of

experimental musicians desired the piece to be performed live. As long as pieces of

experimental music are pulled through technological and cultural change, paying attention to

the modes of intervention can play a productive role in our understanding of the music.

193 James Fei, interview with the author, 20 December 2017.

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