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| Brain Concert Kaspars Groševs, Artist Alvin Lucier - Music for solo performer (1965) David Rosenboom - Invisible Gold (Pogus, 2001) | |
| Alvin Lucier - Music for solo performer (1965) This time our musical story dates back to the 1960s, and to spare you a listing of all the heroic musical deeds of this prolific decade, I have resolved to go back to the foundations, namely, the human head and its contents. John Cage arrived at the idea of a silent piece (4'33") in the late 1940s at Harvard University, when visiting an anechoic chamber which absorbs every sound and has no acoustic. Instead of hearing absolute silence, the composer heard his nervous system and his blood circulating. It was this experience that made him realise that absolute silence - defined as a total absence of sound - is not possible. In the early 1960s, the young composer Alvin Lucier decided to utilise his nervous system in order to create the musical installation Music for solo performer. During the performance, electrodes attached to Lucier's scalp detected his alpha brainwaves. Through amplifiers, these were transmitted to special loudspeakers which were located in such a way that they made various percussion instruments placed in the room resonate. The process of the "interpretation" of brainwaves starts when the performer closes his eyes. This sound installation was never recorded on CD; however, it has been immortalised on video. In 1975, the composer Richard Ashley made a cycle of seven two-hour films Music with Roots in the Aether about his comrades-in-arms in the field of contemporary music, including Philip Glass, Terry Riley and also Alvin Lucier. The first hour of each episode features a discussion between both composers, staged as a picturesque "landscape", followed by the sound installations Music for a solo performer and Bird and person dyning (in this piece Lucier, wearing binaural microphones, is extremely slowly searching for a hidden electronic toy bird, creating by each of his moves an interaction of sound and altering its character). It is possible to view this film on the website www.ubu.com/film/lucier.html. DVD versions of the complete film cycle are available at www.cdemusic.org | |
 Still from 'The Secret Life of Plants', 1979 | |
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David Rosenboom - Invisible Gold (Pogus, 2001) In his creative activities David Rosenboom has always attached great importance to spontaneity and improvisation, and in On Being Invisible, a work created in late 1970s, he develops the idea about the role of brainwaves in the creation of a musical piece. According to the author, a piece of music is "a selforganising, dynamic system rather than a fixed musical composition", in which computer software Rosenboom has created generates and develops musical forms through the performer's subjective perception of sound. A kind of a circuit is created: the software reads off and processes Rosenboom's perception of sonic constructions which he himself has produced. The character of the composition changes if the performer reacts to the course of events with unexpected brain activity. The composer describes this process as "becoming invisible" - balancing on the borderline between becoming submerged in a process larger than himself and being the initiator of an action. This CD also includes the piece Portable Gold and Philosopher's Stones, in which the brain signals generated by four performers connected to a computer and a synthesizer create a meditative sound landscape. In comparison, Lucier's work seems more homogeneous, with its deeply resonant brain signals in agreeable interplay with the spatial rumbling of percussion instruments, whereas Rosenboom's improvisations seem interminable and could go on forever, without beginning or end. At times, the intensive multi-layered sonic constructions are reminiscent of the earliest experiments with electronic music. Some pieces, however, and On the Invisible II in particular, are extremely intriguing with their fusion of contrasting signals and noises, at the same time without overdoing the intensity. The CDs and MP3 are available at http://www.pogus.com/21022.html /Translator into English: Sarmīte Lietuviete/ | |
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