On October 2–7, Moscow hosted Everything Is Real, an international retrospective festival dedicated to Alvin Lucier, a legendary American composer and a pioneer of experimental music and sound art.

Alvin Lucier (born in 1931) has pioneered in many areas of music composition, performance, and sound installation. Following John Cage's concept of "sound acting", Alvin Lucier's work examines the acoustics of space, physical properties of sound, trajectory of its movement, psychology and physiology of its perception. His compositions sonify physical and biological phenomena, and unlock their unique aesthetic potential.

For the first time in Russia, Alvin Lucier will perform personally some of his legendary piecesthat have become the first examples of sound art in the history of music: I Am Sitting in a Room for voice and electro-acoustic tape, Music for Solo Performer for a performer of amplified brain waves and percussion, and Bird and Person Dyning for a performer with binaural microphones, loudspeakers and electronic sounds.

The festival will feature several Russian premieres and a world premiere of Lucier's work Sicklewritten exclusively for the festival Everything Is Real.

Along with Lucier's performance, the festival will feature works written by composers of the New York School: String Quartet in Four Parts by John Cage, Structures for String Quartet by Morton Feldman, and Arbor Vitae by James Tenney.

The festival will take place in Moscow's major cultural centers, including Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow International House of Music, Theater of Nations' New Space, and Electrotheater Stanislavsky.

The musical program will run in parallel with meet-the-artist sessions with Alvin Lucier, a master class for composers, a set of lectures, and a portrait documentary entitled No Ideas but in Things: The Composer Alvin Lucier.

The composer's closest colleagues will take part in the festival as performers: Hauck Harder(Germany), an experimental physicist and composer, a technical assistant and director of the documentary about Lucier, and Trevor Saint (USA), the first performer of Ricochet Lady for solo acoustic glockenspiel. Other performers will be leading Russian contemporary music bands, including Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble, Studio for New Music quartet, and Questa Musica, and soloists Mikhail Dubov (piano), Ivan Bushuev (flute, sound design), Olesya Rostovskaya (theremin), Vladimir Gorlinsky, Arman Gushchian, Sasha Yelina, Alexey Sysoev, Kirill Shirokov (performance), and Alexander Khubeev (sound design).

The concert at Electrotheater Stanislavsky will be accompanied by optical and video installations created by Andrey Topunov (October 7).

The festival is organized by the Trajectory of Music cultural platform in partnership with the Moscow State Conservatory, Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow International House of Music, Theater of Nations' New Space and Electrotheater Stanislavsky, and supported by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation.

Arman Gushchyan is an artistic director of the festival.

Alvin Lucier is one of the most innovative composers of the second half of the 20th century, who, along with New York School composers John Cage and David Tudor, La Monte Young, and his colleagues from the Sonic Arts Union, Robert Ashley, David Behrman and Gordon Mumma, has been a father of experimental aesthetics in acoustic and electro-acoustic music in the 1950–1970s. Following John Cage's concept of "sound acting", Alvin Lucier abandoned the tradition of referring to the history of music and relying on musical tradition, and focused his efforts on a new area – a study of the physical properties of sound – moving towards the phenomenology of sound. He put all his musical experience into studying the phenomenon of sound, letting us feel it physically and poetically and making listeners and himself as a composer analyze, watch and discover something new in its nature. For Lucier and Cage, sound ceased to be a carrier of composer's ideas, feelings, or forms or expressions. But while Cage continued to view sound as an independent phenomenon and an object of aesthetic pleasure for the listener, Lucier made sound a subject of consistent research, which revealed different aspects of this unique phenomenon in his compositions.

The significance of Alvin Lucier festival EVERYTHING IS REAL is not only that Russian listeners will have a chance to hear live the music by a living legend and a pioneer of experimental music and sound art, but also that after listening to Lucier's compositions people will perceive the surrounding sounds and music of other composers in a completely different way. Lucier's creativity is a space where people discover unbelievable and previously unknown quality, depth and beauty of sound.

They will hear themselves hearing. In his 86 years, Alvin Lucier is one of the most respected composers in the world. However, only a few in Russia know his compositions. For the first time in Russia, famous compositions will be performed by the composer himself and the best Russian musicians from new music bands. At the request of the Trajectory of Music cultural platform, Lucier wrote a new composition for the Moscow festival. Called Sickle, it is written for solo theremin with a digital delay system and five instrumentalists.

For me personally, Lucier's music is significant for opening us a new – phenomenological – way of listening, which combines purity and soberness of mind with a deep perception of physical reality and related experience of knowing. What appeals to me is the distance to the listener's mind that is only disturbed by its content born by personal experience of contacting live sound. Everything is real, both objectivity of the physical world and subjectivity of our perception.

Arman Gushchian

Artistic Director
Everything Is Real festival