Everything Is Real: Alvin Lucier Retrospective

From October 2 to 7, Moscow hosted the international retrospective festival Everything Is Real, dedicated to the work of the legendary American composer, one of the pioneers of experimental music and sound art.

Alvin Lucier (1931–2021) was a trailblazer in many areas of musical composition, performance, and sound installation. Continuing John Cage's poetics of observing "sounds acting," Alvin Lucier examines in his art the acoustics of spaces, the physical nature of sound, the trajectory of its movement, and the psychology and physiology of its perception; he sonifies physical and biological phenomena, revealing their unique aesthetic potential.

For the first time in Russia, Alvin Lucier personally performed his legendary performance pieces, which became some of the first examples of sound art in the history of music: I Am Sitting in a Room for voice and electromagnetic 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.

As part of the festival, several Russian premieres took place, as well as the world premiere of Lucier's work Sickle, written specifically for the festival Everything Is Real.

Besides the works of Lucier himself, the festival program included compositions by composers of the New York School: String Quartet in Four Parts by John Cage, the Russian premiere of Structures by Morton Feldman, and Arbor Vitae by James Tenney.

The festival concerts took place at Moscow's leading cultural venues: the Multimedia Art Museum, the Moscow International House of Music, the New Space of the Theater of Nations, and the Stanislavsky Electrotheater.

Parallel to the musical program, there were creative meetings with Alvin Lucier, a master class for composers, a lecture series, and a screening of the documentary film-portrait of the composer, No Ideas but in Things.

The composer's closest colleagues took part in the festival as performers: experimental physicist and composer, technical assistant, and author of the documentary film about Lucier, Hauke Harder (Germany); and the first performer of the piece Ricochet Lady for solo glockenspiel, Trevor Saint (USA). Leading Russian contemporary music ensembles also performed: the Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble, the Studio for New Music Quartet, soloists of the ensemble Questa Musica, and soloists Mikhail Dubov (piano), Ivan Bushuev (flute, sound design), Olesya Rostovskaya (theremin), as well as Vladimir Gorlinsky, Arman Gushchyan, Sasha Yelina, Alexey Sysoev, Kirill Shirokov (performance), and Alexander Khubeev (sound design).

The concert at the Stanislavsky Electrotheater was accompanied by optical and video installations by Andrey Topunov (October 7).

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

Artistic Director of the festival: Arman Gushchyan

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 Gushchyan

Artistic Director
Everything Is Real festival