Alvin Lucier: Sounds unheard

Kate Molleson and Gillian Moore present BBC Radio 3's series exploring the pivotal 'modern' musical works of the 20th century, the groundbreaking composers who created them, and the radical cultural and artistic movements which gave rise to them. In this episode, Kate explores the experimental sound environments of Alvin Lucier. Born in 1931, Lucier blurred the lines between music, sound, science and life in his role as a professor of music at Wesleyan University in Connecticut.

We’ll throw ourselves into Lucier's immersive musical world, traversing heavy avant-garde experiences of Europe to discover an artist experimenting with electrical walks and pondering the phenomenon of physical sound. At the heart of the programme is Lucier’s iconic 1969 work “I am Sitting in a Room”, in which the composer speaks a text into a microphone, repeating the same paragraph 32 times: "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..."

Produced by Sam Phillips
A Reduced Listening production for BBC Radio 3

To listen on most smart speakers just say, “ask BBC Sounds to play 20th Century Radicals”

This episode features an extract from an interview with Alvin Lucier recorded for Stuart Maconie's Freak Zone in 2013. For more playlists from creators of underground and experimental music search for Freak Zone Playlist in BBC Sounds.