The music of composer
Alvin Lucier, who taught for many years at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, brings together the sheer experimentalism of
John Cage with the sonic innovations of his teacher
Luigi Nono.
Lucier writes both acoustic and electronic music, and often a mixture of both in which the two spheres touch and affect each other. Music for Piano XL was composed in 1992 as a 15-minute work, but in 2020, it appeared in a revised version more than an hour long, with
Lucier seeming as vital as ever as he approached his tenth decade. The work combines a piano with the slow sweep pure wave oscillators that have appeared in
Lucier's other works, and the oscillators produce sounds that alter the listener's perception of the piano. The piano, pianist
Nicolas Horvath assures us, was tuned just before the live recording, but over the composition's long duration, it seems to emit pitches in quite a variety of relationships to the actual tone being sounded, which may cause it to sound out of tune. The composition proceeds at a single slow tempo for its entire length, and the basic structure remains unchanged, with
Horvath striking a single note and the wave oscillators going to work on it. Certainly, this release will appeal primarily to listeners oriented toward experimental music, but anyone capable of approaching it with an open, meditative frame of mind may get something out of it. Arguably, the work succeeds better in its longer form, where the listener may be drawn more deeply into
Lucier's unique sound world. For anyone with an interest in contemporary music, it will be noteworthy that
Lucier's discoveries, many of them made more than half a century ago, have not yet been fully explored. ~ James Manheim