Published
In Memoriam Alvin Lucier
This album is not just a homage — it’s a gentle act of remembrance. A way of tuning in to what Lucier showed us: that listening is an art in itself. A meditation on resonance, memory, and the quiet power of pure sound. Or to quote Alvin Lucier himself: “I guess I’m trying to help people hold shells up to their ears, and listen to the ocean again.”
No composer has ever matched Alvin Lucier’s ability to demonstrate the peculiar physics of sound in terms of transparency, elegance, and directness. Many of the pieces he wrote tickle the ears while triggering our minds, and few achieve this more than the pair of works for clarinet and sine waves featured on this stunning album by clarinetist Dries Tack of Ensemble Nadar. Lucier wrote ”In Memoriam John Higgins” in 1984, with a slowly ascending sine wave glissando interrupted by a series of 16 different clarinet long tones which produce extravagant beating patterns that seem to move all around the listening space, while less obvious difference tones wreak fantastical sleight-of-sonic-hand with our ears. Ten years later, he composed “In Memoriam Stuart Marshall,” flipping the script by deploying a fixed sine wave while a bass clarinet moves around it while illustrating the same phenomenon. The bass clarinet and pitch choices are lower, producing a more measured, statelier vibe; but there’s no missing the remarkable collisions that occur across the whole piece.