“I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now.”

1.

One day in 1969 — let us say, wishfully, that it is also early evening in the middle of January — Alvin Lucier steps into the Slosberg Music Center at Brandeis University, a chunk of glass‐and‐brick modernism designed by the same architects responsible for Avery Fischer Hall and its famously imperfect acoustics.

In the chambers of the Center’s Electro‐Acoustic Music Studio, Lucier recites and records a monologue of barely one hundred words, the text of which is now well known to us. He speaks deliberately, although his stutter is apparent on several words – “resonant,” “rhythm,” “reinforce,” “activity” and “smooth” – and upon reaching the final syllable of his monologue – “have” – Lucier stops the tape, rewinds it, and plays it back into the room. He makes a new recording, and repeats the process, “again and again.”

As the work plays out, Lucier’s voice declines, becomes ever more frail. The room’s resonant frequencies (what one initially recognizes as a “whistling” sound) are increasingly evident with the enunciation of each syllable. The frequencies build upon replay, thickening into a series of near‐palpable sonic forms, and the semblance of speech is lost – transformed beyond recognition by the room.

2.

It is mere and negligible accident that we present Architectures of Sound on the belated quad‐decennial of that first recording of “I Am Sitting In a Room.” No matter its date, this program could not avoid mention of Lucier’s work, which anticipates so many of the concerns that we hope to address.

Music today, “contemporary music” – the music of a new millennium! – is, of course, separated from “I am sitting in a room” by forty years, as well as by a cascade of paradigm shifts, both technical and theoretical. However, among the few vestiges of the pre‐digital, pre‐virtual past is that we are still sitting in rooms, writing and rehearsing and recording and performing music amidst architectural space. The implications of “I am sitting in a room” should haunt musicians and sonicians until the unimaginable juncture at which sound is utterly divorced from physical space.

3.

The site of performance is always performing. Every room bears a sonic signature – characteristic resonant frequencies that result from its design, from its shape and size, from its physical matter and mode of construction. These frequencies emphasize and de‐emphasize aspects of any sound produced within.

When Lucier states that he is “sitting in a room distinct from the one you are in now,” he is acknowledging the radical specificity of his and any site. Addressing an anonymous audience, he does not merely distinguish between his room and yours, so much as between his room and all other rooms.

The near‐limitless variation of architectural space mocks belief in the pure agency of a musical performer. However the performer acts, whatever the performer’s own design, received sound is always at the mercy of architecture. Lucier’s speech is eventually “destroyed” by the very form of the Electric‐Acoustic Music Studio; and while this is the result of so many repetitions, the process of destruction is initiated as Lucier’s first syllables slip into an unpredictable material world.

But let us not be pessimistic about the invariable ruination of our ideal sounds, about the violation of our constant rehearsals and best intentions. It appears, at least, that Lucier was not. “I regard this activity,” he ends, “as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.” As the recording reaches its latter half, Lucier’s stutter is indeed smoothed: the jerky stammers of “resonant,” “rhythm,” and “reinforce” deteriorate into shapes more fluid and viscous.

Lucier has enlisted architecture as his ally. An agreement of sorts is reached between the tendencies of architectural space and Lucier’s own desires to be himself remade, and by the close of “I am sitting in a room” we hear the dissolution of each into the other. Is this hybrid not more interesting than our prevailing model: the romantic artist who battles a profane and material world in order to realize platonic forms?

We thus ask: How can composers and performers reconsider their relationship to our ineluctably architectural lives? Can music avail itself of the diversity of the material world?

Architectures of Sound presents six investigations into the uncanny convergence of sound and space. In January 2010, artists Casey Anderson, Douglas Barrett, Anthony Ptak, Charles Stankievich, Jacob Sudol, and Michael Winter will develop site‐specific works for Brooklyn’s ISSUE Project Room – among them computer algorithms tuned to architectural characteristics, human transcriptions of the built environment, and a rethinking of Lucier’s iterative process. It assembles performances that collapse the distinction between a performance and its site – performances that forgo “music” as such to make architecture audible.

4.

Architecture and music have long been addressed as the most distant of artistic relatives. Tradition holds that architecture is thoroughly material, and music fully disembodied, that the former is merely functional and the latter metaphysical – “never the twain shall meet.” This is an intuitive distinction; it is also arbitrary and false.

We occupy a world of monsters – of so many strange pairings of human and nonhuman actors – whose ubiquity renders that purification farcical. The performer is among them: a musician cannot but join in unwitting concert with the architectural environment.

Architectures of Sound explores how musicians and composers might do so wittingly – how they might consciously engage their site of production.

No sound without space! No music without materiality!

Cameron Hu and David Kant, curators