Alvin Lucier, Maze

*2024 stock* The openness of Lucier's instructions belie the difficulty in dealing with the idea of how one can translate a sound from one medium into another and what kind of transformation of information takes place in that exchange. While interpreting this work, a musician becomes intensely aware of the processes by which one listens, both consciously and subconsciously; how one is constantly decoding sounds in one’s environment, filtering out essential and non-essential information, discerning patterns and imposing an emotional reading on them.

 

The work also brings up performative issues; since the musicians are interpreting their individual ‘memory spaces’ collectively in the same concert space, how do these overlapping spaces relate to one another? What is being communicated? Clearly the musicians and the audience have a different perspective on the outcome of the performance; the musicians have half an ear to the source material being played on the headphones and half an ear on the shared sonic result. This was one of the reasons we chose to present the piece in this version on CD, where as a listener you are guided through both the collective musical space and into individual memory spaces of the musicians’ recordings in a constantly shifting perspective.

 

The material in this form encourages awareness of one’s own listening space, whether it is performed live in a concert hall or another public space or whether one is listening to a recording of it at home, where the unique set of environmental sounds outside the window find their way into the collective musical space.