When I was a teenager growing up in Brooklyn in the early 1980s, on Saturday nights, a pirate radio station would sometimes elbow its way to the fore, past the college stations in the lower FM band. One piece I very clearly recall being introduced to on one of these illegal broadcasts was “Music on a Long Thin Wire,” by Alvin Lucier.
Lucier’s curious acoustical installation was originally set up in a shopping mall in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1979 and broadcast for five uninterrupted days and nights on PBS station KUNM. The “score” consisted simply of a very long piano wire (in some installations as long as 80 feet) clamped by magnets at both ends to tables and driven by a sine wave oscillator. Variations in ambient temperatures, room vibrations, humidity and (who knows what) quantum ephemera would cause the wire’s sound to slowly drift and change over time. Aside from setting up the wire and switching it on, there were no performers per se, so experiencing the piece “live” was difficult by definition.
As Lucier started “composing” (if you want to call it that) such work in the mid 1960s, you could probably include him in that subgroup of the early John Cage-influenced minimalists who, like Steven Reich (with his mind-blowing phase-shifting tape manipulation “Come Out”), were rejecting European traditions about how music should be made, and through what means. Unlike Reich or Glass, however, Lucier never made a transition back into more conventional performance-based music, but indeed kept going deeper and deeper into more formidable and abstract sonic territories. That’s why it’s hard to find any Alvin Lucier “fans,” as only someone with access to a private jet could ever have seen more than a handful of his distinctive installation compositions.
Lucier described the piece as “an interest in the poetry of what we used to think of as science.”:
“I always thought that the world was divided into two kinds of people, poets and practical people, and that while the practical people ran the world, poets had visions about it…. Now I realize that there is no difference between science and art.”
You have to admit that if you ran across something like this you’d stand there with mouth agape, simply amazed that someone decided to put something like this together (Kinda similar to encountering a Richard Serra sculpture in real life). YouTube was obviously invented for the express purpose of allowing you to get a sense of “Music on a Long Thin Wire” as it looks and sounds in real life. “Like” it or not, it’s undeniably ambitious and impressive.
