You heard the news of Alvin Lucier’s passing and you immediately thought of your dad.
One of the last birthdays your dad celebrated, you gifted him two of Lucier’s CDs and a book of Lucier’s essays. You thought it was his final birthday, but looking back over your email and finding the Amazon order (registering how now you no longer use Amazon), you realized it was his penultimate birthday. This means he may have listened to and read them – the CDs and books by Lucier -, and that makes you happy, especially today.
After he died – your dad, not Lucier -, you remember finding the copy of the I Am Sitting in a Room CD in his apartment and listening to it in the car with your step-mum – from start to finish. You had played the same work to students in your classes and you appreciated the different resonance of the space of the lecture-hall and the car, heavy with fresh grief.
These memories haunt you today, now knowing that he – Lucier – is gone too.
Speaking of haunting, as a ghost of your library, I am particularly attuned to the sounds that I experience from within your shelves. The shuffling of pages, the striking of a match, the beep of an email, and most prominently, your sighs as you work, think and go about your day. Right now you turn the pages of the book I chose for this occasion,- the revised, 2021 edition of Alvin Lucier: Reflections: Interviews – Scores – Writings published by MusikTexte.
You turn first to Lucier’s writings In Memoriam… for David Tudor (1926-1996), Robert Ashley (1930-2014), Reinhard Oehlschlägel (1936-2014) and Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016), the latter you first read on the documenta 14 website and which begins in the same State you sit now:
I first met Pauline Oliveros in 1965 in Cleveland, Ohio.
Flipping to the back of the book, you read the liner notes to one of the CDs you gave to your dad Orpheus Variations, written for cellist Charles Curtis in 2015, and you are reminded by the ghost that appears in its first line:
For several decades I have been haunted by a particular sonority in the first movement of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet score, Orpheus.
The last gift you gave to you dad, was not that of Lucier’s words or music, but a signed CD of George Winston’s Winter. He – your dad, not Winston – wrote to you in an email – one of the last emails he would send to you – the following words:
Fantastic story about George Winston I m a great fan. Got the sheet music but he has a wide span at least a 13th. Too difficult Thanks xxxx
You brought all of Lucier’s music you own – on vinyl and CD – to your campus office to take a photo for this post today. You imagined a photo like several others from this sequence of daily posts for the Our Library of the Future: A Ghost’s Story project, one in which books and other objects are piled up, overlapping and displayed in suggestive ways. But you feel like this memorial – of Lucier and your dad – needs to be quieter. So you turn back to Reflections and select one of Lucier’s drawings (with the text of his words seeping through from the other side of the page, like a siren through a closed car window). You take out your phone, and before the ‘click’ you suddenly remember that on your phone you have a recording of your dad speaking during his last weeks.
You listen to it.
You sit with it.
Then you take the photo and place it here.
