Reflections on the Arp 2600 and Alvin Lucier
Before we get into Anthony’s presentation at NAMM 2024, I wanted to give a bit of insight about why what he did had such a personal impact on me. I learned synthesis on an Arp 2600!
I started college at Wesleyan University in 1970, the same year that Alvin Lucier , the well respected electronic music composer started teaching there. John Cage had been at Wesleyan only a few years before.
Wesleyan was (and still is) a great, small liberal arts school.
I was studying Jazz with Clifford Thorton, who was in Sun Ra’s Arkestra and Sam Rivers, who had played with Miles.
Wesleyan has an amazing world music program and I was also studying African Drumming with Abraham Konbena Adzenyah, who was both an Associate Professor and simultaneously studying for his GED High School diploma. I would occasionally jam with L. Shankar, the Indian violinist.
John McLaughlin was studying Vina at Wesleyan in the fall of 1970 and used the Wesleyan cafeteria to rehearse his new band , The Mahavishnu Orchestra. For several weeks in a row, I would hang out after lunch and listen for free as Billy Cobham, Jerry Goodman, Jan Hammer, Rick Laird, and McLaughlin rehearsed. McLaughlin and L Shankar would team up later in Shakti.
To say the music scene at Wesleyan at the time was eclectic is an incredible understatement.
Anyway, back to Alvin Lucier. I didn’t know what to expect when I showed up in early September, 1970 for that first class in Electronic Music 101, but it was more surprising then anything I could have imagined. Alvin Lucier introduced himself and it sounded like this. Ma, ma, ma ,ma My,… na, na na, na, name… is Alvin …La, la, lucier and I will ……ba,ba, ba Be your …..Tea, tea, teacher. At that time, Lucier had a horrific stutter and he had just the year before written his signature work ” I Am Sitting In A Room”.
The text spoken by Lucier describes the process of the work, concluding with a reference to his own stuttering:
I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.
Alvin Lucier
in October of 1970, I went to a performance of I Am Sitting In A Room at the Wesleyan coffee house. Musicologists often fail to mention Lucier’s stutter, but to me it was the essence of the piece. Lucier sat in middle of the coffee house with a microphone, two tape recorders and speakers positioned around the small room in quad. He started repeating the text of the piece over and over again, with each consonant causing him to stutter.
It was uncomfortable to listen to and watch. But the repetitive stutter was being fed back into the room and doubled by two tape recorders which were slightly out of sync. This created an amazing cascade of stuttered rhythms.
Then after about 10 minutes, Lucier hit a switch and the sound from the speakers stopped. What happened next was magical. He then said perfectly clearly and without any stutter “I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now.” He then repeated that single phrase and with each repetition, his stutter started to come back.
Then he kicked in the speakers and the whole process started over again. He repeated that process three times over the course of about 40 minutes. You watched in real time as someone with a serious speech impediment used electronic art to fix it, but it couldn’t last, he would always fall back into the halting , uncomfortable pattern of stuttering.
It was both powerful and heartbreaking and one of the most courageous pieces of art I have ever witnessed.
At the Wesleyan Electronic Music Studio, I learned synthesis on two Arp 2600 and an Arp 2500 Sequencer set up in Quad. Students in Electronic Music classes could get the keys to the studio and I spent many nights in my 4 years at Wesleyan creating sounds until the wee hours of morning and then tearing them apart and starting over from scratch to make a new patch. It was there working with the Arp 2600 that I learned the sheer joy of making sounds with synthesizers.
Anthony’s passion for teaching synthesis brought all of that joy back.
The Lifetime Achievement Awards at April NAMM 2023
At the April NAMM show we gave out MIDI Association LifeTime Achievement Awards to the founding fathers of modern synthesise and music production including Alan Pearlman from ARP.
So when Dina Pearlman who runs the Arp Foundation and received the award in 2023 on her father’s behalf came to us at NAMM 2024 and asked for a favor, we couldn’t say no.
She had scheduled a performance by Anthony for the Arp Foundation booth which was only a 5 by 10 booth against the wall at the front of Hall A. We had a much larger booth and headphones for 50 guests.
So even though we had 23 sessions arranged already, we had to say yes and boy are we glad we did!
If you don’t know who Anthony is, he was one of the main people who brought synthesizers to Hollywood.
He was heavily involved with the Synclavier and its development and he and his partner, Brian Banks had notable credits on some of the first films to almost exclusively use synths including: WarGames (1984), Starman (1984), The Color Purple (1985), Stand by Me (1985), Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987), Young Guns (1988) and Internal Affairs (1990).
Here is a 1979 poster promoting the Synner’s (that’s Anthony and his partner at the time Brian Banks) performances of classical pieces at LA County Museum of Natural History.
Anthony has also been the synthesist on many amazing records including Micheal Jackson’s Thriller (produced by Quincy Jones). There isa link at the bottom of the article to his Youtube page which has a bunch of great videos including his presentation at NAMM 2024 where he invited young people on stage and taught them how to get cool sounds out of the Arp 2600 in a matter of minutes.
His passion for synthesis brought back college memories of discovering the joys of analog modular synths for the first time guided by Alvin Lucier.