although for the sake of some change you could let the players vary the pitches a little by putting their hands in the shells, the way French horn players lower and raise the pitches of their horns. I remember that two of the shells that I bought were almost an octave apart but not quite, so they were slightly out of tune and produced beautiful beats, and I was perfectly delighted to let the chords or simultaneities that the shells produced when played together depend on the pitches of the shells themselves and not on anything I did. I thought of asking the players to spin slowly so that the sounds from the openings of the shells would be beamed out in different directions. Then I expanded that idea to have the players actually disperse.
When we first performed it in La Jolla, we did it outside without any announcement but in an environment with people going here and there. The players began playing in a circle, changing their pitches slightly, turning their horns this way and that, spinning around slowly, and then at a given signal, dispersing outward from the central circle to outer points in the environment, moving as far as they could from one another until they reached the threshold of hearing at least one other shell. At that point, the whole area through which they had moved had been described by the sounds of the shells. By the end of the performance, the players must have moved almost a half mile apart.
Later, when we did it in Steinway Hall in New York, we didn’t have that wide open situation. We started inside and moved downstairs and went outside onto Fifty-seventh Street. And what I discovered was that by concentrating on the pitches and timbres of the conch shells, the environmental sounds—buses, trucks, people talking, other urban sounds—got perceived in terms of the sounds of those shells. For example, you’re trying to hear another shell player who’s aiming his or her shell at you or who’s trying to keep in contact with you. Then, as you hear trucks pass, the sounds of the tires take on the pitch of the conch shell on which you’re concentrating. It’s the old idea of the percussion instruments in the orchestra. The bass drum will take on the pitch of the fundamental of a chord that the orchestra is playing. I was also struck by how space intrudes its personality on the sounds that you produce. We’re all aware of that, if not consciously, subconsciously. When we talk here, our voices aren’t the same as they are in other rooms—they just aren’t—because the space does all kinds of processing due to its dimensions and materials. I became very aware of that in Vespers, the piece I did with those echo guns in which you make the audience hear the acoustic characteristics of the performance space. Good performers have always known these things, for example if the reverberation time is such-and-such, it affects the speed at which you play.
When I was asked to write a score of Chambers for publication I decided to expand it. I wanted to make it bigger in the sense that it would imply more, so I extended it to include any resonant environment, large or small, that performers could use to produce or alter sounds in the same way that this room we’re in alters our sounds. If a room can intrude its personality on whatever sounds occur in that room, then any other size environment can do the same thing, so for the sake of performing I decided that performers could collect resonant objects into which they could put sounds, and the acoustic characteristics of the objects themselves—shells, pots, pans and so forth—would alter the sounds with their own characteristics. I was making a lot of rooms, but bringing them down to a size with which you could perform. But I didn’t say you’d have to use only those objects that you could carry into a performance; you could use environments that you’d find outdoors such as oceans, caves, and football stadia.
You know if you’re at a football game you’re always impressed by the sound. I used to play in the Yale Band, and we used to form ranks inside the entrance to the Yale Bowl. Everyone would be tuning up and of course the reverberation of that place! Then when we started playing and marched out onto the field, the sound situation changed completely. That experience later gave me the idea that you can do almost anything in a performance of this piece as long as you think of it in terms of physical environments that alter sounds because of what they are.
When we did it at the Museum of Modern Art we used, as you remember, little pots, paper bags, suitcases, ashcans, all kinds of resonant objects; then the problem was to find portable sounds that you could put into them. We used small battery-operated cassette tape recorders, transistor radios and mechanical toys that would operate on their own power, anything that you didn’t have to plug into a wall.
Did you feel as if you wanted to tell the audience about resonant environments? Was that a reason for doing the piece?
Yes! I want them to open up their ears to their environments, I certainly do, more now than before I did this piece. I hear a lot of re-verbs now when I listen to TV or the radio, or listen to someone walking on the street. I perceive more now than I ever did, sounds coming from walls, the echoes from them, or when you walk down from the administration building here, how the sounds of your footsteps change when you pass, or when there’s a tree or a wall and then you pass the wall and go into an open space, how your footsteps change because of the architecture all around.
Do you feel better about using . . . we used a teapot with a radio in it. . . .
What? A teapot?
We used a teapot in the performance.
Oh yes.
Do you feel better about using a found environment like a teapot, as opposed to something you could build, perhaps with specific characteristics?
Yes, I like found environments more. You can find teapots all over the place, and when you go to a town for a performance, you don’t have to bring all your resonant environments with you. One could conceivably build an environment that would do something specific to sounds but I’m not interested in that. I don’t want to change anything. I simply want to find out what these environments do to sounds, so it’s to my advantage not to make them but to take what I can find, and in that way each performance will teach me something.
Do you feel any different toward the objects being used because this is happening in a concert situation?
Oh yes—your idea about a pot. The little teapot now becomes an instrument or part of an instrument, like part of an oboe. You now think of the teapot as something else.
How do you feel toward the audience in a piece using found objects; do you expect the audience to feel different toward the objects too?
Well, I like pieces that are odd, that do something that you don’t expect them to do. It’s extremely odd to hear a Beethoven symphony coming out of a little pot. You don’t perceive all of it because the pot is so small that the low frequencies don’t get played, but I like that situation very much. A Beethoven symphony implies a large space, the orchestra has a hundred players and it’s tape recorded in a big hall, but when it comes out of a two-inch loudspeaker, it’s very strange, when you think about it. On the other hand, to try to recreate an environment and put it into another one is like taking something that belongs somewhere and putting it somewhere else, so you make connections between things that you wouldn’t ordinarily make. Doesn’t an artist do that anyway? Well, some artists do, I don’t know about all. Some of art is that you make connections between things that no one else would ever make.
But are you interested in making connections that only Lucier would make between objects? Or are you taking advantage of connections between found objects? For example, radios happen to fit into teapots.
Right! That’s the reason I used the radio, because it goes into the teapot.
But you probably wouldn’t be tempted to reduce a Beethoven symphony to a little transistorized device unless it had been done before, or unless people carried around transistor radios.
I would never have thought of it, no.
Are you trying to tell the audience something beyond what they hear?
Yes, I’m trying to make them . . . it’s just an extension of what you do when you’re a little child at the beach and you put a shell up to your ear and hear the ocean. Then you stop. You don’t do that as you grow older. Your ear