Читать книгу Chambers - Alvin Lucier - Страница 7

Collect or make large and small resonant environments.

1. Sea Shells

2. Rooms

3. Cisterns

4. Tunnels

5. Cupped Hands

6. Mouths

7. Subway Stations

8. Bowls

9. Shoes

10. Hollows

11. Caves

12. Suitcases

13. Ponds

14. Stadia

15. Water Spouts

16. Bays

17. Tombs

18. Conduits

19. Canyons

20. Boilers

21. Pots

22. Ovens

23. Barrels

24. Bulbs

25. Bottles

26. Cabins

27. Wells

28. Bells

29. Capsules

30. Craters

31. Empty Missiles

32. Cacti

33. Beds

34. Webs

35. Pools

36. Boats

37. Cones

38. Funnels

39. Bones

40. Stills

41. Gins

42. Draws

43. Tubes

44. Theatres

45. Cars

46. Springs

47. Flumes

48. Trees

49. Others

Find a way to make them sound.

50. Blowing

51. Bowing

52. Rubbing

53. Scraping

54. Tapping

55. Moving

56. Fingering

57. Breaking

58. Burning

59. Melting

60. Chewing

61. Jiggling

62. Wearing

63. Swinging

64. Bumping

65. Dropping

66. Orbiting

67. Creaking

68. Caressing

69. Bouncing

70. Jerking

71. Flipping

72. Levitating

73. Hating

74. Skimming

75. Ignoring

76. Talking

77. Singing

78. Sighing

79. Whistling

80. Walking

81. Snapping

82. Cracking

83. Snoring

84. Boring

85. Praying

86. Loving

87. Spraying

88. Bowling

89. Channeling

90. Freezing

91. Squeezing

92. Frying

93. Exploding

94. Poking

95. Screwing

96. Lowering

97. Shaking

98. Impeding

99. Dancing

100. Others

Sounds of portable resonant environments such as sea shells and cupped hands may be carried out into streets, countrysides, parks, campuses, through buildings and houses, until outer limits are reached where minimum audio contact can be maintained by a player with at least one other player.

Sounds of the outer environment encompassed by the players may be heard with reference to the sounds of the portable resonant environments carried by the players. Sounds of determinate pitch in the outer environment may be heard in simple or complex relationships to the pitches of the portable resonant environments. Sounds of indeterminate pitch in the outer environment may be heard to take on the pitch, timbral, dynamic, and durational characteristics of the sounds of the portable resonant environments.

Sounds of fixed resonant environments such as cisterns and tunnels may be made portable by means of recordings, or radio or telephone transmission, and carried into inner or outer environments. When carried into inner environments, such as theatres into beds, the sounds of the now-portable resonant environments may either mingle with or take over the sounds of the inner environment. When carried to outer environments, such as boilers into parks, the sounds of the now-portable resonant environments may be treated as original portable environments.

Mixtures of these materials and procedures may be used.

Increasing and lessening of any characteristics of any sounds may be brought about.

How did I happen to write the piece? Well, it happened in various stages . . . let me see . . . I remember a film of a Jules Verne book, I think it was a Jules Verne book, something like Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, or one of those books. There’s a wonderful scene where men have built an underwater boat, and to get from the shore to the boat, which is moored under the water, several of them are walking along the floor of the ocean with huge conch shells over their heads, as if filled with air. This was nineteenth-century science fiction and the image struck me as something wonderful, walking on the floor of the ocean with those conch shells. I thought of making a piece with instruments, tubas or French horns, in which the players would do something like that, just an idea. And then I thought of actually getting conch shells, huge ones which I could make into bass instruments, conch shells three or four feet high, bass shells, and the openings could be bowed.

About that time Pauline Oliveros invited me to San Diego to perform Whistlers, a piece in which I tried to get ionospheric sounds in real time with a radio receiver and antenna. There’s something about California, being from the East, palm trees and all that, so I asked Pauline, “Can we get any conch shells?” and she answered, “Well, we’ll see.” Every day we drove along the ocean front, and we used to pass a funny little store that had a sign that said “Sea Shells.” One day I asked her to stop the car. The store was filled with hundreds of seas shells of different kinds and sizes, and the man who owned the store said, “You know, people who live in the Islands have blown conch shells for centuries.” Where did I just see in a film, someone blowing a conch shell?