Marfa Live Arts and Fieldwork: Marfa were proud to present Marfa Sounding—a series of site-specific performances, sound installations, and conversations exploring the intersection of music and the visual arts in the development of Minimalism.

A community of two thousand situated amidst the desert plains of West Texas, Marfa is best known as a site for the permanent installation of large-scale artworks. Over Memorial Day weekend in May 2016, composer Alvin Lucier and cellist Charles Curtis engaged multiple sites throughout the town and its surrounding desert via a series of sound installations and concerts. Expanding on the parallels between process-based music and serial structures in art, these durational performances sought out a musical sounding—a process of measurement—of the artistic mythologies, histories, and temporalities of Marfa.

Performances at the Louvre, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, and Paula Cooper Gallery in New York have highlighted the long-standing collaboration between Lucier and Curtis. Alongside fellow electronic music pioneers Éliane Radigue and La Monte Young, Lucier has created works specifically for Curtis on cello. These compositions confront reality by making audible the sonic qualities of specific locations: a direction Lucier famously developed via his ground-breaking minimal process-piece “I am sitting in a room” (1969), one of the first sound works collected by MoMA. Renowned in the worlds of classical music as well as contemporary experimentation, Curtis explained in a SASSAS interview, “what ultimately moved me in the direction I have continued on was my encounter with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela in 1986, and the very intense work I got into with them and their music. I found a level of refinement and focus that went beyond what I was familiar with in classical music, and an aesthetic stance of non-irony, respect for craft and beauty, an unapologetic relationship to deep musical feeling.” 

Organized by Jennifer Burris Staton in collaboration with Marfa Live Arts, this concert series emerges from a 2015 residency hosted by Fieldwork: Marfa. An international research program for emerging artists, curators, and researchers sponsored by two major European art schools–Les Beaux-arts de Nantes (Nantes School of Art) andHEAD-Genève–Fieldwork is dedicated to the practice of art in public space, critical approaches to landscape, and artistic projects based on field investigation methods. Staton’s residency, “Phase Shifting: Sound and Space in the 1960s,” explored the influences and cross-references between early electronic music and sculpture as a way to elucidate moments wherein the mathematical structures of Minimalism coalesce with political and social concerns.

In the month leading up to the concerts, these ideas were further explored as part of a conference at the University of Houston, organized by art historian Ida Soulard with artist Abinadi Meza; a public discussion at Marfa Book Company; and a public screening of Viola Rusche and Hauke Harder’s feature-length documentary NO IDEAS BUT IN THINGS – The Composer Alvin Lucier (2014). Co-presented by CineMarfa, this screening offers an introduction to Lucier’s pioneering works in electronic music.

For both Lucier and Curtis, an extensive international program of concert performances and site-specific sound installations is juxtaposed by a deep engagement with pedagogy—a parallel also integral to the founding mission of Marfa Live Arts. Lucier taught at Wesleyan University from 1968 to 2011 where he was John Spencer Camp Professor of Music, and since 2000 Curtis has been professor of music at the University of California, San Diego. In keeping with our dedication to incorporating educational components into all of our public programs, Marfa Live Arts brought Curtis to Marfa Independent School District to perform and conduct a workshop with the High School band. Composer, sound artist, and sound studies scholar Erik DeLuca, who was in Marfa to create sound recordings of the weekend for an upcoming publication documenting Marfa Sounding, led the High School and Jr High band classes through a series of music and listening exercises inspired by Pauline Oliveros and her work with the Deep Listening Institute. To mark the occasion of Marfa Sounding and the school visits, Marfa Live Arts also donated a cello to the school through our ongoing instrument donation program. 

Marfa Sounding was produced by JD DiFabbio with support from Cate Cole Schrim.

LINKS:

Marfa Sounding listed by Arts + Culture Texas magazine as one of the “The A+C Top Ten” for  May 2016

Tom Parkinson's review of Alvin Lucier Sounds in Space in Dundalk, Ireland, June 2014 for The Guardian.

Alvin Lucier, "Music on a Long Thin Wire" (1977)

Éliane Radigue , "Pour Charles Curtis – Naldjorlak" (2008)

Artist Biographies

Alvin Lucier and Douglas Simon, "Vespers," in Chambers (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1980), pp. 16–27.

Alvin Lucier and Douglas Simon, "I AM SITTING IN A ROOM," in Chambers (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1980), pp. 30–39.

Alvin Lucier, Music 109: Notes on Experimental Music (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2012), pp. 84–91; 150–152.

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