This American composer is creating new music 4 years after his death: This is how he’s doing it

Alvin Lucier was a long-time music professor at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, where he remained until his retirement. Before that, he taught at Brandeis University and directed their Chamber Chorus and electronic music studio.

Lucier was a member of the influential Sonic Arts Union, which also included Robert Ashley, David Behrman, and Gordon Mumma and the bulk of his work explored psychoacoustic phenomena and the physical properties of sound. His compositions often aimed to make the inaudible audible and the audible visible or spatially tangible.

His first mature work is considered to be the 1965 composition Music for Solo Performer, which used brainwave amplification. Other important early pieces include Vespers (1968) and his best-known work, I Am Sitting in a Room (1969).

Posthumous work

In 2025, a musical exhibit based on cerebral organoids cultured from Lucier’s white blood cells opened at the Art Gallery of Western Australia. The organoids emitted electrical signals that triggered mallets on brass plates, creating music.

The exhibition has created plenty of division with many questioning the ‘new music’ creative aspect of this initiative.

“Creativity has two components,” said Indre Viskontas, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of San Francisco who studies creativity. “One is the originality or the novelty or the uniqueness of the piece. And here, of course, that’s in spades.”

However, Viskontas said the organoids lack the other component that would make them capable of the creativity needed to truly make new art: intention. “Creativity really has to have a conscious element to it. And I don’t think this particular piece of art is conscious,” she said. “Those cells have no intention.”

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