A Blood Sample From A Late Composer Is Powering A Musical Experiment

It’s not unusual to see new releases from artists who are no longer with us.

But those consist of music that the artists made or at least contributed to before their passings.

Today we look at a new musical work that is, maybe, kind of from a composer who’s been gone three years.

Alvin Lucier experimented with all kinds of sound during his long career.

He was particularly interested in sounds that he said “would never – in ordinary circumstances – reach our ears.”

For example, he wrote a piece called “Opera With Objects” that featured the sounds of tapping pencils.

Another piece, “Music For Solo Performer,” used brain waves to set off percussion instruments.

Now there’s “Revivification,” a Lucier installation at the University of Western Australia.

The name is a nod to the fact that the composer passed away in 2021, and to the effort to create new posthumous music.

In 2018, Lucier gave a blood sample to a team at the university.

They say they transformed some of the white blood cells into stem cells, ones meant to work like brain tissue.

And they put those structures, which they call cerebral organoids, into a kind of incubator.

Electrical signals from those organoids can trigger mallets that hit brass plates set up around the installation space.

Now, you could argue this isn’t really new music from Lucier, since he’s not around to intentionally create it.

You could also argue that these cells are not really a brain, certainly not one like the one that powered “Music For Solo Performer” or created so many other unique and challenging works.

But you could also argue that this is a great opportunity to ponder some of these deep questions about what music is, what composing is, and, really, what we are.

And in a way that’s definitely in line with Alvin Lucier’s body of work.