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Music for . Piano with Magnetic Strings performed by Lois Svard
Producer . Alvin Lucier
Engineer . Rusty Richards
Assembled and mixed . Tom Hamilton
Editing and mastering . Tom Hamilton
Recorded . Weis Center for the Performing Arts, Lewisburg, PA, 12 January 1997
Piano . Steinway No. 502414
Label . Lovely Music, Ltd., 1999 (LCD 5011)
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Available at
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Alvin Lucier wrote Music for Piano with Magnetic Strings in 1995 at the request of Lois Svard. "When Lois asked me to write a piece for her, I imagined a work in which the strings of a piano would sound by themselves. In Music on a Long Thin Wire, a large horseshoe magnet straddles the wire creating a flux field around it which, in conjunction with a current from an oscillator, causes the wire to vibrate and sound. For a piano work I would need several small magnets to activate more than one string at a time. I bought several EBows, small electromagnets used primarily with electric guitars. I experimented, placing them on the strings of my piano - creating strands of sounds of varying density and texture." Svard improvises in response to harmonics, audible beating, occasional rhythms produced as one or more magnets vibrates against adjacent strings, and other acoustic phenomena.
From the CD liner notes written by Alvin Lucier, pioneer in many areas of music composition and performance, including the notation of performers' physical gestures, the use of brain waves in live performance, the generation of visual imagery by sound in vibrating media, and the evocation of room acoustics for musical purposes. He has taught at Wesleyan University since 1970.
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