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Alvin Lucier & Margaret Leng TanMargaret Leng Tan performs Alvin Lucier's Nothing Is Real (Strawberry Fields Forever) at Other Minds 5, 1999 (March 26, 1999)

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Margaret Leng Tan performs the west coast premiere of Alvin Lucier's piece Nothing Is Real (Strawberry Fields Forever) (1990) at the Other Minds Music Festival in 1999 at the Cowell Theater in San Francisco.

Margaret Leng Tan, piano & teapot with miniature sound system

According to Lucier:
In the Spring of 1990, Aki Takahashi asked me to write an arrangement of a Beatles song for her. She had just finished recording the complete piano music of Satie for Toshiba-EMI, the success of which had prompted them to ask for a collection of Lennon and McCartney tunes. She agreed, on the condition that she could invite composers of her own choosing to write the arrangements. Not wanting to pin myself down to a specific song, memory or feeling, I asked her to choose one for me. She selected Strawberry Fields Forever. When I asked why she chose that particular song, she replied that the line, "nothing is real," reminded her of my music.

During this work, fragments of the melody are played and sustained as clusters. The performance is recorded on a cassette tape recorder. After the last fragment has been played, the tape is rewound and played back through a small loudspeaker hidden inside a teapot. During the playback, the lid of the pot is raised and lowered, changing the resonance characteristics of the pot. Twice during the performance the pot itself is lifted off the lid of the piano, causing the resonances to disappear completely.

Nothing Is Real was commissioned by Toshiba-EMI Ltd., Japan, and is included on their Eastworld Compact Disc, TOCE-6655, HYPER BEATLES 2. It was written expressly for Aki Takahashi.
- Alvin Lucier


This audio is part of the collection: Other Minds Archive

Artist/Composer: Alvin Lucier & Margaret Leng Tan
Date: 1999-03-26 00:00:00
Source: Other Minds
Label / Recorded by: Other Minds
Keywords: Avantgarde; 20th Century Classical

Creative Commons license: Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial

Notes

All Other Minds programs available, with additional print and photo materials, at http://www.radiOM.org. Coming soon you will be able to view our complete list of titles not yet digitized at http://www.radiOM.org/titles.

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