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A work in which the strings of a piano sound by themselves. Several EBows which cause the piano strings to vibrate and sound are placed on the strings of the piano. The pianist works from a prose score which describes the process and suggests she freely position and reposition five EBows on the piano strings, creating strands of sounds of varying density and texture. Much of her time is spent listening for harmonics, audible beating, occasional rhythms produced as one or more magnets vibrates against adjacent strings, and other acoustic phenomena.

Theme (18:45)

Setting a poem of John Ashbery's to music, Lucier didn't want to violate the flow of the words of the poem by fragmentation or any other cut-up method. The stanzas seemed musical enough just as they were and he wanted the audience to hear the poem more or less in its pristine state, so, working intuitively and by ear, he wrote out the poem for four readers in the order it was written, repeating words and phrases, overlapping and superimposing them in various ways. To "set" the poem, he inserted microphones into the mouths of various vessels, including a small milk bottle, a sea shell, a vase and an empty ostrich egg, to pick up the words as they were sounding inside the vessels. The readers speak normally, allowing the pitches of their voices which match those resonances of the vessels to create musical sounds. Occasionally, however, a reader will tend to emphasize certain pitches more than others, reading in an almost chant-like way, to sound the resonances of the vessels more clearly.

Music for Gamelan Instruments, Microphones, Amplifiers and Loudspeakers (15:09)