Making audible what is usually inaudible rendering sound visible in an unusual way and
facilitating a spatial experience of sound-this is what constitutes the pioneering work that
makes Alvin Lucier one of the most important representatives of American music in the second
half of the twentieth century. The stated aim of the study at hand is the detailed historical
and theoretical exploration of Alvin Lucier's work with particular focus on his decidedly
reflexive experimental aesthetics. The research is thus based on two essential methodological
approaches: on the one hand a musicological study of the genesis of Lucier's work and on the
other an aesthetic analysis of the role of the real within Lucier's aesthetics.Lucier's
experimental compositions are aesthetic reflections that are constantly making reference to the
phenomenology of sound as well as to the perception of perception itself. His aesthetic vision
gravitated towards devising minimalist constellations and processes which due to the
withdrawal of the compositional subject gave expression to an acoustic phenomenon and the
unforeseeable idea inherent to it.
