We did the Mozart ‘Mass in C Minor’, and here I was participating as a student in these chanting, ritualistic pieces.” All momentous experiences, yet they paled in comparison with the transformation she would experience as a member of Pauline Oliveros’s ♀ Ensemble. She found herself performing in text based pieces by Robert Erickson. Her fellow students were engaged in experimental and environmental music, sound art activities far removed from her prior study of piano and classical technique. Louie attended her first concert at UCSD on Halloween of 1970: a midnight performance of Terry Riley’s ‘In C’, its hypnotic repetition a revelation.
As intended, “it completely upended my concept of music study.” I remember thinking, what am I doing here? It’s a graduate music school and I’m crawling on the floor with my fellow graduate students.” The rumours were true: San Diego was a “wide open place”. Instead of the anticipated meet and greet – polite handshakes and shy smiles peppered with dry considerations of lesson plans and academic targets – Alexina Louie found herself “making sounds, high and low vocal sounds, you know, tapping on things and crawling on the floor.
#Sound effect a few moments later full#
In keeping with the summer camp vibe, the year’s initial gathering of graduate students was a full immersion in sound improvisation led by trombonist John Silber. As Roger Reynolds, a composer then new to the campus, would later recall of his undergraduate students, “they were smoking pot in the back, their dogs were with them, they were lying on the floor, it was incredible”.
#Sound effect a few moments later series#
In a setup that resembled a summer camp more than a major university, UCSD’s music department was housed in a series of Quonset huts left over from Camp Matthews, the Marine base that preceded the campus. It was advertised as “a wide open place”, she would later recall, “and indeed, it was, to my shock.” Any number of schools offered more of the same, but UCSD promised something much more intriguing. She had come from a conventional music school with a traditional emphasis on theory, notation, musical history and coursework. It was 1970 and Alexina Louie, a fledgling Canadian composer, was looking at graduate schools when her professor mentioned a new university on the West Coast staffed by composers, with an emphasis on contemporary music.
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