Voyager on Pedal Steel Guitar, Susan Alcorn, Die at 71

Susan Alcorn, an experimental composer and musician who pushed pedal steel guitars, an instrument associated with the country music roadhouse, into the avant-garde, passed away in Baltimore on Friday. She was 71 years old.

Her husband, David Lobat, said the cause of death in the hospital had not been determined.

Alcon, a rare female master of instruments that men have long ruled, has erased the boundaries of pedal steel guitars. Console-style electric guitars use pedals and knee levers to change pitch and are often used to create lorn, lament and lament. . It has become an important instrument in country music.

As suggested by the title of his 2006 album, “And Waiting for the Revival of Pedal Steel Guitar,” Alcorn led the instrument into unknown territory. In her career, where she mined and recalibrated countless genres, she was a solo artist or with boundary-packed musicians such as guitarist and banjoist Eugene Chadborne, saxophonist Caroline Crabel, and the saxophone. We have jointly released over 20 albums. Guitarist Mary Halverson.

Her album, Curandera, released in 2003, featured an interpretation of the universe of Curtis Mayfield's song “People Get Ready” and Messiaen's “O Sacrum Convivium.” Her 2023 album, “Canto,” was inspired by a trip in Chile, and became engrossed in Nueva Cancion, a left-leaning folk music that was suppressed by dictator Augusto Pinochet in the 1970s.

Still, the sound was all her own. Just as the signal and noise of experimental music journals once attracted attention, Alcon's “pedal steel tones stretch into the air, float and dance, and communicate at the deepest level, expressing a world beyond words. You can take it.”

Despite her experimental nature, her work has sometimes become mainstream. Her 2020 album “Pedernal” was recorded on Quintet – the title refers to the Mesa in New Mexico frequently drawn by Georgia O'Keefe – the 10 Best Jazz Albums of the Year by Giovanni Rossonello of the New York Times was chosen as one of the following. The Times also included tracks from the album “Northeast Rising Sun” in a compilation of the year's well-known songs.

But Alcorn was striving for something deeper than popular admiration. “For me, music is a kind of communication on a very deep level,” she said in a 2015 interview with Guitar Modern Magazine. “It includes colour, shape, emotions, memories.”

Mr. Alcorn was born on April 4, 1953 in Allentown, Pennsylvania. The eldest son of three children of salesman James Alcorn, and Mary (Ohh) Alcorn, a charity event coordinator who played piano with the Cleveland Orchestra. She filmed the guitar at about 12 years old and has a sense of affinity with her son's house and the bluesman's slide guitar pieces, which look like a muddy sea.

While studying political science and history at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois, she was intrigued when she saw pedal steel players perform in a nightclub. “I remember the incredibly magical metallic sound and the way the sparkling bars of steel appear to float above the instrument,” she recalled in an autobiographical essay on the website. “I was hooked.”

She took up instruments and began gigs with western swings and country bands in Chicago and later Houston, where she graduated in 1976 and moved with her first husband in the early 1980s. “In the case of pedal steel, you need to study the country to get the technique,” she said in a 2020 interview with the British music magazine The Wire.

She never lost her love for the country, but Ms. Alcon began to expand her musical horizons – in words she was captivated by the mysteries of sound and the vast musical possibilities of dissonance.” It developed and began writing more experimental materials.

Her musical sensibility evolved further in 1990. She was introduced to Deep Lisning, a philosophy developed by her future collaborator, experimental composer Pauline Oliveros. The concept was “How to listen.” “All notes, harmonies, melody, composition, people and spaces were approached both inside and outside,” she writes.

Alcorn released her first solo album, “Uma,” in 2000. In a review of Texas Monthly Magazine, John Mortland said, “While not ignoring the melancholy mood her instruments bring to the country, he applies elements of world music, jazz, aban classics, and new age, to sound that is contrary to classification. I'll create it.”

In addition to her husband, she was survived by her daughters Rose and Hannah Alcorn, as well as grandchildren. She lived in Baltimore.

The 2022 Times believed they helped others open the door to innovating with pedal steel guitars, but Alcorn showed little interest in fame.

“I try not to think about whether I have a lot of the audience or advocates,” she told Guitar Modern. “I'm hoping to keep making music, say something with it, throw it into the ocean, like a bottle message, reach someone else somewhere and have a positive impact on that person. .”