Susan Alcorn, pedal steel virtuoso, has died aged 71

One of the world’s premiere exponents of her instrument, Susan Alcorn, died in Baltimore, MD on 31 January due to natural causes.

Alcorn was born on 4 April 1953 in Allentown, Pennsylvania and began playing music at age three, when she sat underneath her mother’s spinet pianist and pressed the foot pedals. In school she played viola, cornet and guitar; at age twenty-one she found the pedal steel guitar. Having first paid her dues in Texas country & western bands, she began to expand the vocabulary of her instrument through her study of 20th century classical music, visionary jazz, and world musics.

Though known for her solo work, she collaborated with numerous artists including Pauline Oliveros, Eugene Chadbourne, Chris Cutler, the London Improvisors Orchestra, the Glasgow Improvisors Orchestra, Joe McPhee, Ken Vandermark, Nate Wooley, Ingrid Laubrock and Leila Bourdreuil, George Burt, Evan Parker, Caroline Kraabel, Michael Formanek, Catherine Sikora Mingus, Zane Campbell and Mary Halvorson among others. In 2016 she was voted best Miscellaneous Instrument in the DownBeat International Critics Poll. In 2017 she was a recipient of the Baker Artist Award and in 2018, along with saxophonist Joe McPhee, the Instant Award in Improvised Music. She released more than a dozen critically acclaimed albums as a leader/co-leader including, most recently, Filament with Catherine Sikora.
 
The Guardian (UK) wrote: “As an improvisor and composer, Alcorn has proven to be visionary. Her pieces reveal the complexity of her instrument and her musical experience while never straying from a very direct, intense and personal musical expression.”

Talking about her feelings about making music Alcorn said on her website: “There has always been a certain magic, feeling the vibrations through my bones as a child and now as an adult. With that magic, there has always been, for me, a need to wade deeply then swim in those vibrations and communicate what it feels like - an experience beyond pleasure or pain, beyond emotions. A feeling of transcendence but also of being rooted like a tree in the earth below. A connection with that mysterious universe of musical vibrations, vibrations within vibrations, and the spaces between in which stillness is only relative.
 
“I view the instrument I play, the pedal steel guitar, not as an object to be mastered, but as a partner with which to share with the listener a meaning, depth, and hopefully profound awareness of each fragile moment we’re together. It is this dynamic of which I try to be cognizant in both my writing and performance.
 
“There are basically four directions to the music I play and have played for years - the composition and recording of my own music, adaptation of adventurous works of music written by others that speak to me in a personal way, free improvisation with like-minded musicians, and collaborations with various outlier musicians on the fringe of music and society who have important things to say.”