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Susan Alcorn, an experimental composer and musician who pushed the pedal steel guitar, an instrument more often associated with the country music roadhouse, into the avant-garde, died on Friday in Baltimore. She was 71.<\/p>\n
Her husband, David Lobato, said the cause of death, in a hospital, had not been determined.<\/p>\n
A rare female virtuoso on an instrument long dominated by men, Ms. Alcorn erased boundaries for pedal steel guitar<\/a> \u2014 a console-style electric guitar played face up, with pedals and knee levers to alter pitch, often used to create a forlorn, wailing twang. That made it a key instrument in country music.<\/p>\n As hinted at by the title of her 2006 album, \u201cAnd I Await the Resurrection of the Pedal Steel Guitar<\/a>,\u201d Ms. Alcorn steered the instrument into uncharted territory<\/a>. Over the course of a career in which she mined and refigured countless genres, she released more than 20 albums, either as a solo artist or in collaboration with boundary-pushing musicians like the guitarist and banjo player Eugene Chadbourne, the saxophonist Caroline Kraabel and the guitarist Mary Halvorson.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Her album \u201cCurandera,\u201d released in 2003, featured cosmic interpretations of the Curtis Mayfield composition \u201cPeople Get Ready\u201d and Messiaen\u2019s \u201cO Sacrum Convivium.\u201d<\/a> Her 2023 album, \u201cCanto,\u201d<\/a> was inspired by her travels in Chile, where she became entranced with nueva canci\u00f3n<\/a>, a left-leaning folk music that had been repressed by the dictator Augusto Pinochet in the 1970s.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Still, the sound was all her own. As the experimental music journal Signal to Noise once noted, Ms. Alcorn\u2019s \u201cpedal steel tones stretch, float and dance in the air, and on the ears, expressing something that\u2019s worlds beyond words, yet able to communicate on the deepest level.\u201d<\/p>\n Despite its experimental nature, her work did cross over into the mainstream at times. Her 2020 album, \u201cPedernal,\u201d recorded with a quintet \u2014 the title refers to a mesa in New Mexico that Georgia O\u2019Keeffe frequently painted<\/a> \u2014 was named one of the 10 best jazz albums<\/a> of that year by Giovanni Russonello of The New York Times. The Times also included a track from the album<\/a>, \u201cNortheast Rising Sun,\u201d in a roundup of that year\u2019s notable songs.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n But Ms. Alcorn was striving for something deeper than popular acclaim. \u201cTo me, music is a form of communication<\/a> on a very deep level,\u201d she said in a 2015 interview with Guitar Moderne magazine. \u201cIt includes \u2014 but goes beyond \u2014 colors, shapes, emotions and memory.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Ms. Alcorn was born on April 4, 1953, in Allentown, Pa., the eldest of three children of James Alcorn, a salesman, and Mary (Auer) Alcorn, a philanthropic event coordinator who had played piano with the Cleveland Orchestra. She took up guitar when she was about 12, developing an affinity for the slide guitar work of bluesmen like Son House and Muddy Waters.<\/p>\n While studying political science and history at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Ill., she was intrigued when she saw a pedal steel player perform at a nightclub. \u201cI remember that wondrously magical metallic sound and the way the shining steel bar seemed to float over the top of the instrument,\u201d she recalled in an autobiographical essay on her website. \u201cI was hooked.\u201d<\/p>\n She took up the instrument and, after graduating in 1976, started gigging with Western swing and country bands, first in Chicago and later in Houston, where she moved with her first husband in the early 1980s. \u201cFor pedal steel you pretty much have to study country<\/a> to get the technique,\u201d she said in a 2020 interview with the British music magazine The Wire.<\/p>\n While she never lost her affection for country, Ms. Alcorn started to expand her musical horizons \u2014 developing, in her words, a \u201cfascination with the mysteries of sound and the vast musical possibilities of dissonance\u201d \u2014 and began writing and performing more experimental material.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u200bHer musical sensibility further evolved in 1990, when she was introduced to \u201cdeep listening,\u201d a philosophy developed by the experimental composer Pauline Oliveros<\/a>, a future collaborator. The concept was \u201ca way of listening,\u201d she wrote, \u201cin which all notes, harmony, melodies, composition, people, and space were approached from within and without.\u201d<\/p>\n Ms. Alcorn released her first solo album, \u201cUma,\u201d in 2000. In a review in Texas Monthly magazine, John Morthland<\/a> noted that she \u201cdoesn\u2019t ignore the melancholy mood<\/a> that her instrument brings to country, but applies elements of world music, jazz, avant-classical and New Age to create sounds that defy classification.\u201d<\/p>\n In addition to her husband, she is survived by her daughters, Rose and Hannah Alcorn, and a grandson. She lived in Baltimore.<\/p>\n While The Times in 2022 credited her with helping to open the door<\/a> for others to innovate on the pedal steel guitar, Ms. Alcorn showed little interest in fame.<\/p>\n \u201cI try not to think about whether I have much of an audience or a following,\u201d she told Guitar Moderne. \u201cI try to keep making music, try to say something with it, and then, like a message in a bottle, cast it into the sea and hope somehow somewhere it will reach someone and affect that person in a positive way.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n