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

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.

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

A rare female virtuoso on an instrument long dominated by men, Ms. Alcorn erased boundaries for pedal steel guitar — 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.

As hinted at by the title of her 2006 album, “And I Await the Resurrection of the Pedal Steel Guitar,” Ms. Alcorn steered the instrument into uncharted territory. 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.

Her album “Curandera,” released in 2003, featured cosmic interpretations of the Curtis Mayfield composition “People Get Ready” and Messiaen’s “O Sacrum Convivium.” Her 2023 album, “Canto,” was inspired by her travels in Chile, where she became entranced with nueva canción, a left-leaning folk music that had been repressed by the dictator Augusto Pinochet in the 1970s.

Still, the sound was all her own. As the experimental music journal Signal to Noise once noted, Ms. Alcorn’s “pedal steel tones stretch, float and dance in the air, and on the ears, expressing something that’s worlds beyond words, yet able to communicate on the deepest level.”

Despite its experimental nature, her work did cross over into the mainstream at times. Her 2020 album, “Pedernal,” recorded with a quintet — the title refers to a mesa in New Mexico that Georgia O’Keeffe frequently painted — was named one of the 10 best jazz albums of that year by Giovanni Russonello of The New York Times. The Times also included a track from the album, “Northeast Rising Sun,” in a roundup of that year’s notable songs.

But Ms. Alcorn was striving for something deeper than popular acclaim. “To me, music is a form of communication on a very deep level,” she said in a 2015 interview with Guitar Moderne magazine. “It includes — but goes beyond — colors, shapes, emotions and memory.”

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.

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. “I remember that wondrously magical metallic sound and the way the shining steel bar seemed to float over the top of the instrument,” she recalled in an autobiographical essay on her website. “I was hooked.”

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. “For pedal steel you pretty much have to study country to get the technique,” she said in a 2020 interview with the British music magazine The Wire.

While she never lost her affection for country, Ms. Alcorn started to expand her musical horizons — developing, in her words, a “fascination with the mysteries of sound and the vast musical possibilities of dissonance” — and began writing and performing more experimental material.

​Her musical sensibility further evolved in 1990, when she was introduced to “deep listening,” a philosophy developed by the experimental composer Pauline Oliveros, a future collaborator. The concept was “a way of listening,” she wrote, “in which all notes, harmony, melodies, composition, people, and space were approached from within and without.”

Ms. Alcorn released her first solo album, “Uma,” in 2000. In a review in Texas Monthly magazine, John Morthland noted that she “doesn’t ignore the melancholy mood that her instrument brings to country, but applies elements of world music, jazz, avant-classical and New Age to create sounds that defy classification.”

In addition to her husband, she is survived by her daughters, Rose and Hannah Alcorn, and a grandson. She lived in Baltimore.

While The Times in 2022 credited her with helping to open the door for others to innovate on the pedal steel guitar, Ms. Alcorn showed little interest in fame.

“I try not to think about whether I have much of an audience or a following,” she told Guitar Moderne.” “I 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.”