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Home , David Behrman, Gordon Mumma, Lovely Music, Robert Ashley, Sonic Arts Union

THE WIRE WWW.THEWIRE.CO.UK ISSUE 234 AUGUST 2003 Meet the electronic pioneer who took into the multimedia age. By Thom Holmes

Built for Speed

Textually hyperdense and accellerated for the televisual age, the multimedia music theatre of Robert Ashley has been called the future of opera, as well as the first to exploit the unique rhythms of the American voice. Following this year’s premiere of his new work Celestial Excursions, Thom Holmes meets the composer to discuss his founding role in the , his love of TV, and his celebration of life on the margins.

Photos: Chris Buck other for their living space. Today, the windows are open due to the warm weather. Ashley’s computers, keyboards and recording equipment are clustered in the centre of the space underneath a marquee-like canopy. The tent is there to protect the equipment from falling crumbs of concrete and ceiling plaster while the roof undergoes repairs. Despite the disruption, Ashley never loses his train of thought.’“That’s why so much popular music has to do with love,” he continues. “It puts a label on it and when it’s good, that label really works. It can’t do anything but that, no matter how hard people try. No matter how hard Bob Dylan tried or John Lennon tried, you can’t make popular music into anything except a labelling of your own experience that you never realised needed a label.” He sits up straight and places the palms of his hands firmly on the table in front of him. “Opera doesn’t do that. Opera is supposed to present you with characters in the same way that a great novel presents you with characters. In that sense, it becomes amoral. You’re supposed to be able to see it because it’s brought to you. That’s totally different than labelling an experience. You have to continually refer back to what human beings know. My job is to establish those characters.” We have just crossed the line where popular music ends and opera begins. “Popular music always “ends after accelerating clip. He is always Welcome to Robert Ashley’s territory. three minutes,” remarks Robert composing and touring, completing a Ashley without a hint of judgment in new opera about every three years Ashley often talks about history, his voice. In his studio in and following it with select perhaps because he had such a hand downtown , we’re talking performances that might take him in forging it. He and his about the he’s been writing across the and over to contemporaries were initially linked to since the mid-70s, which leads to a Europe and Japan. He edits his and through a discussion of popular song. He conversation with great care, as if variety of encounters and pauses, forging his next sentence. determined to verbalise the best take collaborations in the 1960s, and then “Popular music, when it works, of each thought. He and partner Mimi went on to become the most reminds us of something we already Johnson live in an old brick warehouse consistent practitioners of American know, or it reminds us of something that was converted into residential into the 70s. This we’ve already experienced. It turns lofts back in the 70s. She runs Lovely ‘post-Cage generation’ — Ashley, back the hands of time to something Music, the record label devoted to , and that we know from experience. It puts documenting key works of the — acquired their initial a label on that thing.” American electronic and momentum through their founding of Even at 72 years old, Ashley exists electroacoustic avant garde. The two The Sonic Arts Union (1966-76), a in defiance of history, and he are longtime residents, occupying two mutually supportive thinktank for live continues to move ahead at an floors — one for their studio and the experimental music. If Cage and Tudor represented the first wave of live drone of his voice. The repeated line Though he had stopped composing, production — the use “She was a visitor” cascades gently, Ashley didn’t remove himself entirely of magnetic tape and the amplification sleepily, into a chanted murmur, as an from the world of New Music. The of small sounds — then Ashley, accompanying chorus freely repeats Sonic Arts Union gave him a way to Mumma, Lucier and Behrman in their given phonemes from the sentence. perform without having to actually different ways represented four Ashley likened it to the process of compose. He also took the job of extensions of that abstraction, each rumour mongering, where the content Director of the Center for indicating musical practices that are of the original message becomes Contemporary Music at Oakland’s still being explored and utilised today. distorted and transformed with in 1969, revitalising one Ashley’s contribution consisted of repetition. of the most influential music his attempts to seamlessly integrate programmes in the country after electronic performance with human But one morning in April 1968, he several of its founding members — performance. One of the earliest and decided to stop composing altogether. most notably and most notorious examples was The Fully intending the decision to be final, — had left to pursue Wolfman (1964), where he played his his reasons were many, such as the other opportunities. Ultimately, it was own vocals through loudspeakers economic pressures of trying to Mimi Johnson who challenged Ashley simultaneously with a tape produce concerts while eking out a to return to composing, saying, “Well, composition and controlled the living with day jobs. With little money if you are a famous composer, you’ve feedback by putting his mouth up available for , he began to got to compose music.” against the mic. The avalanche of believe that “there was no reality” to But where to begin? During his noise was “so overpowering to the his dreams. He had also been deeply sabbatical, technology and the arts listener that no one ever understands discouraged by one of the last had evolved significantly. By the early how the sound is made”. performances of the touring ONCE 70s, video production equipment was The Wolfman was emblematic of Group, when the audience physically affordable for independent artists, the performance pieces Ashley tested assaulted the musicians. and experimental electronic music during his years of work in Ann Arbor, “The performance we did at flourished with the accessibility of Michigan, particularly with Gordon Brandeis [1968] was a beautiful piece synthesizers, integrated circuits, and Mumma for Milton Cohen’s Space called Night Train,” Ashley recalls.”“It other by-products of the burgeoning Theater (1957-64), and with Mumma involved, among a lot of other things, computer industry. “I had been and others for the ONCE Festivals giving the audience something when working for years on an idea of an (1961 and 1965). Ashley was they came in. The idea of the piece opera whose characters were all my constantly experimenting with was that we were aliens trying to composer friends,” says Ashley, “and combinations of available technology make friends with the Earth people. they would be represented in the and live performers. His 60s portfolio So, everybody who came in along with opera by their music and by their is a melange of performance their ticket got something edible, like conversation. I tried to make it work in approaches, including purely an apple or an onion or a fish or a loaf about five different ways. Finally, when electronic works for tape such as Big of bread or something like that. I figured out that I could do it on Danger In Five Parts (1964) and Somehow in the middle of the videotape it just came together very Untitled Mixes (1965), and performance the audience kind of lost quickly.” soundtracks for the experimental films it and started attacking us. They were This work became Ashley’s first of George Manupelli. throwing things... Besides the hard extended ‘opera’ for television, Music The ONCE Festival became a pieces of vegetable, like an onion, we With Roots In The Aether (1976). remarkable laboratory for New Music were passing out lights. [Architecture Aether is a 14 hour TV opera/ and mixed media before Ashley and professor] Harold Borkin had a group documentary featuring the work and Mumma wound it down in 1966 in Ann of ten or so students there who were ideas of seven American composers: Arbor to concentrate on other outlets soldering one end of a flashlight bulb David Behrman, , Alvin and contexts for their music. While to one end of a battery and then Lucier, Gordon Mumma, Pauline Mumma went to work with Tudor, Cage soldering a wire to the other end of Oliveros, and Ashley and the Dance the battery. When the audience himself. More portraiture than Company (see The Wire 216), Ashley started throwing those, I knew we conventional operatic narrative, these extended his forays into electronic were in deep trouble. We got through video profiles lovingly showed the music theatre into works he called the performance but it was very ugly. artists in action rather than operas for voices, dancers and tape. It was very discouraging. I had had attempting to explain their work. After Drawn from his own That Morning enough. I didn’t compose music for premiering at the Festival d’Automne à Thing (1967), She Was A Visitor another five years.” Paris in 1976, Aether has been shown (1967), for speaker and chorus, was in different countries on TV or as an an early work featuring the soothing installation. Ashley followed Aether with The watershed composition in His development of characters, Automatic Writing: 46 minutes of Ashley’s portfolio is Perfect Lives accessible electronic scores, music so quiet that it’s mostly (1983). an opera for TV in seven half- precision timing, even his choice of inaudible at normal volume settings. hour episodes. Perfect Lives evolved musicians and vocalists all evolved The underlying keyboard sound making from the two-part Private Parts from it. up one layer of its texture is so muted, (1979), the two ‘private’ parts it sounds like it’s coming from another eventually becoming the bookends for Ashley likens his operatic output room. The base element of Automatic the bigger work. In Perfect Lives. between 1980-95 to a TV series Writing is the spoken voice, close- Ashley’s hypnotic voice is at the without a name. It consists of three miked, uttering what Ashley centre of a maelstrom of pulsing groups of operas, of which Perfect characterises as “involuntary electronics. He tells the story of two Lives is now considered the middle speech”: random comments, musicians conspiring to stage a prank sequence. The first is a trilogy called mutterings and disconnected bank robbery in a small Midwest Atalanta (Acts of God) (1985), which conversational fragments picked up American town. A series of encounters interprets the story of Europe’s origins off the street. But, more than the with other characters — an eloping through anecdotes about surrealist words, for Ashley the shape and couple, elderly people at a rest home, painter , shamanic timbre of the voices, the levels of the sheriff and his wife — leads to a storyteller Willard Reynolds and bop amplification and the musical solution of the mystery behind the pianist Bud Powell. While Perfect Lives accompaniment are all significant robbery. revels in the values of present day musical resources. “In Automatic Ashley was working on Perfect Lives middle America. the third installment Writing I had become interested in the during a period flushed with innovative is a quartet known collectively as Now idea of characters in an operatic or approaches to opera: Philip Glass and Eleanor’s Idea (1993) and relates the dramatic sense,” he says. “Of Robert Wilson had staged Einstein On history of religion through episodes characters actually being manifested The Beach in 1976, and Laurie about Judaism, Protestantism, through a particular sound. I was Anderson was producing her Catholicism and the ‘religions’ of big fumbling around looking for ways I mammoth United States I-IV (1979- business and science. In Ashley’s could work in an operatic sense that 83). Glass and Wilson’s opera is world. the individual is always at odds would be practical. I didn’t want to emphatically instrumental — one with the establishment. The underlying start writing things that wouldn’t be couldn’t escape the familiarity of the theme of his work is the sanctity of performed for 25 years without Glass sound. Anderson’s United the individual in an unforgiving world. forming a group.” States is determinedly visual with its Ashley’s most recent works, such Automatic Writing was frequently barrage of projected images, but a as Dust (2000) and, currently, lauded as an early Ambient piece, in great many American voices speak Celestial Excursions (2003), take a the wake of the late 70s recordings of through Anderson, as the work’s sole more inward look at the human Brian Eno and Jon Hassell, because of performer. In contrast, Ashley’s condition. Dust features the imagined its quiet, tinkling qualities. At the operas focus on a union of character, thoughts of various park dwellers and same time, its sparse repetitions story and an abundance of words. The down and outs who “live on the fringe caused others to bracket it with the instrumental portion of his music, of society”. Five readers occupy minimalist pulse works of while always integral to the transparent booths facing the and Philip Glass. Consisting largely of performance, is subsumed by the audience. The front pane of each spoken dialogue, it was also dubbed a continuous chattering of the booth is electronically modulated ‘text sound’ composition. While all characters. There’s no cult of between opaque and clear, obscuring those descriptions are superficially personality, only people and their or revealing the readers as required. accurate, most attempts to categorise stories. Overhead, many of the words spoken Automatic Writing are ultimately Perfect Lives has been called both are projected on a large video screen, unhelpful, for they fail to take account the first American opera, and the like afterimages of voiced ideas. of the way Ashley was attempting to future of opera. Not only has it been Celestial Excursions ventures into access a new form of musical performed live. It’s also one of the confined quarters of an old storytelling using the English Ashley’s only productions to achieve people’s home, whose senile language. He recalls, “I went toward some success on the small screen, residents struggle to remain tethered the idea of sounds having a kind of having been shown on TV in half a to reality. It premiered in Germany last magical function — of being able to dozen countries. With its voices March, and made its US debut in April actually conjure characters. It seemed buoyed up by electronic rhythms and in New York. This trajectory reveals to me that in a sort of psycho-physical chords that flap along with the words how his works have evolved sense sounds can actually make you like the decorated tail of a kite. thematically from a broader concern see things, can give you images that Perfect Lives set the pattern for much with government, religion, history, and are quite specific.” of the composer’s subsequent work. culture to a closer, more microscopic view of the individuals who make up people who have a very serious real- talking at an ordinary pace. You think Western society. “The characters I am life existence — like professional that they’re sounding like you. interested in,” he elaborates, “are athletes — you can see them being Actually. they’re talking twice as fast marginal, because everybody is transformed yearly into stereotypes.” as I am. I’ve never heard people talk marginal compared to the stereotypes. The key to Ashley’s work is speed. faster than this, and I know people Even though I am very interested in Television has accelerated human who really talk fast. Within 12 their profoundly good qualities, even perception and nowadays it’s infinitely seconds they give you the news, the though I’m not interested at all in evil, faster than 25 years ago, when he weather, everything, plus two or three the characters in my work are as was making his first video works. ads. It’s totally incredible. bizarre and unreal as the characters in “Tempo has been entirely neglected in “The essence of my music,” he William Faulkner. They just happen to opera for 100 years,” he explains. continues, “is that the syllables go by be ordinary people who are spiritually “It’s about time we got interested in as fast as they do in the American divine. And that’s why I can’t get on tempo, because it has made a big English language and the pitch television.” comeback in many aspects of our stresses, which make one syllable lives.” The pace of commercial radio more important than the other Despite all the international is a case in point. “I’m fascinated by syllable, are all within a range of half premieres and tours, the TV screen the speed in format radio. The an octave. It’s like you squeeze it in remains Ashley’s preferred medium. announcers speak at an unbelievable one direction and expand it in another “I’ve been thinking in terms of tempo. But they make it sound so direction. I’ve always been interested television for 25 years,” he says, casual that you think that they’re in tempo because it’s a big, big factor “despite not having much success in making television and not much encouragement. The television situation for anyone like myself now is pretty discouraging. It is so much more conservative than it was 25 years ago.” But Ashley remains hopeful, even though he knows that the production of radical video work for television has hit a long dry spell. “The game is not over,” he declares. “It’s just that in the last few years the corporations and advertisers saw television as a huge resource. So I didn’t win that game. I have a strong feeling that perhaps the disgruntled public will force television to come up with some new subject matter. That may open up the door for music. If it does, the door will only be open for a few seconds. Somebody may get in there.” Aiming his work at mass audiences reflects his belief in empowering alternative voices in society. His characters, unglamorous and marginalised, run counter to TV stereotypes. “My feeling,” he argues, “is that everybody, in our unhealthy, neurotic media environment, is on the fringe, except for the stereotypes. There’s nobody like the people on television. They don’t exist in the real world, including the newsmen and the weather reporters. It is becoming more and more peculiar that even in vocal music. The other factors, like melody, have been used up for the time being.”

For the last ten years, Ashley has composed for the same group of accomplished vocalists: Tom Buckner, Jackie Humbert, Sam Ashley and . A frequent collaborator on the electronic elements of his music is fellow composer Tom Hamilton. This ensemble recently completed eight performances of his latest piece, Celestial Excursions, at The Kitchen in New York’s Chelsea district. Ashley and Hamilton are now busy producing a CD based on this run. Celestial Excursions — scored for five vocalists, electronic orchestration and piano — doesn’t sound like most people’s conception of opera. At the premiere, Ashley’s four vocalists and the composer himself sat unassumingly at their own small tables, lined up facing the audience in front of the stage. At stage left, keyboardist Blue (aka Robert Sheff, a longstanding composer and performer on NYC’s avant music scene) took up position at a grand piano. The rest of the stage was the operating theatre for improvising dancer Joan Jonas, who moved silently and ghostlike throughout the night, articulating the nuances of Ashley’s wordy, rapidfire libretto with her body. Additional music, composed by Ashley using MIDI software, was played through a Kurzweil keyboard controlled by Hamilton, positioned at the rear of the theatre. The ‘plot’ of Celestial Excursions revolves around four elderly people who’ve been placed in an assisted- living home. “They’re not the kind of active elderly people that you read about, like business guys, Wall Street guys, or John Cage,” explains Ashley. “These people are the kind of people who have been marginalised in our society, even by their own families.” The environment consists entirely of other old people. “There’s a new set of rules that comes with being Scenes from Robert Ashley’s Celestial Excursions at Berlin’s Hebbel Theatre, spring there,” he continues. “That gives rise 2003, with (bottom) the composer as narrator. Photos by Mimi Johnson to very peculiar and personal meditations. The things they say and attached to resonant consonances. sounds for himself and to think of his the things they apparently think about “My main idea has been to make piano playing as accompanying Joan.” are not necessarily the things you American English sound like Constantly changing shape with the would associate with good citizenship. American English in the same way aid of a rack of clothes, capes, masks They’re strange sometimes. that Tosca sounds like spoken and long linen drapes, dancer Joan Sometimes they’re very radical. They Italian. I want it to sound like the way Jonas provides what Ashley calls go to extremes.” Ashley plays the part we speak English. That means that “additions to my very dumb, simple of a counsellor at the assisted-living the syllables have to go by at a idea of a person just getting ready for home. He says,”“Basically it’s just a faster rate.” the day”. dialogue between him and these four The words are spoken, declared, other people who are complaining sung and spouted as if from a secret ‘Dumb, simple’ ideas such as these about getting old.” interior dialogue. The piece’s texture have been the lifeblood of the The score runs to more than 130 is dictated by the threads of voices composer’s work for nearly 50 years. pages, with the text laid out in parallel that unwind, combine and Throughout it all he somehow columns. Each vocalist has a column sometimes weave together in a manages to rescue everyday moments to read. The piece would be daunting torrent of symmetrical patterns. The and launch them onto the stage with a for any ensemble not accustomed to traditional way of developing gripping fascination. He shares this working with Ashley. To maintain character in stage productions is by ability with some of the greatest timing and an even pace, each placing them in dialogue with other writers and artists of the 20th century. vocalist wears an in-ear monitor people. Celestial Excursions defies If James Joyce were alive today, he playing back a click track tuned to this convention by presenting would probably be trying to write middle C, and Ashley’s voice counting characters without context. “There’s operas like Robert Ashley. the measures. The pulse is a rapid no excuse, there’s no context at all,” Ashley is thoughtful as the light of (for opera) 100 beats per minute. says Ashley. “Which I thought would late afternoon dims, taking in the “Everybody is singing all the time,” be appropriate to this idea of a group clamour of traffic and voices that rises explains the composer gleefully. “We of old people in a home. You don’t from the street, six floors below. start with a solo by Joan [La Barbara] know where they come from. You “There’s nothing that makes you and the other three voices are a kind don’t know who their relatives are. happier than going fast,” he of chorus. I tried to make all of the They have no relationship to each concludes. “That’s one of the basic choruses different in some other or at the most a casual rules of life.” recognisable way so that you don’t get relationship. All you have to go on in the same chorus activity for each terms of character is just what they piece. In the dialogue itself, there is a tell you. What’s on their mind. In this Robert Ashley’s major works are available calculated rotation of the voices opera I was hoping that I could have on and Alga Marghen, who speaking to the counsellor. characters who were clearly have just issued The Wolfman. Thom Holmes is the author of Electronic And pattern of that rotation changes characters unto themselves but are Experimental Music: Pioneers In according to the plan of the piece.” not presented to us as the result of Technology And Composition (Routledge The work is dense with words, with a story.” 2002) the singers hovering around the pitch The instrumental accompaniment most comfortable to them. This is to Celestial Excursions, created by part of Ashley’s design for working sampling the vocal patterns of the with English. “I have never liked the singers and arranged into ‘orchestral way American composers have tried to libraries’ controlled by Tom Hamilton, adapt American English speech to a shifts continuously from a symphony European style,” he states. “Which, if of chords and articulated notes to you t listen to every opera that has waves of quiet noise that lend a ever been written by an American haunting reverberation to the composer, has basically come down to prevailing atmosphere. Blue Gene one syllable per note. My idea is that Tyranny’s amplified piano part is, by American English doesn’t have the design, disconnected from the kinds of vowel sounds that allow for singers. “There are so many amazing vocal embellishment of the vowel sounds that can be made on the sounds as in Italian, and of course piano with some combination of the Italian is our model. There are very three pedals, and that you rarely few pure vowels in American English. hear in ordinary piano playing. So I Most American English vowels are asked Blue Gene to make up a diphthongs or vowel sounds that are programme of those very unusual