UbuWeb Sound :: Robert Ashley

Robert Ashley

1. Interiors With Flash (3:07)

Recorded Mills College, Oakland, CA, May 14, 1978 from Big Ego (Giorno Poetry Systems)

2. The Wolfman (15:33)

From SOURCE: Music of the Avant-Garde

3. In Sara Mencken, Christ and Beethoveen there were men and women (1972)

Text: John Barton Wolgamot (written 1944)

Music: Robert Ashley + Paul DeMarinis
Voice: Robert Ashley

Reissued by Lovely Music,LCD 4921

4. Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon

From the LP Sonic Arts Union

All sound and videos are granted to UbuWeb by permission of Robert Ashley and Lovely Music.

NOTES

'The Wolfman', was composed in early 1964 and first performed on Charlotte Moorman's festival of the avant-garde in New York in the fall of the same year, gaining considerable reputation as a threat to the listener's health. For the occasion instigated by Feldman, Robert Ashley composed a piece of tape music, 'The Wolfamn Tape', to be played along with the vocal performance of 'The Wolfman'. The idea of a tape composition, which is to come out of the same loudspeakers as the voice and the feedback (the main sound source for this composition), is to fill-in the ongoing performance sound and to transform the performance into an elaborate version of the 'drone' under the influence of electronics. The choice of what sounds should be on the tape is determined by the need to have the whole range of frequencies brought into the feedback, but to give those sounds a short duration-in other words, a blizzard of very short sounds across the whole frequency range-so that the illusion of the sounds coming from all parts of the room is preserved. For the performance of 'The Wolfman' recorded here, produced at the University of California at Davis, Robert Ashley used an earlier (1960) tape composition entitled 'The 4th of July'. That composition changes gradually from a parabolic-microphone documentation of a backyard party into a layering of tape loops and tape-head feedback. 'The Wolfman Tape' (1964) is, as descibed above, a tape composition made for a short performance of 'The Wolfman'. It uses tape-speed manipulation and mixes of many layers of 'found' sounds, both from AM radio and from recordings made using different kinds of microphones. 'The Bottleman' was composed in 1960 as music for an experimental film by George Manupelli. The 40 minutes long version preseted here involves contact microphones on a surface that holds a loudspeaker some six feet away. The loudspeaker is broadcasting open-circuit 'hum' (at the American standard of approximately 60 hertz). That pitch is raised slightly through tape manipulation and the result is mixed with vocal sounds and other 'found' sounds played back at various tape speeds. All compositions previously unreleased. The digipak CD comes with a 12 pages booklet including liner notes written by the composer and the complete score of 'The Wolfman', first issued in Source magazine."

Some Common Observances by Robert Ashley (1972)

1. On examining the structure of Wolgamot's poem, I have seen that it is possible to pronounce every stanza, without taking a fresh breath. Among other things, given the fact that it was not possible to do otherwise, I successively became convinced that this was the poet's intention. Wolgamot, who I only met later, observed ironically in this regard: "I bet you had difficulty with the last page."

2. Another problem which I had to solve was the pronunciation of the proper nouns. As I could not pronounce them each time in their original language and, on the other hand, to avoid the usual sing-song way radio announcers have of speaking, I took the unusal decision to read them as though they were in English. In this way, among other things, I believe I underlined the American tone of the poem better, its relations with the 1950's American culture and the embarrassment of the latter in comparison with European culture.

3. Having linked together the recordins of the individual stanzas, I began to experiment with various accompaniments to the point of imagining a structure of the poem capable of including the entire ambience in which it was immersed, like light, temperature, etc. In fact, this insight is my only real contribution to the poem given the fact that, in no way, did I want to modify it's already perfect form. I have therefore elaborated two different types of accompaniment, one which is a simple surrounding to the vocal structure (used for the first performance in Bremen, 1972), and another where the same structural characteristics of the poem guide the accompaniment, as they do in this recording.

4. Paul DeMarinis, an expert in Moog Synthesizers, has elaborated seven different modular combinations, each of which can be controlled by programmed impulses. These derive from the sound of the reading of the poem passed through a regeneration high frequency filter and successively translated into a series of command impulses.

RELATED RESOURCES:

Music With Roots in the Aether