#robert ashley

10+2: 12 American Text Sound Pieces, (12" vinyl record), S-1752, 1750 Arch Records, 1975 [midcenturyclassical]

“Sitting here

Thinking about life

in all its forms. It's

one of those days so

far where nothing fits.”

So begins the voice of Robert Ashley musing over breakfast at the Holiday Inn Hotel, “where he lives, ordinarily.” Tap Dancing in the Sand is a one-off collaboration between the late avant-garde composer-librettist Robert Ashley and the now-defunct Dutch contemporary classical Ensemble MAE (formerly the Maarten Altena Ensemble, named after its founder, contrabassist Maarten Altena). Robert Ashley’s monologue began as a commission to “write five or six scenes where [Hector] Berlioz would make profound and oracular statements.” The text was written in 1979 for a film project by Woody Vasulka (The Commission), but the character Ashley wrote was Berlioz playing Alvin Lucier playing a character named Dr. Chicago from a series of motion pictures by George Manupelli. Ashley’s profound and oracular statements meander like the music itself, the instruments here written to imitate the stresses and rhythms of spoken English by the practice of ‘shadowing’ or ‘doubling’. Monolithic piano chords in a jazz idiom thus toll throughout in indeterminate rhythm, a female voice oohs along with the changes, while resonant tom-toms and a finicky muted horn provide texture. For a brief and beautiful second Ashley sings the word “fan-dan-go” in triple meter. In the end he thinks he understands something out of Plutarch about Metrodorus of Scepsis, at which point the monologue precipitously drops away. The horn, electric guitar, a violin, and a clarinet carry on in jittery dialogue meant to hearken back to the oracular style of the speech, thus demarcating Parts I and II of a 15-minute piece repurposing Ashley’s text from ’79.

[notes from undrcurrents]

Anxiety / dissociation music

Music that evokes feelings of unease, anxiety, terror, discomfort. Lots of drone music as I associate quite a bit of it with this feeling - I'm confident I could've filled the entire chart with more drone / noise. Idea came whilst relistening to Radio Amor.

"... The problem is the arc.

The changing angle of the shot.

It defies geometry.

The drawings of a geocentric solar system, when we meet them in the books, make us avert our eyes.

Heresy is heresy.

We make one great, weird curve from the east edge of the backyard,

looking west –

She is on the right edge of the shot –

across, following the equator of the backyard, to the west edge,

looking east.

Now she is on the left edge.

At some point, midway, we face,

both looking at the center.

The center is between us.

Except that for the purpose of the shot, or in the interests of economy,

she doesn't move.

She is standing in the doorway of her mother's house.

The doorway to the back porch.

The backyard is the south.

Behind her the great northern constellation rises in the majesty

of its architecture.

Well, maybe that's a little too much.

Let’s just say that contradictions are behind her.

And in the backyard, god, this set of circumstances

that is indescribable with our geometry.