Sonic Arts Union: Robert Ashley
Preceded by a talk with Arthur Sabatini at 7pm
ANSWERS and OTHER SONGS (2010)
Robert Ashley, voice
ANSWERS is a set of thirteen questions about music in general and about my operas in particular. These questions could be posed to many opera composers. Some of the questions get answered and some do not, depending on the mood of the audience and the mood of the performer. This part of the concert can be brief — if none of the questions are answered — or it can be longer at any length. The duration depends on the singer’s feelings at the moment about the job of trying to explain things.
The OTHER SONGS are from a large set of songs composed to be sung in the accents of speech and with reference to a specific pitch — the “key” of the song. Some are from operas. (In the operas they are sung in a different style.) Others are individual songs composed simply to be sung in the style of speech. The songs variously take fifteen to twenty minutes. I bring a dozen or so songs to the concert and choose, almost at the last minute, which to sing. This makes the concert interesting for me in that the choice of the focus pitch — and, thus, the determination of the “character” singing the song — is unplanned and unrehearsed
A distinguished figure in American contemporary music, Ashley holds an international reputation for his work in new forms of opera and multi-disciplinary projects. His recorded works are acknowledged classics of language in a musical setting, and he pioneered opera-for-television. His main artistic innovation has been to examine and incorporate spoken American English into music, experimental soundworks, and opera. Early pieces for electronics and voice, including “The Wolfman,” prefigured later innovations in live electronics and noise music. He also developed a distinctive body of work for electronics and spoken English, eventually expanding to opera and his work in opera-for-television.
Sonic Arts Union Retrospective has been supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage through the Philadelphia Music Project.
