AMIF 2015 Prologue #1: Yes, But Is It Edible? The Music of Robert Ashley, For Two or More Voices

For the first in a series of Prologue events for this year’s fifth edition of the Artists’ Moving Image Festival 2015 at Tramway, Will Holder and Alex Waterman read duets from the operas of Robert Ashley.

Some years ago we proposed to Robert Ashley that musicians and non-musicians might produce new versions of his operas, by way of typographical scores. The bulk of this book is a result of that proposal: scores for Dust (1998) and Celestial Excursions (2003). These operas’ characters have, until now, been solely produced by and are the stories exchanged between Ashley and his ​“band” (singers Sam Ashley, Joan La Barbara, Thomas Buckner, and Jacqueline Humbert); in landscapes (technological, imaginary, acoustic, organisational, sonic, ocular) produced by ​“Blue” Gene Tyranny, Tom Hamilton, David Moodey, Cas Boumans, and Mimi Johnson — the result of a thirty-year relationship. Any ​“scores,” as such, weren’t written for this intimate readership. It hadn’t been considered that any one outside this ​“band” might produce this work. – Will Holder and Alex Waterman, 2014

The scores for Dust and Celestial Excursions are preceded by a selection of Ashley’s work, from 1963 to 2008, drawing attention to the varying relations between instruction and score, and the tones of instructional address. Working with these scores gave us a better sense of how each one produces a specific mode of decision-making, telling us what to put on the pages of the scores, for any reader who follows.

This is the fourth in a series of publications produced with or by Holder and Waterman, a musicological perspective on scoring speech, and the role of printed matter in collective forms of reading and writing: Agapē (Miguel Abreu Gallery, 2007); Between Thought and Sound (The Kitchen, 2008); The Tiger’s Mind (with Beatrice Gibson, Sternberg Press, 2012); Yes, But Is It Edible? (New Documents, 2014).

This event is produced by LUX Scotland in collaboration with Tramway, for AMIF 2015.