Hot with Excess
12 December
Music with Roots in the Aether,
Parts 4-7
The Underground Cinema, 180 Studios
BOOK TICKETS
Full price: £10
Concessions: £8
On the door: £12
Doors: 10.30am
Screenings start: 11am
Robert Ashley
Music with Roots in the Aether (1976)
(UK premiere)
11am
4. Gordon Mumma
1pm
5. Pauline Oliveros
3pm
6. Terry Riley
5pm
7. Robert Ashley
Few composers stretched the possibilities of what an opera could be more than the American composer Robert Ashley. Seven years before his video-opera masterwork Perfect Lives, he made Music with Roots in the Aether (1976), arguably an even more radical interpretation of what a Gesamtkunstwerk might look like.
Ostensibly a set of portraits of seven of the most important post-serial/post-Cage composers working in America at the time, Ashley called the work ‘a music-theater piece in color video’, seeing the interviews an act of theatre, and pairing these playful, hour-long head-to-heads with an hour-long film of each composer’s music:
Parts 1-3, featuring composers David Behrman, Philip Glass and Alvin Lucier, will receive their UK premiere public presentation on Saturday 5 December, 1pm. Parts 4-7, featuring composers Gordon Mumma, Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley and Ashley himself, will receive their UK premiere on Saturday 12 December, 11am.
Ostensibly a set of portraits of seven of the most important post-serial/post-Cage composers working in America at the time, Ashley called the work ‘a music-theater piece in color video’, seeing the interviews an act of theatre, and pairing these playful, hour-long head-to-heads with an hour-long film of each composer’s music:
‘The style of the video presentation comes from the need I felt to find a new way to show music being performed. The idea of the visual style of Music with Roots in the Aether is plain: to watch as closely as possible the action of the performers and to not "cut" the seen material in any way – that is, to not editorialize on the time domain of the music through arbitrary space-time substitutions.
‘The visual style for showing the music being made became the "theater" (the stage) for the interviews, and the portraits of the composers were designed to happen in that style.’ (Robert Ashley)
Parts 1-3, featuring composers David Behrman, Philip Glass and Alvin Lucier, will receive their UK premiere public presentation on Saturday 5 December, 1pm. Parts 4-7, featuring composers Gordon Mumma, Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley and Ashley himself, will receive their UK premiere on Saturday 12 December, 11am.