Improvising Immortality
Composer Robert Ashley & Baritone Thomas Buckner Bring The Future To You
by Mic Holwin
originally appeared in American Composers Orchestra Quarterly Vol. II No. 1 Fall 1997
It's the future. A Greek chorus of tomorrow's denizens looks back to our time, eavesdropping on a jazz musician making his acceptance speech for the Noble Prize in Science. The musician has invented the Immortality Salve, a wonderful tonic except for the unfortunate side effect of a user's going to bed as one person and waking up another. Living forever loses some of its appeal when your personality gets randomly pulled out from under you like a rug.
That's not a scene from a sci-fi novel. It's the concept behind pioneering composer Robert Ashley's latest work, When Famous Last Words Fail You, an ACO commission which will have its world premiere at Carnegie Hall on December 7.
"When you get to the Pearly Gates," explains Ashley, "you have to make a statement. Of course, everybody's statement is rather odd." These statements are what Ashley dubs "Immortality Songs," his latest exploration of the human theater. The premiere of When Famous Last Words Fail You will be the first time an Immortality Song, one of seven of a projected total of 49 that Ashley has written so far, will be done in full performance.
Singing the part of the jazz musician and salve inventor is longtime Ashley teammate, baritone Thomas Buckner, himself an inhabitant of the future by way of his ceaseless championing of new music and emerging composers. "Tomorrow's music today" could be his motto.
Buckner and ACO are joined by vocalists Sam Ashley, Jacqueline Humbert and Joan LaBarbara, a chorus who comment on the soloist's increasingly off-track rantings, which they find anachronistic in the same way we would the voice on a scratchy 78rpm record found in the attic.
Their musical comments, however, as those of the orchestra, are restricted to one pitch, concert A. Different octaves and complex systems of entrances and exits transform a minimalist idea into a continually evolving texture.
The only performer not confined to A, soloist Buckner uses the declamation of the text and the implied melody in the words as a source for spontaneously inventing the melody of his part. A cohort of Ashley's for some 12 years, Buckner is at ease with and enjoys Ashley's exploration of "controlled versus not-controlled."
Previous to his current examination of immortality, Ashley made his name in mixed-media art, through which he began a lifelong redefinition of the collaborative process that is opera. He established Ann Arbor's ONCE Festival in the '60s, directed the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College in San Francisco and founded composers' collective the Sonic Arts Union in the '60s and '70s, and preceded MTV with his concept of "video opera," multimedia operas staged for television, in the '80s. Ashley's opera trilogy, Atalanta (Acts of God), Perfect Lives and Now Eleanor's Idea, totals 40 1/2 hours of opera for television, of which eight have been realized by Channel Four in Great Britain, though Ashley hopes to one day see them all staged.
When Famous Last Words Fail You is, in Buckner's words, "an open-ended ending" to that trilogy. Unlike an Ashley opera, however, Immortality Songs are conceived as individual pieces and have no video or stage sets save for what staging the soloist brings to the characterization.
Ashley writes for and works with an ensemble of friends, such as Buckner. A musician as excited as Ashley about experimental music, Buckner performs 20th century works almost exclusively and gives more world premieres a year than most performers in their career.
Buckner's yearly high point is a solo concert of all world premieres, many of them commissioned by him, at Merkin Concert Hall as part of the Interpretation Series. It's a present to himself for being the programming director of that 12-concert series the rest of the year.
Says Buckner, "Most singers do new music as an adjunct to their classical careers. I did that for a number of years and then I decided that I really preferred doing new music. And when I came to New York, I decided to pretty much specialize."
It was then, in the '80s, that Buckner began working with Ashley. In describing their relationship, Buckner says that Ashley "invented his style, but the two of us together invented the style in which I do his pieces. I'm the first singer that he worked with that can incorporate classical singing sounds through the speech-type thing that he does."
Buckner also excels at improvisation, a necessity for an Ashley piece. His interest first piqued as a young man by the music of "free" jazz players like the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman, Buckner "had a hobby in college of being a jazz singer." It led to his first work in improvisation with musicians such as Art Ensemble saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell, with whom he has a continuing 25-year relationship.
A highlight from the past year, Buckner teamed with Mitchell in a performance and recording of Tom Hamilton's Off-Hour Wait State, an "electronic environment for improvisers." Another was giving the world premiere of Morton Subotnick's new "media poem," Intimate Immensity, for singers, Balinese dancer and multimedia, at Lincoln Center in July.
Ashley is currently at work on the next two Immortality Songs, on commission from Southwest German Radio and Japan. He is planning a recording of Now Eleanor's Idea and writing a screenplay for a French television production of Eleanor's first part, Improvement.
Ashley and Buckner united earlier this year for Balseros, an opera about Cuban raft people commissioned by the Florida Grand Opera, for singers, electronic score and Afro-Cuban drummers.
With such a varied menu of styles and ideas, a performer has to be ready for anything, says Buckner, Ashley a case in point. "You never know what a composer's going to come up with."
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