Robert Ashley - Yellow Man With Heart With Wings (1990)

"A two-part composition with narration (part one in Spanish and part two in heavily altered English) commissioned by public radio station KUNM in Albuquerque, this music has a plain, serene beauty. Part one is a narration by Guillermo Grenier in dreamy, flatly inflected Spanish, backed by a four-note synthesizer track, and punctuated by mysterious, heavily processed vocalizations. Ashley throws in extensive sound washes and other electronic figures which flutter in and out of the mix. The text, "Ideas from The Church," will later show up in the 1994 opera, Foreign Experiences. It is included in the liner notes. In part two, the four-note synthesizer line returns, this time backing an ethereal, sustained chord, and the vocals sound "like a distant rendering of the earth's electromagnetic halo."
1990 CD issue of this 1978 piece for voice and electronics. The electronics (with additional Clavinet by "Blue" Gene Tyranny) start out shimmering and subtle, slowing building up in strange, menacing fashion. The first part is in Spanish (with Guillermo Grenier providing the voice); the second part is "in English" (heavily processed vocals by Ashley) and quite radical -- easy to imagine this one sitting very high in a United Dairies-like universe."
~ in Forced Exposure

"An inspired prose-poem in Spanish and English about agriculture, and other perspectives and feelings that occur to people in cities, and to those who live outside cities. Heart-lifting."
~ "Blue" Gene Tyranny, All Music Guide

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Robert Ashley studied with Ross Lee Finney, Roberto Gerhard, Leslie Bassett. Music degrees from Univ. of Michigan and Manhattan School of Music, worked in Speech Research Lab (psychoacoustics and cultural speech patterns) and was a Research Assistant in acoustics at the Architectural Research Lab. Co-founder legendary ONCE Group in the 1960s, co-director Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College in 1970s. Created new kind of opera (sometimes called the New Narrative opera) in works like That Morning Thing (1967), Combination Wedding and Funeral (1964), Perfect Lives an opera-for-TV (1980), e/L Aficionado (1991). Social behavior and and language illusion studies like The 4th of July for tape (1960), The Wolfman (1964), in memoriam ... Crazy Horse (symphony) (1963), The Trial of Anne Opie Wehrer and Unknown Accomplices for Crimes Against Humanity (1968).
+ info on Ashley HERE

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Robert Ashley : English voice and all instruments; except "Blue" Gene Tyranny, clavinet; Spanish voice : Guillermo Grenier

Track 1 : Spanish version running time: 26' 51''
Track 2 : English version running time: 26' 39''

Originally composed by Robert Ashley in 1978 (Visibility Music Publishers)

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Alejandro Viñao - Children of Nancarrow (2004)

This radio programme is about the Children of Nancarrow, the composers who came after him and have been influenced by his music or, perhaps even more so, by his ideas. This post Nancarrow generation took off where Nancarrow's piano etudes left to explore in different directions the issue of multiple simultaneous tempi. During the programme I play and discuss selected movements or complete pieces by these composers. Alejandro Viñao

Featuring excerpts from:

*Alejandro Viñao, 'The World We Know'
*Alejandro Viñao, 'Phrase & Fiction' performed by the Flux Quartet
*Javier Alvarez, 'Cuaderno Para Armar', by Banda Elastica
*Luca Francesconi, 'Mambo', by Jean-Luc Plouvier (piano)
*Gyorgy Ligeti, 'Etudes Pour Piano - No.6' , by Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano)
*Gyorgy Ligeti, 'Piano Concerto' by Ensemble Intercontemporain conducted by Pierre Boulez with Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano)
*John Adams, 'Short Ride in a Fast Machine', by Netherlands Wind Ensemble conducted by Stephen Mosko
*Conlon Nancarrow, 'Etude No.15' by a player piano
*Conlon Nancarrow 'Etude No.9' performed by Ensemble Modern
*Moritz Eggert, 'The Trouble with Trills'
*Charles Amirkhanian, 'To a Nanca Rose'
*Charles Amirkhanian, 'A Rimsky Business'
*Charles Ives, realised and completed by Larry Austin 'Universe Symphony'
*Igor Stravinsky, 'The Rite of Spring' by the Cleveland Orchestra conducted by Pierre Boulez
*Giuseppe Verdi, 'Requiem' performed by the orchestra and choir of Teatro de la Scala conducted by Ricardo Muti
*Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, 'The Magic Flute' by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Herbert von Karajan
*Hector Berlioz 'Symphonie Fantastique' by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Herbert von Karajan
*Johann Sebastian Bach 'Musical Offering' by the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields conducted by Neville Marriner

Aired on 18.09.04 by BBC Radio 3, Hear & Now.
Written & presented by Alejandro Viñao
Produced by Philip Tagney

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Shelley Hirsch - O Little Town of East New York (1995)

"Besides her improvisations and collaborations, Hirsch writes and performs her own original compositions, amongst them three radio-plays: #39 (based on a text by Angela Carter), The Vidzer Family, and O Little Town of East New York. The Vidzer Family portrays a Jewish family with roots in Russia, who travelled to South America and ended up in Brooklyn's East New York in the 'sixties. O Little Town of East New York is a sort of sequel to it. It is a semi-autobiographical docu-musical about growing up in mid-century East New York. Hirsch recreates and inhabits remembered environments, situations and characters. She evokes the ethnically diverse neighbourhood: her Russian schoolmate's living room; the home of her own working class Jewish family; the synagogue; high school; the rallies against the Vietnam War; drugs. It's a hilarious, nostalgic, touching composition, merging avant and pop sensibilities. Critics praised her "dazzling technique" as well as her "wild, beautiful energy". The piece (later released on Tzadik) won the prestigious Prix Futura in Berlin (1993)".

"Hirsch's creative transformations of kitschy fragments and her skilled shaping of multiple dimensions suggest a quality central to the surrealist doctrine, the merveilleux: "a rupture in the order of reality." Her methods go beyond conventional definitions of composition and of performance. By violating logical, linear narrative forms, by opposing elements from our known world in disturbing ways, she plunges herself, and her audience, into collective reminiscences so visceral that they seem almost visual---a surreal accomplishment in itself". Anne Le Baron in Reflections on Surrealism in Postmodern Music.

David Weinstein: programming, sampling, performer.
Shelley Hirsch: lyre, programming, main performer, sampling, vocals.

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