She Was A Visitor

I figured I should post more music on this site. I used to more but then I lost access to my server so now I have to use free Internet host sites. Either way, it works so I’m going to post a new piece of music each week. Most of what is already posted here is disco or balearic. I have a few hundred gigs of experimental/new music/noise/ambient type stuff on a hard drive so I’ll share some the best of that collection. A lot of it is extremely out there and challenging material so I’ll try and keep it to pieces that are more listener friendly.

First up is a piece by Robert Ashley. When I studied this sort of music, my teacher, Maggi Payne, had been a student of his and turned me on to his stuff. He was one of the early electronic music pioneers that came out of the scene centered around the San Francisco Tape Music Center in the early 70’s. Now he is probably best known for directing operas but back then he was known for a piece called Automatic Writing. She Was A Visitor was included on the same CD as that classic work but for whatever reason it resonated with me more, and still does today. It is a experimental piece for voice from 1967 performed by the Brandeis University Chamber Chorus and directed by Alvin Lucier.

Ashley's notes on the piece: "She Was a Visitor is a form of description, it is intended to be understood as a form of rumor. The chorus is divided into groups, each headed by a leader. A lone speaker repeats the title sentence throughout the entire performance. The separate phonemes of this sentence are picked up freely by the group leaders and are relayed to the group members, who sustain them softly and for the duration of one natural breath. The time lag between the group leaders' phoneme choices and those phonemes being picked up by members of the group produces a staggered, chant-like effect, with the sounds moving outward from the nearest performer to the farthest".

Play it loud.

Robert Ashley - She Was A Visitor