Four American Composers, Vol. III: Robert Ashley

🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿

🎙️ EPISODE 416: 03.08.22 𝐏𝐚𝐫𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝟏𝟎-𝐕𝐨𝐥𝐮𝐦𝐞 RANKING GREENAWAY 𝐒𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐬 This was the musician I was least acquainted with going in, and I thought — at the very least — that his style, which incorporates a lot of video and other mixed media, was extremely well-suited for Greenaway's similarly-minded maximalist aesthetics. The focus of this doc is squarely on the performance of Ashley's piece Perfect Lives. This is an incredibly weird piece and its outward weirdness seems to be the point; Greenaway tries to pick apart some meaning in the various interview segments with Ashley and other members of the performing group, but the explanations don't really help all that much and — again — that seems to be working mostly in its favor as a piece of experimentation.

CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 416B - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 416D ⫸

---

Four American Composers is a 4-part documentary that follows four different contemporary composers performing/creating/building their shows. Peter Greenaway leads us through the creative process of 4 very different composers in style: sound and noise (John Cage) repetition and discipline (Philip Glass), poetry and musical freedom (Robert Ashley) and vocal experimentation (Meredith Monk) who are all framed under the same musical genre, contemporary music. It was released on May 1, 1983.