Louth Contemporary Music Society, 2024
Gelsey Bell, Brian McCorkle, Paul Pinto, Dave Ruder, Aliza Simons, Amirtha Kidambi
An Táin Arts Centre, Dundalk - 14th June 2024
The LCMS, the Louth Contemporary Music Society, have been hugely imaginative in their programming over their 18 year history, finding accessible yet challenging and innovative ways to bring new music to a wider audience. Some of the names invited to put on performances of their work in Dundalk include Terry Riley, Philip Glass, John Zorn, Salvatore Sciarrino and Kaija Saariaho, but founder Eamonn Quinn makes great efforts to involve local musicians and present challenging but still accessible material to the local audience. In 2018, Gavin Bryars led world class musicians and local children's choir and music students through a moving rendition of 'Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet' and last summer's Folks' Music festival saw a thrilling rendition of Terry Riley's 'In C' played in a completely unique fashion by some of the finest Irish traditional and folk musicians. For their 2024 festival, going under the title of Lovely Music, the progamming of Robert Ashley alongside Linda Catlin Smith, Hamza El Din and Stockhausen is equally inspired.
I can't say for certain whether there has ever been a Robert Ashley opera performed in Ireland before, but it's hard to imagine anyone being as bold and adventurous as the LCMS. Holding a two-day festival dedicated to new music every June, bringing in some of the major figures as guests and featuring some of the best new music ensembles in the world to this small town, they don't usually feature opera as a rule or indeed have the resources to stage full operas, but then rules about what we think of as opera don't really apply to Robert Ashley’s works. There are several companies that specialise in performances of his operas and - I say this as someone who has long awaited for the opportunity to see one performed live - we were fortunate enough to have the Varispeed Collective come over and perform two works, Crash and The Bar (a section from the TV opera Perfect Lives).
Crash, Robert Ashley's last opera, was first performed just after his death in 2014. Like all his works, it's based around voices and a concept, but appropriately for a work that feels closest to autobiographical, there is a refinement of both those features. Crash consists of just voices: there is no music, not even the plinkity-plonk (apologies for using advanced musicological terms) electronic keyboard backing that often features. As far as concept goes, Crash appears to be a little more straightforward than some of his works in its structure into sections that advance the underlying concept. Of course many of his works start out that way and are far more sophisticated in their structure than they appear, but quickly meander down inexplicable and unpredictable twists and turns. As indeed does Crash.
There is at least an effort to hold that concept together a little more tightly than usual. As is announced at the start of the opera, it's based on the idea of life being divided into stages, not unlike Shakespeare's seven ages of man, but in the theory Ashley works with that was inspired by a book about Hindu belief, it sees it being divided into distinct 14 year cycles that govern our lives, each with their apogee and nadir that bring times of fortune and misfortune. That's 14 years for the masculine part. The feminine part is a 10 year cycle and one might be more dominant than other or become more dominant at different stages. The idea is one that the narrator(s) say is one that many religions hold to, seeing it as being related to the physical manifestation of the body as impure and evil, while the spiritual aspect has now been lost.
Structurally then Crash is divided into six Acts of 14 year cycles; Act 1 years 1-14, Act II is 15-28 through to Act VI covering 71-84, each section around 15 minutes long. The narration likewise has three interweaving narrative voices and three backing voices, which makes it somewhat easier to follow than Ashley himself doing all the main voices and appearing to go off in tangents, as in other works where the structure is less immediately evident. One voice sings as if they are talking in a conversational manner on the phone, another has a floating meditative singsong voice, the third exhibiting a mild stammer or halting glitch. All of these are styles that Ashley would have adopted himself in other works as the main narrator/actor.
The first voice talks about the basic concept (initially anyway) of the 14 year cycles, the second has a detached poetic quality that seems to relate to the main character's out-of-body experiences (electrocution, fainting, allergic reaction) and the third voice relates life experiences through those ages, covering the highs and lows of his career as a composer and musician. The other three backing voices recite vocalisations and chanted refrains of words from the main narration behind the narrative voices. Along the way, the text hits upon all variety of subjects including small people, neighbours and the discovery and meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The choices of what is expanded on as significant moments in the main figure's life are almost inexplicable, but of course they all relate to an examination of a life subject to forces outside oneself, or within oneself.
Just to complicate - well, not just to complicate but to adhere to the idea of cycles where dominant forces appear - the three singers doing the conversational, poetic and glitch voices switch with the 'backing' voices, and each of the two groups of three take their turn as one of the three voices in each of the sections. These are complex musical ideas, arrangements and leitmotifs, all presented in an unconventional manner, hugely distinctive and quite unlike anything else, but which nonetheless are surprisingly easy to grasp. Grasp perhaps, but not necessarily fully comprehend. You are kept on your mental toes trying to relate the interweaving stories and ideas and it requires intense concentration. There is no time in the flow to stop and consider an idea, so it's almost impossible to take everything in. There inevitably comes a point in Crash, like all Ashley's work, where you think either you or the work has wandered off and lost the meaning at some point.
Unless you see it performed. In that respect at least, Crash is much like traditional opera. With six people sitting at desks with no musical instruments and essentially reciting the text into microphones, you might think there is nothing that can be gained here that you can't get from listening to the exact same thing on CD, but the performance is a vital element. It's not that it varies to any degree from the recorded version, and I'm not going to claim that you can glean any greater meaning from the text, but there is definitely a truer connection established when you see people involved who can't help but bring themselves into the interpretation, allowing you to see as well as hear the quirks of Ashley's score presented to you. And yes, the visual engagement does certainly helps focus and the mind is less likely to wander, or at least not wander any more than is intended.
There are a few other reasons why this performance for the LCMS's Lovely Music festival was special, it being the 10th anniversary of the opera's first performance and the 10th anniversary of Robert Ashley's death. To make it even more of an occasion, it was performed by the original cast who worked with the composer on this final opera, the Varispeed Collective (including Amirtha Kidambi, whose solo musical career with the Elder Ones I am a big fan of). To be honest, just seeing a Robert Ashley opera performed is something I never even expected to see and that it didn't disappoint. It's a promising sign that Ashley's work still has followers, admirers and supporters (including Lovely Music that publishes his recordings) all contributing to keep his legacy going. This was an utterly fascinating performance of the work of a truly unique and inimitable composer.
