For this event, Will Holder and Alex Waterman will be reading duets from the operas of the late, great composer, Robert Ashley, in support of their book, 'Yes, But Is It Edible? The music of Robert Ashley, for two or more voices'.

Robert Ashley, a distinguished figure in American contemporary music, holds an international reputation for his work in new forms of opera and multi-disciplinary projects. His recorded works are acknowledged classics of language in a musical setting. He pioneered opera-for-television.The operatic works of Robert Ashley are distinctly original in style, and distinctly American in their subject matter and in their use of American language.

“Some years ago we proposed to Robert Ashley that musicians and non-musicians might produce new versions of his operas, by way of typographical scores. The bulk of this book is a result of that proposal: scores for Dust (1998) and Celestial Excursions (2003). These operas’ characters have, until now, been solely produced by and are the stories exchanged between Ashley and his “band” (singers Sam Ashley, Joan La Barbara, Thomas Buckner, and Jacqueline Humbert); in landscapes (technological, imaginary, acoustic, organisational, sonic, ocular) produced by “Blue” Gene Tyranny, Tom Hamilton, David Moodey, Cas Boumans, and Mimi Johnson—the result of a thirty-year relationship. Any “scores,” as such, weren’t written for this intimate readership. It hadn’t been considered that any one outside this “band” might produce this work.

The scores for Dust and Celestial Excursions are preceded by a selection of Ashley’s work, from 1963 to 2008, drawing attention to the varying relations between instruction and score, and the tones of instructional address. Working with these scores gave us a better sense of how each one produces a specific mode of decision-making, telling us what to put on the pages of the scores, for any reader who follows.

This is the fourth in a series of publications produced with or by Holder and Waterman, a musicological perspective on scoring speech, and the role of printed matter in collective forms of reading and writing: Agapē (MiguelAbreuGallery,2007); Between Thought and Sound (The Kitchen, 2008); The Tiger’s Mind (with Beatrice Gibson, Sternberg Press, 2012); Yes, But Is It Edible? (New Documents, 2014).”