Video
Portraits of Composers and their Music: David
Behrman, Philip Glass, Alvin Lucier,
Gordon Mumma, Pauline Oliveros,
Terry Riley and Robert Ashley.
Produced and directed by Robert Ashley. Philip Makanna, Director and Camera;
Maggi Payne, Audio Recordist; Jerry Pearsall, Video Recordist and Technical
Director
Seven 2-hour VHS programs. NTSC or PAL.
Music with Roots in the Aether is a music-theater piece in color video. It is the final version of an idea that I had thought about and worked on for a few years: to make a very large collaborative piece with other composers whose music I like. The collaborative aspect of Music with Roots in the Aether is in the theater of the interviews, at least primarily, and I am indebted to all of the composers involved for their generosity in allowing me to portray them in this manner.
The piece turns out to be, in addition, a large-scale documentation of an important stylistic that came into American concert music in about 1960. These composers of the "post-serial" / "post-Cage" movement have all made international reputations for the originality of their work and for their contributions to this area of musical compositions.
The style of the video presentation comes from the need I felt to find a new way to show music being performed. The idea of the visual style of Music with Roots in the Aether is plain: to watch as closely as possible the action of the performers and to not "cut" the seen material in any way--that is, to not editorialize on the time domain of the music through arbitrary space-time substitutions.
The visual style for showing the music being made became the "theater" (the stage) for the interviews, and the portraits of the composers were designed to happen in that style."
— Robert Ashley
Robert Ashley & Terry Riley, Moonshine Ranch, California, 1976. Photo: Philip
Makanna
Complete set of seven programs: $350.00
Available in either NTSC or PAL. Please specify.
Also available as DVD (NTSC only).