“Say what you mean and mean what you say” is sage yet impractical advice. Societal conventions often throw a spanner in the works of meaningful communication. These fragmented thoughts swam into focus while listening to the late American composer Robert Ashley’s 1979 album Automatic Writing and 1985 opera Improvement (Don Leaves Linda) in circling sequence. The two works were recently reissued together, the former marking its 40th anniversary and the latter documenting a 2019 production of the opera at legendary New York performance space the Kitchen. While aesthetically poles apart, they make for a complementary pairing, because they illuminate Ashley’s interest in the interplay of speech and convention from opposite directions.
On Automatic Writing, which comprises one 46-minute piece, Ashley repeats the line, “My mind is censoring my own mind,” or a slight variation of it, a dozen times. The composition is based on a recording of the composer’s involuntary speech, a symptom he attributed to a possible “mild form of Tourette’s.” “It is against the ‘law’ of our society to engage in involuntary speech,” he wrote in the liner notes of a 1996 reissue of the record. “That’s why we are embarrassed to talk to ourselves. That’s why Tourette had to leave the room.” Ashley came to record himself because he’d noticed repetitions in the phrases he muttered and wondered how these unconscious patterns related to his work as a composer. Could he find music within the mysterious workings of his own body?
In his searching, Ashley distorted his voice to the point of granular gesture on Automatic Writing. (Save for a few moments of clarity, it is only possible to understand what he says by reading the transcription that accompanies the release.) In a rare example of an echo being more legible than its origin, the emotional resonance of his mouth sounds is underscored by a whispered French translation of his involuntary speech performed by long-time collaborator Mimi Johnson. The faraway melody of an organ and the murmurings of a Polymoog, the latter evoking a crate of old-fashioned milk bottles jiggling against each other in transit, hold the space for the two voices. Layered together, these four sonic elements—or characters in an opera, as Ashley saw them—have a proto-ASMR quality, textural and sensual.
Where Automatic Writing puts Ashley’s own (involuntary) language under the microscope, Improvement (Don Leaves Linda) takes a widescreen view of the ways in which societal conventions can inhibit communication. On the page, it’s a hugely ambitious project: a domestic narrative (Linda is abandoned by her husband Don and has to make a new life for herself) laid atop a historical one (in 1492, the Jewish population of Spain was forced into exile by the country’s Catholic leaders). Yet instead of sweeping dramatic scenes, the story unfolds through social transactions that range from the awkward to the absurd, the kind that consumer society runs on: an encounter with a busybody family that gives Linda a lift to the airport after she finds herself abandoned (“Good luck trying to/Use your ticket. We would help you/If we could, but probably/It would only make things worse”); an exchange at an airline ticket counter (“Where were you when your husband left?”/“I was in the toilet at the turnoff”); a conversation with a doctor Linda met at a party in which she tells him about the dream she had the night before, which goes about as well as anyone who has ever tried to tell a stranger their dream. (“I’m sorry. What I meant that last night I dreamed as/I ordinarily do, and I wanted you to know that the dream/Was a common one for me, which I thought you could/Not know unless I told you.” “Just a moment, please.”)
It’s not just what the characters say but the way that they say it that tickles the senses. And they do say it, rather than outright sing it, often delivering lines—solo and in unison—at a thrilling sing-song pace, in clear-as-a-bell tones. “The essence of my music,” Ashley explained in a 2003 interview with The Wire, “is that the syllables go by as fast as they do in the American English language and the pitch stresses, which make one syllable more important than the other syllable, are all within a range of half an octave. It's like you squeeze it in one direction and expand it in another direction.”
What connects these two works is the malleability of language and the way the sound of it conveys as much as the substance. The line that Robert Ashley repeats on Automatic Writing has resonance for both: “My mind is censoring my own mind.” These seven words that sprang unfiltered from his interior world gesture to the way that self-awareness obstructs expression as much as they do the freedom that can come from breaking with societal convention. It’s this gift that the avant-garde opera pioneer left today’s artists: the precedent to take the form in whichever direction satisfies the senses.
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