Robert Ashley - Automatic Writing [voices: mimi johnson, robert ashley | electronics: robert ashley]: 2 | Текст песни и Аккорды

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• Robert Ashley
• Automatic Writing [voices: mimi johnson, robert ashley | electronics: robert ashley]: 2

Automatic writing was a technique used by the surrealists to generate images that didn’t come from their rational conscious- ness. You can see why John Cage was interested in the surreal- ists. I met Cage once a couple of years ago in Germany, before he died. He had been sick and had gone to a German doctor, who ran a magnet over his body to make his diagnosis. And John said, “Oh, it was wonderful. He didn’t have to use his intelligence!” Anyway, the idea is that there’s intelligence that comes from vari- ous sources, in one case magnetism, and in another automatic writing. In the Forties, John Cage, Virgil Thomson, Lou Harri- son, and others wrote pieces in which each one would write a section. They would agree on such things as meter and length but otherwise wouldn’t know what the others were writing. They called it Exquisite Corpse, after a parlor game used by the surreal- ists in 1925.

In some of my composition classes, the first thing I do when I see that student composers are stuck for ideas is to suggest that they try automatic writing. I may give them thirty seconds to think about it, then write down what immediately comes to mind. It’s a way to get unstuck when you can’t work. It can give you beautiful and unexpected results.

In the Seventies many people were envious of my speech im- pediment—I stutter. (See the last sentence of “I Am Sitting in a Room.”) People would come up to me and explain that although one couldn’t tell from hearing them talk, in fact they stuttered. I never believed them and was amused by their desire to suffer the embarrassment that comes with stuttering. Anyway, Bob Ashley used to tell me that secretly he stuttered. I told him that I really didn’t believe that he did. A few years later he came up with the notion that he had Tourette’s Syndrome.

In the liner notes to the recording of Automatic Writing (1979), Bob states that he thinks he has a touch of Tourette’s. It is an imag- inative way of explaining involuntary speech, which is the basic sound source of the recording of Automatic Writing. These invol- untary utterances, processed by a switching circuit designed by Paul DeMarinis, as well as intermittent whispers in French, some mysterious organ music, and ambient sounds as if heard through the walls of an apartment next door, make up the sound material of the piece.

Recently mezzo soprano Priscilla Dunstan presented the idea that there are universal sound reflexes in babies from birth to three months old. For example, “Neh” means “I’m hungry”; “Owh” means “I’m sleepy.” If she is correct (her theory is yet to be proven) then what we thought of as simply random grunts and gurgles may now be considered as involuntary signals common to all human infants. We could, I suppose, analyze Bob’s utterances as having meaning, to him at least, if not to everyone. One could indicate anguish, sadness, regret.

In those days many people distrusted language or at least gram- mar. William Burroughs once said, “Language is a virus from outer space.” N. O. Brown said somewhere that when he hears grammar he thinks of an army marching.

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