June 8, 1979 - New Music New York day 1: Robert Ashley's "Wolfman" at the Kitchen
New Music America - New Music New York 1979,
closing performance on the opening night at the Kitchen.
Robert Ashley with “Blue” Gene Tyranny: The Wolfman
(y2b post by “GBD”)
NMNY program:
Charles Ward, Houston Chronicle July 24, 1979:
Finally, the first night concluded with Robert Ashley’s The Wolfman of 1964. A historical work that ushered a new era of electronic shock in classical composition, the piece is predicated on distortions caused by feedback and based on an electronically derived score. As the composer roared into the microphone, half the audience fled and the other half formed the funny sight of people intent on listening while sticking their fingers in their ears.
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Joe Franklin (NMA Philadelphia) from his autobiography, Settling Scores (pp. 213-214)
Among the works we were most eager to hear and see was The Wolfman by Robert Ashley.
To our knowledge, only Robert Ashley had previously performed The Wolfman. It requires a performer to sing loudly – very loudly – into a microphone a tone that slides over the range of an octave (or more). The voice is “accompanied” by a separate taped composition. The performer is required to, (from Bob Ashley’s instructions that appeared in the July 1968 edition of Source – music of the avant garde) “slide the top front surface of the tongue from extreme front (against the teeth) to extreme back along the roof of the mouth, thus producing a range of 'vowels'.
By manipulating the tone production technique, the vocal sound (in combination with the taped sounds) becomes increasingly louder and louder. Then the sounds are controlled in a manner that causes severe audio feedback at a level that is approximately comparable to 1/2 watt of available power for every seat in the performance space. The resultant sound can be painful, causing members of the audience to flee the space with hands over their scorched ears. In its brief history The Wolfman caused controversy wherever it was performed and this night was no exception.
Almost everybody fled the Kitchen as Bob, bathed in an amber light, dark wrap-around sunglasses hiding his intense stare and sweating in tempo while leaning into the microphone, produced a very, very loud sound. It was loud, but strangely soothing.
Annson and I stayed throughout the performance, among a handful to do so. There was no other work on the festival which profoundly elicited an immediate reaction from the audience as The Wolfman did.
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Since posting this, I’ve learned that he performed Wolfman at NMA Minnesota in 1980; I don’t have any further details at this point, which will be added to this blogpost when I get them.
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From the Lovely Music liner notes of the recording
http://www.lovely.com/titles/cdalgamarghen2.html
The title track, The Wolfman, was composed in early 1964 and first performed on Charlotte Moorman's festival of the avant-garde in New York in the fall of the same year, gaining considerable reputation as a threat to the listener's health. For the occasion instigated by Feldman, Robert Ashley composed a piece of tape music, The Wolfman Tape, to be played along with the vocal performance of The Wolfman. The idea of a tape composition, which is to come out of the same loudspeakers as the voice and the feedback (the main sound source for this composition), is to fill-in the ongoing performance sound and to transform the performance into an elaborate version of the 'drone' under the influence of electronics. The choice of what sounds should be on the tape is determined by the need to have the whole range of frequencies brought into the feedback, but to give those sounds a short duration-in other words, a blizzard of very short sounds across the whole frequency range-so that the illusion of the sounds coming from all parts of the room is preserved. For the performance of The Wolfman recorded here, produced at the University of California at Davis, Robert Ashley used an earlier (1960) tape composition entitled The 4th of July. That composition changes gradually from a parabolic-microphone documentation of a backyard party into a layering of tape loops and tape-head feedback. The Wolfman Tape (1964) is, as descibed above, a tape composition made for a short performance of The Wolfman. It uses tape-speed manipulation and mixes of many layers of 'found' sounds, both from AM radio and from recordings made using different kinds of microphones.
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Pat Padua review of the re-release of The Wolfman, 20150613
https://spectrumculture.com/2015/06/23/robert-ashley-the-wolfman/
Originally composed in 1964, the 18-minute title track is an overwhelming sonic wash with a dramatic narrative attached. Made up of found sounds, AM radio recordings and a live vocalist, the piece is an experiment in feedback. In live performances of the piece, a backing tape would be played along with a vocalist, with vocals and tape coming out of the same speakers feeding back in an increasingly volatile audio collision that would appear to move around the performance space. This spatial effect can’t be captured on tape, but what you have is a disorienting, escalating explosion of sound that appears to be led by a screaming man. Ashley’s notes clarify that the vocalist in fact had to perform softly, otherwise the feedback would be blocked out. The Wolfman, which the composer concisely described as suggesting a “sinister nightclub vocalist,” is more interesting when you realize how it was recorded: the feedback becomes a metaphor for quiet voices amplified and distorted by the environment.
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Noisextra.com – Podcast with Chris Sienko and a discussion on “The Wolfman” 20200520
https://www.noisextra.com/2020/05/20/robert-ashley-the-wolfman/
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Getty image of Robert Ashley performing “The Wolfman” on September 3, 1964.
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Robert Ashley’s notes about a BBC production of The Wolfman in 2005 performed by keir Neuringer (vocals) and Joel Ryan (live electronics)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/cutandsplice/wolfman.shtml
The Wolfman was composed because Morton Feldman was asked by a singer-friend to compose a work for the friend's debut recital and Feldman didn't want to do it. He thought it would be a good chance for me. I had been thinking about feedback as a sound source for a couple of years, but I had never had the occasion to finish a piece. With Feldman's invitation I jumped into action, knowing full well that the singer would never do the piece I had in mind. But that's the way things came to pass in those grim days. I took what I had to do in the composition as a kind of answer to Feldman's challenge. I succeeded. Feldman liked The Wolfman a lot and wrote a friendly and positive review (also a rarity in those grim days). Of course, the singer never performed the composition and so I did the first performance in Charlotte Moorman's festival of the avant-garde in New York in the fall of 1964.
A few years later the score was published by Composer-Performer Editions and appeared in their magazine Source - after the piece had gained a considerable reputation as a threat to the listener's health.
Even today, for obvious reasons, most performances of music are done in rooms, halls, auditoriums that, because of the volume of the space, respond to feedback levels of amplification in the mid-range and higher frequencies. The smaller the room, the higher the frequency. This is when people put their hands over their ears, although in fact those higher frequencies are far less dangerous to hearing except over long exposures, than low frequencies - which are felt just as "pressure". I am speaking here about full room feedback, which allows even the smallest sound at the microphone to take on the illusion of moving around the room, depending on frequency and other aspects of the microphone sound. This is different from the use of feedback as "color" attached to the guitar sound, which was popularised by rock musicians just a couple of years after The Wolfman was premiered. In rock music the feedback is localised to the guitar amp and deafens only the guitar player.
If The Wolfman were to be performed in a great cathedral or airplane hanger, for instance, the feedback would center on much lower frequencies - in the human voice range or even lower, because of the volume of the space. At least that's the way I understand the idea, though I have never had a chance to experiment with it. But just a few years ago, on more or less the thirteenth anniversary of the premiere performance, I was wandering around Barcelona as a tourist and I went into a great cathedral just as the service of the mass was to begin. The sound technician had set the amplifier levels too high, so that when the priest approached the microphone the sound system in the cathedral made a wonderful feedback. But it was in the same range as the priest's voice and because the pitch range was low the feedback seemed tolerable to the priest. So, when he couldn't get the attention of the sound technician (who was probably having lunch) he just went ahead with the service. It was remarkable and beautiful, as through the priest were being accompanied by a huge ghost choir singing Gregorian chant in exactly the same key and mode that the priest was using in his singing and chanting. I realised that I was listening to a version of The Wolfman in a way that I would never hear again.
Reviewers, listeners and, indeed, some interpreters, I have been told, have understood The Wolfman as a person "screaming into the microphone". This couldn't be farther from the truth. The vocal sounds in the performance have to be probably the softest vocal sounds ever performed in public. Otherwise, the vocal sounds would 'block' the feedback and the two kinds of sound would alternate in the performance - singing, feedback during breathing etc. The technical idea of the variety of vocal sounds, which doesn't include any sound above normal speech level, is that the vocal sounds mix with the feedback (and mix with the sounds of the tape composition) to create the illusion of spatial movement to all parts of the hall for the different ingredients of the mix, depending on frequency and other factors. (Robert Ashley)
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Beth Anderson “Report from the Front”
Guerrilla criticism of ‘New Music New York’ (26 pages), June 1979:
The concert presented: the loud, the beautiful, the very loud, the amazing and the agonizing. Mr. Ashley, a truly wonderful composer on every other occassion, is the representative for the last catagory. Tonight he is like all the rest of the boys – too fucking loud. The saving grace is that its an old piece and it uses the wretched volume to endeavor to say something. Looking at his pained expression as he screams, I know how he feels. It may be important, but it sure is painful.
Why does everyone like this freaked out violence number? With the planets lining up at seventeen degrees, we can hope for the end of the world and the rebirth of acoustic life.
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From the same report by Beth Anderson:
Joseph D. McLellan interview (by the editor – he’s from the Washington Post…)
Q: What do you think of the music?
A: Tom Johnson’s ‘pokalockadukala’ piece sounds like the opening scene in The Music Man. Scott Johnson’s crying track was the most interesting part of his piece.
Q: What composers do you like?
A: J.S. Bach, Varese, Berio, the Rolling Stones before Let it Bleed, John Fahey and on this series the music I’ll remember the most is the Oliveros piece. And Ashley’s Wolfman.
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John Rockwell, NY Times review published June 10:
It was left to Robert Ashley at the end to provide the evening with a real climax, the only bit of old-fashioned avant-garde aggression of the night. Mr. Ashley performed his Wolfman, which dates back to 1964 and succeeded in driving a good portion of the early show audience from the premises.
The Wolfman consists of a cacophonous barrage of distorted electronic squawking on tape, fevered electric keyboard effects and Mr. Ashley grimacing and moaning into a microphone, his sounds twisted by howling feedback. It was a little bit of nostalgic history, a blast from the avant-garde past, a new-music golden oldie, and, at least in retrospect, amusing as such.
Southland Ensemble posted their 2015 version on y2b:
gd correction: the original mailing out of this post indicated it appears on the Kitchen compilation cd from 2004 but on fact checking myself, I found it not to be so. Hopefully there’s a copy of the performance either at The Kitchen’s archives or somewhere else…