Robert Ashley: Superior Seven/Tract

Album review

Robert Ashley's Superior Seven exists in both a small chamber music version and in the full "Concerto" version here, for flute, piano and a computer-controlled electronic orchestra made by adding the smallest version in a specified order. The specific pitches, their octave displacements (with a gentle telegraphic effect to the rhythm), and the event occurences (e.g. the periodic sustain chord which enters like a ray of light) are encodings of words from various newspaper ads extolling "superior" houses for sale and rent. There are six movements: I. Superior Seven, II. Jewel of the Nile, III. Designed by a Well-Known Architect, IV. Restored to Classic Elegance, V. One-Of-A-Kind Treasure, and VI. Country Estate. The differences among them are subtle shifts in harmony and melodic mode, thus shifting the emotional mood. In all, a sustained aura of great and transmundane beauty is established. Ashley's Tract (1959, orchestrated in 1996 for voice and electronics) began as a composition for piano and voice written in five-voice counterpoint. At that time, Ashley was fascinated with an "implicit harmony" that occurs in the polyphony, " ... the harmony is not necessarily 'there' ... at any moment in the composition any number of those pitches (including all of them) could be dissonant to the implied harmony." Dissonances are created here from unresolved suspensions, whether or not the implicit harmony has in fact changed by the time of the resolution. For the later version, Ashley decided to bring this harmonic "aura" to the front and add it to the single pitches, making an ethereal, harmonically rich and sustained texture through which the live voice sails. "It is something of a setback for the 'theory', but then the piece wasn't written to prove a theory. It was written because that's the way I heard things then."

© TiVo