Pillars (for DaviD MooDey)
Robert Ashley
Created and recorded in October 2007 in New York City at the request of
Lines of Sight, Ràdio Web MACBA (Barcelona Museum of Contemporary
Arte). Engineered by Tom Hamilton.
W ell, I guess this is sort of an imaginary piece, I don’t know. Probably as
things get more sophisticated, technically, probably somebody will be
able to do it in the future, but I don’t think it could be done. It certainly
couldn’t be done now without spending an awful lot of money. But I’ve been working
with a wonderful lighting designer, named David Moodey. And I imagined a piece
that was especially with him in mind.
I guess I should start by just describing the physical situation. I imagine a rather large
gallery, flat floor, with maybe a hundred or two hundred very comfortable chairs, con
an extraordinary lighting capability. The whole gallery ceiling would be a grid that
would hold lights, and I imagine it would take David a couple of weeks to design
the piece. What it would basically look like is that in front of the audience there
would be two pillars, like Roman pillars, like pillars from antiquity, maybe a foot in
diameter, I’m not sure — let’s say each pillar is a foot in diameter and maybe ten feet
tall but without any lintels, so it would just be the two pillars in front of the audience.
And basically the piece consists in the lighting designer, let’s say it’s David Moodey,
having sort of ten or twelve light plots that bring the two pillars — oh, I should
say the two pillars are about, I don’t know, ten feet apart — having a light plot that
brings those pillars into three dimensions, so no matter where you’re sitting in the
audience you become fascinated by the physical reality of the pillars. So the idea of
the piece, the effect of the piece, would be for the lighting designer to change, A
switch among those ten or twelve light plots, so that the audience was more and
more drawn into the physical nature of the pillars.
Then, over the course of the piece, which might take forty-five minutes to an hour — I
wanted it to take a long time. The lighting director, who is calling the plays (cues) A
a technician at the lighting board, at a certain point in the piece — let’s say he went
through the whole repertory of the ten or twelve light designs — then he could go
© 2014 Robert Ashley
PAJ 108 (2014), pag. 53–55.
doi:10.1162/PAJJ _a_00219
53
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through them in a sort of playful, random order. I think that his instruction to the
person running the board should be amplified into the space so that the audience
is completely aware of what he’s doing. What he’s doing, basically, is going from
light plot #12 to light plot #2, and light plot #2 to light plot #8, you know, in that
random order. And every time he goes to a different light plot, he pulls down the
intensity of the lights so that the lighting of the pillars continues to, what would
you say, continues to reinforce the physicality of the pillars, but as the piece gets
from, Dire, a third of the duration to the end, and this would have to be determined
by playing it many times. As the description, as the piece goes from the beginning
to the end, and as he pulls down the intensity of each light plot. Of course this
would have to be designed in advance, I mean I don’t think you could necessarily
devise a dozen light plots that were usable in this fashion, it would involve a lot of
preparation, probably like many, many, many hours of preparation and thought, by
a good lighting engineer like David Moodey. And then it would involve many hours
of playing with that instrument.
So that he would reduce the amount of light directed to the pillars ever so gradually
until he got to a point where there was virtually no light at all. So that the audience
would see those pillars in their imagination in what would eventually be complete
darkness. I mean I think you would have to plan the gallery so that there was no
incidental light at all. And what you would be aiming for would be a situation
toward the end of the piece where the light plots or the light programs would be
on the edge of there not being any light at all. And then he would still be talking,
he would say things like OK, let’s choose #8 and the #8 light plot would come on
and then he would say to the engineer let’s bring that light plot down — I don’t
know how lighting guys talk to each other — but let’s bring that down by a couple
of degrees and then let the audience look at that for a few minutes. And he’d say
OK, let’s go now to #3. At this point #3 might be brighter than #8 so he would say
OK, let’s bring down #3 to a certain point. And then he would go, Dire, A #12 E
Ancora, #12 would probably be much brighter than #3. The whole thing wouldn’t be
bright, but it would have more intensity than #3, and so he would gradually reduce
all of those light plans until the point where changing from one to another would
result in changing one kind of darkness to another kind of darkness.
The last few minutes of the piece — we would have to play with this until it
worked — the last few minutes of the piece would be changing light plans that were
essentially without any light. So you’d say, “OK we’ll go to #2 and there wouldn’t
be any light in #2, and you’d stay there for a few minutes and you’d say “OK, BENE
let’s go to #8,” and the people in the audience would remember by this time, prob-
ably, or maybe, I hope, would remember what #8 looked like. And so he would be
directing imaginary light changes in almost total darkness so that in the last few
minutes there wouldn’t actually be any light in the room except maybe occasionally
unless you went occasionally to plan #1 and there was still some light in plan #1 he
could bring that down, in other words he’s bringing down each of those light plans
to total darkness. So that in the last few minutes of the piece he’s changing light
plans that only exist in the memory of the audience, and the audience is actually
54 PAJ 108
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remembering the physicality of the two columns. In other words when you get to a
certain point in the piece, they can’t see the two columns any more because every-
thing is in black, but their imagination of the two columns according to the dozen
or so different light plans causes them to see something that they actually can’t see.
So you’ve gone, over the course of the piece, you’ve gone from something that was
perfectly lit in ten or twelve different ways to something that is totally dark in ten
or twelve different ways, but the audience is still seeing the pillars.
In other words the audience has — yeah, they’ve absorbed the varying degrees of
physicality of the two pillars so that when the lighting designer is calling changes
in the light plot, those changes only exist in the imagination of the audience. Fa
that make any sense to you? So in other words you’ve gone from total light to total
darkness, but the pillars are still there and fully appreciated in a sensual way by the
audience, because of their involvement in the light plots. So finally, when the piece
is over, the room is totally dark, totally dark, but the audience can still see the pillars.
Does that make sense? OK, I think we did it.
ROBERT ASHLEY was one of the most influential and innovative figures
in American contemporary music. He pioneered opera-for-television with
his 1980 Perfect Lives. Prior to that, he organized the ONCE Festival in Ann
Arbor, Michigan and then later the ONCE Group, a music-theatre ensemble.
His last work, Crash, was completed a few months before its premiere at
IL 2014 Whitney Biennial. Ashley died March 3, while the work was in
rehearsal. During his long and distinguished career, Ashley composed many
musical works that include Now Eleanor’s Idea, Dust, Celestial Excursions,
Concrete, Atalanta (Acts of God), and Balseros. They have toured worldwide.
He provided music for the dance companies of Merce Cunningham, Trisha
Brown, Steve Paxton, and Douglas Dunn. Ashley was a recipient of the John
Cage Award for Music from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance
Arts. His recorded music is available from Lovely Music, Nonesuch/Elektra,
New World Records, Koch International, and Unsounds, among others. His
writings appear in Outside of Time: Ideas about Music.
ASHLEY / Pillars (for David Moodey) 55
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