PennSound Daily

Today brings sad news from the world of contemporary music: pioneering composer Robert Ashley has died at the age of 83 following a battle against cirrhosis. Scholar Kyle Gann, who recently completed a biography of the composer, confirmed Ashley's passing, and observed, "Bob was one of the most amazing composers of the 20th century, and the greatest genius of 20th-century opera. I don't know how long it's going to take the world to recognize that. And it hardly matters. He knew it. That the world was too stupid to keep up was not his problem."

PennSound is very proud to be home to a newly remastered version of Ashley's seven-part "opera for television," Music with Roots in the Aether, which was first aired in 1974 and includes segments on the work of (in order) David Behrman, Philip Glass, Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma, Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley and Ashley himself. You can watch all seven installments on our Robert Ashley author page.

We recently created an author page for Grzegorz Wroblewski, one of Poland's leading contemporary authors. There, you'll find four brief recordings made over the past two years, starting with a 2012 performance of Wiara with guitar accompaniment by Amir Hadziahmetovic, which took place in Copenhagen, where Wroblewski currently resides. A recording from this past January of translator Marcus Slease reading a selection of Wroblewski's poetry also has a musical backing track, and we have a second reading featuring Slease taken from an Enemies Project reading at London's Rich Mix Arts Centre in February of this year. Finally, from last month (and also in London) we have Wroblewski's set from the Torriano reading series, which showcases work from his recent volume Kopenhaga, with translations by Piotr Gwiazda.

Al Filreis recently posted this playlist featuring highlights from our PennSound Classics archives in the PennSound box on Jacket2's homepage:

1. Jerome Rothenberg reads from Rimbaud's "Farewell" (4:10): MP3
2. Gerritt Lansing reads from Gerard de Nerval's "Delfica" (1:33): MP3
3. Keith Waldrop reads from John Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" (5:58): MP3
4. William Corbett reads from Dorothy Wordsworth, "Grasmere, Lineated" (2:03): MP3
5. Jeffrey Robinson reads Walt Whitman's "Good-Bye My Fancy" (2:11): MP3
6. Jerome Rothenberg reads from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1:03): MP3
7. Rachel Blau DuPlessis reads T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (3:11): MP3
8. Aaron Kramer reads Browning's "Andrea del Sarto" (18:25): MP3
9. John Trimmer reads from Paul Valery and William Butler Yeats (19:36): MP3
10. John Richetti reads John Donne's "Aire and Angels" (1:40): MP3
11. Anne Waldman sings Ginsberg's arrangement of Blake's "The Garden of Love" from By the Side of the Road (1:19): MP3
12. Caroline Bergvall reads Chaucer's "The Summer Tale" (2:59): MP3
13. John Richetti reads Anne Finch's "A Nocturnal Reverie"  (1713) (3:06): MP3