Robert Ashley’s film Title Withdrawn was shown as part of Infinite Ear exhibitions in Bergen in 2016,  in Moscow in 2018, and in Madrid in 2019. With this work, Infinite Ear reflects on accepting that each one of us perceives a world from which a part is missing, and considers these missing parts as spaces left to the imagination.

Title Withdrawn is a film by Robert Ashley based on the music of his piece Automatic Writing. Ashley used his own involuntary speech that results from his mild form of Tourette’s Syndrome as one of the voices in the music. The second voice is a French translation of his ideas. Ashley was intrigued by his involuntary speech, and the idea of composing music that was unconscious. His interest in the use of voice and words went beyond their explicit denotation, believing their rhythm and inflection could convey meaning even if one does not understand the actual phonemes.

It features David Peterson and Donald Renzulli from the California School of the Deaf signing the involuntary speech heard in Automatic Writing.

Title Withdrawn belongs to a series of videos, Music with Roots in the Aether, directed by Robert Ashley, in which he establishes a panorama of the New York experimental scene of the early 1970s through interviews and concerts by Pauline Oliveros, Philip Glass and Alvin Lucier, among others. ¹