On today's Radio Art Hour, we'll listen to Robert Ashley's two-part radio work, Yellow Man with Heart with Wings, commissioned by KUNM Albuquerque for Ned Sublette's 1979 season of the Radio Performance Project. The piece was first presented with the title in memoriam…Kit Carson (opera), an iteration of Ashley's 1963 score of the same name. But Carson was a frontiersman, mythologized in the 1950s as the archetypal "mountain man," a figure instrumental in the dislocation and genocide of Navajo and Apache tribes, and Albuquerque's indigenous community objected to the title of the piece.

Ashley wrote four in memoriam scores: for Esteban Gomez, John Smith, Crazy Horse, and Kit Carson, his attempt to reckon with the social construction of the "American hero." These scores, paradoxically, represent Ashley moving towards a more collaborative form of composition, where the ensemble dictates the direction of the piece and notation itself becomes impossible. In 2017, Post Commodity and Alex Waterman performed In Memoriam with indigenous musicians in Alberta, Canada, in order to "decenter and complicate Ashley's intentions, [...and to] recover subjugated knowledge about who these figures were and their legacies.”

The piece that became Yellow Man with Heart with Wings contains both a performance of in memoriam…Kit Carson (opera), and a libretto titled "Ideas from 'The Church'," a reference to Ashley's Perfect Lives. This text would later become part of his 1994 opera Foreign Experiences. In the first section, Guillermo Guerin performs his own Spanish translation of the libretto. In the second section, the same libretto is performed in English by Ashley, an English so distorted by electronic processing as to be virtually unintelligible. Blue Gene Tyranny accompanies the vocalists on clavinet.

Yellow Man with Heart with Wings was first broadcast on KUNM on September 27, 1979, produced by Ned Sublette, and remastered by Allan Tucker for Lovely Music in 1990.

This episode of The Radio Art Hour was produced by 2025 Radio Art Research Fellow Luna Galassini. Luna Galassini is a musician, artist, and bodyworker based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her performances explore the somatic qualities of sound and the vernacular range of the voice through improvisation with found objects, handmade oscillators and receivers, and traditional instruments exploited for their resonant potential as speaker objects. She is the co-founder of Santa Fe Noise Ordinance, an experimental concert series founded in 2023 that has ranged from small DIY shows to large warehouse installations, wilderness sound walks, collaborative community-led performances, and hybrid audio-visual works.