She Was a Visitor by Bob Ashley is a choral work. The title refers to a young woman we knew who died by her own hand. John Cage has a story about a suicide. young child kills himself. Buddhist monk was asked, “Why would he do such a thing?” The monk answered that perhaps he was correcting an error. I don’t know what I think about that story. “She was a visitor” is a more beautiful way of saying it.

Throughout the course of the piece a speaker repeats the phrase, “She was a visitor.” Bob notates the phrase in 43 time. “She was a” and “visitor” are notated in triplets. Triplets are when you squash three notes into the time it takes for two notes to sound. Bob em- beds two sets of three in a rhythmic pattern of three. The [bad word] is split into any number of groups each having a leader. From time to time the leaders choose a phoneme as the main speaker is pronouncing it. Say you decide on “sh” from “she.” You wait for the speaker to utter “sh” from the word “She,” then you sustain the sound for one breath. As you do so the rest of the group picks up that phoneme—they don’t know in advance what it is going to be—and sustain it for one breath also. Because reaction times vary the sounds spread out through the groups. It’s a way of taking apart an English phrase and isolating the phonemes in it, making choral music. There’s no “s” sound in the piece. There’s only “sh,” “ih,” “oo,” “ah,” “zz,” “uh,” “v,” “ih,” “zz,” “ih,” “t,” and “er.” It isn’t pronounced “visit-or.” Bob is from the Midwest. He pronounces it “visiter.”