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Robert Ashley (1930-)

Robert Ashley, a distinguished figure in American contemporary music, holds an international reputation for his work in new forms of opera and multi-disciplinary projects. His recorded works are acknowledged classics of language in a musical setting. He pioneered opera-for-television. The operatic works of Robert Ashley are distinctly original in style, and distinctly American in their subject matter and in their use of American language. A prolific composer and writer, Ashley’s operas are “so vast in their vision that they are comparable only to Wagner’s Ring cycle of Stockhausen’s seven-evening Licht cycle. In form and content, in musical, vocal, literary and media technique, they are, however, comparable to nothing else” (The Los Angeles Times).

Born in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1930, Robert Ashley was educated at the University of Michigan and the Manhattan School of Music. At the University of Michigan, he worked at the Speech Research Laboratories (psycho-acoustics and cultural speech patterns), and was employed as a Research Assistant in Acoustics at the Architectural Research Laboratory.

Ashley began his early work with sound producing live sound with Gordon Mumma for productions of the Space Theater between 1957 and 1964. The Space Theater was a loft specially designed and outfitted for performances with projected images and music. During their cooperation in Space Theater, Ashley created the Cooperative Studio for Electronic Music in 1958 with Mumma, whom he had originally met in his graduate composition seminars. The studio consisted of little more than spare rooms in each of their houses, where they kept their equipment. Ashley and Mumma were “serious tinkers in electronics,” working before synthesizers and electronic musical instruments were commercially available. They invented and built much of their own equipment with materials from Radio Shack, and were two of the earliest composers to work in live generation of music with amplified small sounds.

Partially out of the work begun at the Space Theater, Ashley began the ONCE Festival. The annual festival of contemporary performing arts in Ann Arbor, which occurred annually from 1961 to 1969, presented most of the decades’ pioneers of the performing arts. Some musical participants included Roger Reynolds, George Cacioppo, Bruce Wise, and Donald Scarvada. From 1964 to 1969 Ashley directed the highly influential ONCE group, a music-theater ensemble that toured the United States. During these years Ashley developed and produced the first of his mixed-media operas, notably That Morning Thing and in Memoriam…Kit Carson. The music of the ONCE Festival from this period was released as a box set by New World Records in 2003 and can be streamed in its entirety on DRAM.

In 1969, Ashley was appointed Director of the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College (Oakland, California), where he organized the first public-access and media facility. From 1966 to 1976 he toured throughout the United States and Europe with the Sonic Arts Union, the composers’ collective that included David Behrman, Alvin Lucier and Gordon Mumma. A retrospective on the SAU will take place at Philadelphia’s International House as well this fall. More information from the Philadelphia Weekly.

Vidas Perfectas: An Opera for Stage and Television

Director Alex Waterman on Perfect Lives and Vidas Perfectas:

Fanfare Magazine called Ashley’s seminal work, Perfect Lives, “nothing less than the first American opera…” Perfect Lives was originally commissioned for television by The Kitchen (NYC) in 1979 and was completed in 1983, co-produced by the Kitchen and Channel Four in Great Britain. It was aired on Channel Four in 1983 and 1984 and subsequently on German, Austrian and Spanish television. Parts of the seven-episode series have been seen on American cable channels and in Japan and in Australia. It was also celebrated in Peter Greenway’s seminal series Four American Composers. Clips of this production, along with other productions of Ashley’s can be seen here.

Perfect Lives challenges the ways in which we perceive the relationship between language and music, mixing chanting, storytelling, meditation and ecstatic revelation. And as the world’s first “television opera”, has almost single-handedly changed the way we think about opera, television, and performance. Since its completion, all of Ashley’s operas have been written for television. Like the original version of the opera, Vidas Perfectas will be produced for television and appear in seven 30-minute episodes. 

In 2010, Issue Project Room was awarded an NEA grant to produce a new version of Perfect Lives in co-operation with Robert Ashley and Alex Waterman. Using a Spanish-language translation, commissioned by the Filmoteca de Andalucia, Vidas Perfectas will represent all seven of the opera’s episodes as a full stage and television production. Ned Sublette, Guggenheim Fellow (2005) and veteran of the New York Experimental scene will star as the opera’s narrator “R” (originally performed by Ashley). Composer Peter Gordon, who collaborated with Ashley on the original incarnation of Perfect Lives, will return as sound designer, and Steinway Jazz Artist Elio Villafranca will play “Buddy, the world’s greatest piano player”

The NEA grant provided the funds necessary to begin, but it constitutes only a fraction of the cost of a live performance run and an even smaller fraction of the cost of television production. If you would like to donate to this production, please visit their USA Artists site.

A Brief Synopsis of Perfect Lives

Raoul de Noget (no-zhay’) and his friend Buddy, “The World’s Greatest Piano Player,” have come to a small town close to the border between Mexico and Los Estados Unidos, to entertain at La Vidas Perfectas Lounge. Raoul, a Cuban, grew up north of the Border, and Buddy (also Cuban) grew up on the other side of the border. As one of the characters in the opera describes Buddy after they become known in town, “There’s no doubt that the Mexican is in it. The doubt is if he’s Mexican.”

Raoul and Buddy fall in with two locals, “D” (the ‘Captain of the Football Team’) and his sister, Isolde. They conspire to commit the “perfect crime”, a metaphor for something philosophical: to remove a large amount of money from The Bank for one day (and one day only) and let the whole world know that it is missing – crime if they are caught, art if they are not. A couple of innocents, Ed and Gwyn, head for the border with “D” and his friend Dwayne (‘who has trouble being understood’), to elope and get married. They are, without knowing it, carrying the money (from The Bank) in the trunk of the car. According to the plan, the missing money will be discovered to be back in The Bank the next day.

Among the colorful characters that journey through the opera’s seven episodes are a loving pair of unnamed old people from the Home for Old People, the Sheriff and his wife (Will and Ida), who finally unravel the mystery of the crime, and Isolde who watches the celebration of the changing of the light at sundown – and who knows that the perfect crime has been successful.

Cosmology, Language and Migration in the Work of Robert Ashley

When Americans (estadounidensos) think about themselves, as Robert Ashley has written, they face east (to face the Old World). Facing East from California (or looking back from the ‘last stop’ on the great westward migration) one faces a seeming void of deserts and endless stretches of cornfields. This disorientation, literally “a losing of one’s sense of east” is one of the existential conditions that have made possible the many new forms of American language and speech in the last century.

Many of these speech forms were developed in the movie and television studios of California, whilst yet other forms of artful speech crafted to sell commodities fast and hard to consumers, were born on format radio. In reaching California, American consciousness and language lost parts of itself along the journey west. Most importantly, of course, it lost its past.

Robert Ashley’s major works can be read and listened to as studies of American history and speech forms, critical in situating what American music is as a social form. In Ashley’s operas the characters often speak with voices that sound like an othering of familiar speech. They create a world onstage that is populated by voices that rant and chant; voices that tell other people’s stories in the midst of working out or forgetting their own sense of self, voices that interrogate one another, interrupt, and back each other up. The characters in the most recent trilogy of operas (Dust, Celestial Excursions and Concrete) practice a type of speech that remains outside of civic discourse; they employ “illegal” forms of speech.

To be outside the law in America is part of our national consciousness. It is, ironically, a quality we treasure even in an age of extreme policing and control. After all, most of our heroes were or are loners and outsiders or maverick lawmen – “rebel(s) without a cause” like the heroes in the stories, films and comic books that we have consumed. These heroes have become archetypes in the American consciousness: the robber barons of the 19^th century like Jesse James, the mythological Cowboy or Marlboro men, the gangsters and high rollers of the 1920s prohibition era, the Philip Marlowes and the other lonely fast talking detectives of Film Noir, and our present day alienated suburban teenagers (most memorably represented by the ‘original icon’ James Dean) who have become criminalized as they try to cope with their own disorientation in the de-centered landscape of quiet streets and empty sidewalks, stuck with no place to gather to perform or celebrate their youth.

In America, you can break all kinds of laws but you better not talk funny. That’s where Ashley’s characters just don’t fit into the picture we have created of the outlaw. They break the one rule that makes you more or less disappear from society all together. They speak differently. Through Ashley’s music, we enter into their world and hear an incredibly rich landscape of voices and stories.

The Landscape of Robert Ashley’s Operas

Perfect Lives has been called “a comic opera about reincarnation.” The re-setting and translation of this great avant-garde opera, is an attempt to remind ourselves that ‘the other’ in our midst, the Spanish language and its people – as unjustly treated and marginalized as they have been – are as much a part of our American history as whatever other version of the story we might have been told growing up.

Creating a new version of Perfect Lives in Spanish gives us a new take on the Old World/New World story. Perhaps it’s an elaborate way of re-birthing the soul of America. The mix of accents and dialects complete the circle of migration from Old World to New World and symbolically ‘closes’ the grand cosmology of Robert Ashley’s operas, which have charted the movement of people and language from East to West. We are now facing south and watching how language moves between South and North.

The language of Perfect Lives/Vidas Perfectas is, like English, a monolithic technology that has made its epic (and often brutal movement across oceans and land. In this new place that Vidas Perfectas creates, we witness an America where Spanish and English are mutually understood through the transformative and magical act of singing. In the Vidas Perfectas Lounge there are no longer any borders between the Americas.

More info on Vidas Perfectas with links to USA Artists and links to the cast and artists involved:

Listen to Robert Ashley’s Original Recording of Perfect Lives:

Recordings from Robert Ashley’s Opera Tetralogy, Now Eleanor’s Idea: