Robert Ashley

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Robert Ashley (born March 28, 1930), is a contemporary American composer, best known for his operas and other theatrical works, many of which incorporate electronics and extended techniques. Along with Gordon Mumma, Ashley was also a major pioneer of audio synthesis.

Ashley was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He studied at the University of Michigan with Ross Lee Finney, at the Manhattan School of Music, and was later a musician in the US Army. After moving back to Michigan, Ashley worked at the University of Michigan's Speech Research Laboratories. From 1961 to 1969, he organised the ONCE Festival in Ann Arbor with Roger Reynolds, Gordon Mumma, and other local composers and artists. He was a co-founder of the ONCE Group, as well as a member of the Sonic Arts Union, which also included David Behrman, Alvin Lucier, and Gordon Mumma. In 1969 he became director of the San Francisco Tape Music Center. In the 1970s he directed the Mills College Center for Contemporary Music. His notable students include Maggi Payne.

The majority of Ashley's recordings have been released by Lovely Music [1], which was founded by Performing Artservices [2], the not-for-profit management organization which represents Ashley and other artists. Ashley's opera Perfect Lives was featured in Peter Greenaway's documentary 4 American Composers.

Contents

[edit] Operas

  • In Memoriam... Kit Carson (1963)
  • That Morning Thing (1967)
  • Music with Roots in the Aether (television opera) (1976)
  • Perfect Lives (an opera for television) (1978-80)
  • Atalanta (Acts of God) (1982-91)
  • Now Eleanor's Idea tetralogy:
    • Improvement (Don Leaves Linda) (1985)
    • eL/Aficionado (1987)
    • Now Eleanor's Idea (1993)
    • Foreign Experiences (1994)
  • Balseros (1997)
  • Your Money My Life Goodbye (1998)
  • Dust (1998)
  • Celestial excursions (2003)
  • Concrete (2006)

[edit] Trilogy: Atalanta, Perfect Lives, and Now Eleanor's Idea

The operas of Perfect Lives, Atalanta, and Now Eleanor's Idea comprise a massive trilogy of sorts that maintains a pulse of 72 beats per minute throughout. The third episode of Perfect Lives ("The Bank") contains the focal event of Ashley’s this trilogy. The event itself is hard to describe; after a variety of strange events transpire at the bank, i.e. a fight between dogs that speak Spanish and a bucket of water accidentally thrown on the bank manager, it is realized that the bank "has no money in the bank”, a consequence of the art/crime action taken by the elopers Gwen and Ed. In describing the curious events happening in the bank, Ashley introduces all of the bank tellers (“Introducing Susie. Susie works at the bank. That’s her job. Mostly she helps people count their money. She likes it.”), who each have visions, each representing one of the trilogy’s operas.[1]

Kate sees the security camera footage from the bank, which contains elements of Episodes 2 through 4 of Perfect Lives. She is, in effect, watching herself. Linda, Susie, and Jennifer see visions of the three suitors of Atalanta, Willard Reynolds, Bud Powell, and Max Ernst who have accidentally appeared in a spaceship at the moment of the bank incident. Eleanor’s vision is conceptually of the four operas that bear her name, although Linda’s vision introduces its four characters (Linda, Eleanor, Don, and Junior Jr.) as a foursome.

[edit] Now Eleanor's Idea tetralogy

Now Eleanor’s Idea is an opera tetralogy, itself part of the larger trilogy described above, based on the idea of heading westward in America, eventually getting to the Pacific Ocean [2]. Each opera is centered around one of the characters briefly introduced in Episode 3 of Perfect Lives: Eleanor and Linda, tellers at the bank, Don, Linda’s husband, and Junior, Jr., their child. These works are subtle in their narrative links to one another. The flow from Perfect Lives leads to Now Eleanor’s Idea (the opera, not the tetralogy), focused on Eleanor and her journey from Midwestern-small-town bank teller to television news reporter to prophet for the Southwestern Hispanic custom-car culture. Don’s story is chronicled in Foreign Experiences. Don has moved to California with his family and become a professor. Unsatisfied with his existence, Don embarks on a mystical quest. Improvement (Don Leaves Linda) focuses on Linda, here a metaphor for the Jews forced out of Spain in 1492, who is abandoned by her husband Don at a highway rest stop. Linda meets many new and varied characters, including a tap dancer who is a stand-in for Giordano Bruno, and settles on a cosmopolitan existence with her son, Junior Jr. In a dream that echoes the uncertain journeying of his father, Junior, Jr.’s opera, el/Aficionado, is a post-mortem on a mysteriously botched espionage exercise. Ashley says that each of these scenarios is in reality the simultaneous dream of the protagonist, happening at the focal moment of Perfect Lives[3].

Ashley, along with Sam Ashley, Thomas Buckner, Jacqueline Humbert, and Joan LaBarbara, performed the complete tetralogy in 1994 in Avignon and at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Recordings of the operas have been released gradually, first with Improvement in 1992, followed by el/Aficionado in 1994, Foreign Experiences in 2006, and Now Eleanor’s Idea in 2007.

[edit] Additional allegory

Ashley has ascribed various meanings to the individual elements of the trilogy. One layer of meaning is the journey Westward across America (presumably of European-Americans). Atalanta represents those in the new world who are acutely aware of their tradition in the old world. This is represented in the lengthy stories on great figures of the past (the “Anecdotes”, etc.). Perfect Lives represents life in the Midwest, which Ashley was interested in “because it was flat”[4]. The stories have gotten shorter and are now just quaint colloquialisms and idioms (think of the string of phrases punctuated by “AND” in Episode 4). Now Eleanor’s Idea is about the journey beyond the familiar to the West Coast, presumably the end of the world, i.e. a certain civilization was established when European adventurers found themselves in California and figured they would likely never make it home. Rather than anecdotes and sayings, the story telling unit in these operas is much smaller, and hence the language is more abstract [5]. Ashley says in the liner notes to Atalanta that the three works represent “architecture, agriculture, and genealogy”, respectively.

Ashley has also described the Now Eleanor’s Idea tetralogy as cataloging four American varieties of religion: Judaism in Improvement, Pentecostal Evangalism in Foreign Experiences, “corporate mysticism” in el/Aficionado, and Roman Catholicism as derived from Spain in Now Eleanor’s Idea [6].

In 1976, his Music with Roots in the Aether was released, a video collection of interviews with seven American contemporary composers (David Behrman, Philip Glass, Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma, Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley and Robert Ashley)

Ashley has written many other pieces for combinations of instruments, voices, and electronics. A complete list can be found at his official website.

[edit] Films

  • 1976 - Music With Roots in the Aether: Opera for Television. Tape 7: Robert Ashley. Produced and directed by Robert Ashley. New York, New York: Lovely Music.
  • 1983 - Perfect Lives (an opera for television). Released on DVD by Lovely Music, 2005.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Perfect Lives libretto, pg 160
  2. ^ Foreign Experiences liner notes
  3. ^ Perfect Lives libretto, pg. 178
  4. ^ Perfect Lives libretto, pg 187
  5. ^ Perfect Lives libretto, pg 152-3
  6. ^ www.lovely.com, Foreign Experiences entry

[edit] External links

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[edit] Listening

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