Robert Reynolds Ashley (March 28, 1930 – March 3, 2014) was an American composer, who was best known for his "television operas" and other theatrical works, many of which incorporate electronics and extended techniques. His works often involve intertwining narratives and take a surreal multidisciplinary approach to sound, theatrics and writing, and have been continuously performed by various interpreters during and after his life, including Automatic Writing (1979) and Perfect Lives (1983).
Life and career Ashley was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He studied at the University of Michigan from 1948 to 1952, where he met Ross Lee Finney in 1949. Finney had a good reputation after serving in World War II, in which he was wounded by a land mine. Ashley stated, "Everyone treated him as if he [were] James Bond." Finney went on to approve a paper Ashley wrote on a Bartók string quartet during a weekly analysis seminar. Later, he studied at the Manhattan School of Music, and then became a musician in the US Army. After moving back to Michigan, Ashley worked at the University of Michigan's Speech Research Laboratories. Although he was not officially a student in the acoustic research program there, he was offered the chance to obtain a doctorate, but turned it down to pursue his music. 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.LaBelle, Brandon (2006). Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art (London and New York: Continuum), p. 124. 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 and Hsiung-Zee Wong.
The majority of Ashley's recordings have been released by Lovely Music, which was founded by Performing Artservices, the not-for-profit management organization which represents Ashley and other artists. His first album with Lovely Music was 1978's Private Parts, an early version of the first and last acts from his opera Perfect Lives. In 1979 and 1980, the label released, respectively, Automatic Writing and Perfect Lives (Private Parts): The Bar (the latter being another excerpt from what was to become Perfect Lives).
Since he first came to prominence, Ashley was indelibly linked to the performance of his pieces, particularly through the use of his voice in such works as Automatic Writing and Perfect Lives. Starting in the 1980s, he formed a band that lasted for decades consisting of himself, Sam Ashley, Joan LaBarbara, Thomas Buckner, and Jacqueline Humbert as vocalists and Tom Hamilton on electronics.
Ashley also collaborated with various artists in terms of reading text. He was featured, alongside Kunga Rinpoche, on Eliane Radigue's 1987 piece Mila's Journey Inspired by a Dream. On December 9, 1992, Ashley publicly read William Gibson's electronic poem Agrippa (A Book of the Dead), on its premiere at The Kitchen in Chelsea, Manhattan. His reading, known as The Transmission, was recorded and simultaneously transmitted to several other cities only once. In the opera Agamemnon, (1993) he performs with singer Shelley Hirsch.
In the final years of his life, Ashley's work was newly taken up by other performers. Notable interpreters of Ashley's work have included the electronic duo Matmos, who often perform their arrangements of episodes from Perfect Lives; Object Collection, who premiered a stage version of Automatic Writing in 2011; the band Varispeed, who've presented various site-specific, day-long arrangements of Perfect Lives since 2011; the band Trystero, who perform Perfect Lives in their memorized marathon arrangement; and Alex Waterman, who spearheaded a new Spanish-language version of Perfect Lives entitled Vidas Perfectas, performing the piece around the world and producing a new video realization as well. In 2002 he received the Foundation for Contemporary Arts John Cage Award. In 2011, Ashley's 1967 opera That Morning Thing was restaged as part of the Performa Biennial with direction from Fast Forward. In 2014, shortly after his death, the Whitney Biennial presented three of Ashley's operas: Vidas Perfectas and The Trial..., both directed by Alex Waterman, and Crash, the opera he finished three months before he died. Crash was remounted a year later at Roulette Intermedium with the same cast: Gelsey Bell, Brian McCorkle, Paul Pinto, Dave Ruder, and Aliza Simons from the music collective Varispeed, as well as Amirtha Kidambi, with projected photos by Philip Makanna.
Personal life and death He had one son, Sam, from his first marriage to Mary Tsaltas. In 1979, he married his second wife, Mimi Johnson.
He died at his home in Tribeca, Manhattan,Smith, Steve. "An Opera Full of Secrets From a Master of the Opaque", The New York Times, January 14, 2007. Accessed February 25, 2019. "Seated in the kitchen of his TriBeCa rehearsal studio, which occupies an entire floor of the converted warehouse where he and his partner, Mimi Johnson, have lived since 1979, Mr. Ashley, 76, recounted how a friend had once revealed a sordid past." on March 3, 2014, from liver disease, aged 83.
Major Works Ashley wrote multiple operas and many other pieces for combinations of instruments, voices, and electronics. A complete list can be found at his official website.
1959-1960 "Christopher Columbus Crosses to the New World" 1960 "The Bottleman" 1963 "In Memoriam...Esteban Gomez" 1963 "In Memoriam...Crazy Horse" 1963 "In Memoriam...Kit Carson" 1964 "The Wolfman" 1967-1968 "That Morning Thing" 1968 "Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon" 1968 "The Trial of Anne Opie Wehrer and unknown accomplices for crimes against humanity" 1972-1973 "In Sara, Mencken, Christ and Beethoven There Were Men and Women" 1974-1979 "Automatic Writing" 1976 "Music with Roots in the Aether" (television opera) 1976-1983 "Perfect Lives" (television opera) 1979 "Yellow man with heart with wings" 1979 "A last Futile Stab at Fun" 1981-1987 "Atalanta (Acts of God)" 1982 "Tap Dancing in the Sand" Now Eleanor's Idea tetralogy: 1985-1990 "Improvement: Don Leaves Linda" 1987-1992 "eL/Aficionado" 1993 "Now Eleanor's Idea" 1994 "Foreign Experiences" 1998 "Dust" 1998 "Your Money My Life Goodbye" 2003 "Celestial Excursions" 2011 "Quicksand" 2006-2012 "Concrete/The Old Man Lives in Concrete" 2013-2014 "Crash"
Ashley, Space Theater, and ONCE
The Space Theater was a loft specially designed and outfitted for performances with projected images and music. It served as the venue for semiweekly multimedia performances from 1957 to 1964; its creators asked Gordon Mumma and Ashley to produce live electronic music for the productions. The performances included music produced by things such as the "rubbing together of stones" and steel rings thrown along wires.
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. They were two of the earliest composers to work in live generation of music with amplified small sounds.
The success of Space Theater led to the creation of the ONCE festival, a contemporary performing arts event that served as a forum for experimental art and music. Ashley was the director. Other musician participants included Roger Reynolds, George Cacioppo, Bruce Wise, and Donald Scarvada. Other collaborating artists were Harold Borkin and Joseph Wehrer, architects; George Manupelli, filmmaker; and Mary Ashley and Milton Cohen, painter-sculptors. There were six ONCE festivals between 1961 and 1965. They were considered "far-out" and controversial, and experienced both support and antagonism from the surrounding community in Ann Arbor. The festivals invited European and jazz composers to participate, and were a major influence on contemporary music of the time.
Trilogy: Atalanta, Perfect Lives, and Now Eleanor's Idea The operas of Perfect Lives, Atalanta, and Now Eleanor's Idea comprise a trilogy that maintains a pulse of 72 beats per minute throughout (except for the opera Foreign Experiences within the Now Eleanor's Idea tetralogy, which is set to a quarter note=90). The third episode of Perfect Lives ("The Bank") contains the focal event of 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 strategically 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 Gwyn and Ed. In describing these curious events, 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.Perfect Lives libretto, pg 160
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. The first section of the opera Now Eleanor's Idea, entitled Improvement, features a retelling of these events.
Now Eleanor's Idea tetralogy
Now Eleanor's Idea is an opera tetralogy, part of the larger trilogy described above, based on the idea of heading westward in America, eventually arriving at the Pacific Ocean.Foreign Experiences liner notes Each opera is centered on one of the characters briefly introduced in Episode 3 of Perfect Lives. According to Kyle Gann, the order of the tetralogy is (1) Improvement (representing Linda, one of the bank tellers), (2) el/Aficionado (representing Don Jr, i.e. "D, the Captain of the Football Team"), (3) Foreign Experiences (representing Junior Jr., Don and Linda's Son), and (4) Now Eleanor's Idea (representing Now Eleanor, another teller). According to Gann, the overall four-part structure of the cycle mirrors the four-movement symphonic form.