Robert Ashley

By Kyle Gann

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Copyright © 2012 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-07887-3

Contents

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS…………………………………………………………………………………………..viiPREFACE……………………………………………………………………………………………………….ix1. Oh, How We Misunderstand: Introduction…………………………………………………………………………12. The Vessel of the Eternal Present: The Early Years………………………………………………………………73. When Slow Starts to Mean Something, We Crave Fast: The ONCE Years…………………………………………………234. Incredibly Slowly Our View Begins to Slide: The Mills College Years……………………………………………….465. I’m Not the Same Person That I Used to Be: Perfect Lives…………………………………………………………576. Who Could Speak If Every Word Had Meaning?: Atalanta (Acts of God)………………………………………………..777. If You Have to Ask You Can’t Afford One: Now Eleanor’s Idea………………………………………………………878. One Thing Follows the Next and I Just Do It: Dust, Celestial Excursions, Concrete, and Smaller Pieces…………………110CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF WORKS BY ROBERT ASHLEY………………………………………………………………………131NOTES…………………………………………………………………………………………………………135SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………………………………..143DISCOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………………………………………145INDEX…………………………………………………………………………………………………………147

Chapter One

Oh, How We Misunderstand

Introduction

All the world’s people revel in oral sex We had to stop asking the question except the British We don’t do it OK you don’t do it and we know why Nobody takes a bath Jane Austen didn’t take a bath She wrote her ass off but she didn’t take a bath Mr. Darcy never took a bath Disraeli never took a bath The whole place smelled to high heaven whole Cults jumped on boats to the New World they knew Something was amiss Charles Dickens never took a bath Until he met Mark Twain who kidded him so bad about stinking That he took a bath he hadn’t seen his own legs in 15 years The fucker almost drowned End of insert back to scene ten —Foreign Experiences, Act 1

THAT’S OPERA? The voices chant ecstatically on one pitch, echoing and overlapping in almost unintelligible profusion. The piano beats out a sporadic, dissonant pointillism, though the background electronics reinforce an immobile tonality, a frozen ritual, an undistinguishable fragment of eternity. Each of four scenes is a few seconds over eighteen minutes in length, and all are at the same tempo, a peculiar formal symmetry given the seemingly frantic outpouring of words from someone’s babbling subconscious. Where do these ideas come from? How can these voices jabber the same non sequiturs in unison?

Robert Ashley’s works do not fit the profile of what people generally think of as opera. In his pieces people sing in a style that resembles speech, within a small pitch range and with pitch and stress inflections based on speech; one of Ashley’s guiding premises is that speech is itself music, that the melody of speech patterns can be composed. Plots are rarely evident in his works, or, rather, if there’s a background plot (and several of his operas share one overarching background plot), you can’t necessarily reconstruct it from the text. His works are made not for the stage but for television. As he told me in a 1991 interview,

I put my pieces in television format because I believe that’s really the only possibility for music. I hate to say that. But I don’t believe that this recent fashion of American composers trying to imitate stage opera from Europe means anything. It’s not going to go anywhere. We don’t have any tradition. If you’ve never been to the Paris Opera, never been to La Scala, never been to the Met more than once, we’re talking primitivism. How can you write the pieces if you’ve never been there? It’s like Eskimos playing baseball. It’s crazy! It’s nuts! It’s superstition. The form is related to the architecture. La Scala’s architecture doesn’t mean anything to us. We don’t go there. We stay home and watch television. We go there like we go to the Statue of Liberty, but it’s from another time, like the pyramids.

The theorist Arthur Sabatini has sidestepped the terminology issue by dubbing Ashley’s works “performance novels,” in other words, expansions of the “idea of story-telling modeled on the technology of the electronic media.” Then again, as Ashley once exclaimed in good humor to a music critic, “Well, if I say it’s opera, it’s opera! Who’s running this show, anyway?”

In fact, it is a thesis of this book that Ashley is not only an opera composer but the greatest opera composer of the last half-century and the most innovative opera composer since at least Harry Partch, if not Monteverdi. The word opera literally means “works,” and the genre originally took this name in the seventeenth century because it was a fusion of different media: music, text, scenery, and action. In this sense Ashley is a quintessentially operatic composer in the same way Richard Wagner was. Like Wagner, he writes his own texts (one hesitates to call them librettos in the conventional sense). As with Wagner’s texts, Ashley’s are poetic; they are, in fact, epic poems. Like the ancient epics of Homer and Hesiod, they are made of episodes and are meant to be heard while being read aloud—which is how we experience them in his operas. Moreover, it is thought that ancient epics were sung and accompanied by music, so Ashley’s operas represent a technologically updated revival of an ancient tradition. More than anyone else, though, Ashley remade opera from the ground up as an American form, not oratorical but vernacular, not for the stage but for television, not originating in musical notation but in speech and electronic technology.

Ashley’s operas overload the senses. They are mesmerizing. They are as familiar as a conversation at the local diner yet sometimes (equally) incomprehensible. They have a Buddhistic flavor, written as they are from the standpoint of eternity (sub specie aeternitatis, to use the classical phrase). They embody overarching theories about the history of humanity. Like the novels of James Joyce and Henry Miller, they do not—as evident above—shy away from sex and profanity. They are at times riotously funny. In source material they range from Renaissance occultism to Hindu cosmology to the financial pages of the Wall Street Journal to boogie-woogie to country and western music to recent research on the evolution of the brain to cult fan magazines. They erase the lines between classical music, pop music, and the avant-garde. They are a world unto themselves, playful, absorbing, dazzling, thought-provoking, infinitely quotable.

Yet—or, perhaps, predictably—Ashley remains a somewhat marginalized figure in the “serious music” world, and one vastly misunderstood. How can someone whose primary creative act is to talk, and then write down that talking, be considered a composer? His insouciant-sounding texts are more carefully constructed than they seem. Ashley is highly unusual in the extent to which his works are collaborative, dependent on the art of the core group of musicians he’s worked with for thirty years. He doesn’t fit the pattern of the all-determining classical composer. Only a handful of his works are written in standard musical notation. His scores don’t look like what people think of as music. His documentation consists of long texts divided into lines, chord charts, and MIDI files, and often the final documentation is the recording itself, produced in his Tribeca, New York, studio. He doesn’t have any known pattern in common with any other composer. He has blazed an independent path, devoid of models. The classical music world has no idea what to do with him. Experts on conventional opera frequently don’t even recognize his name. The pop world is equally oblivious. Yet to his broad cult following—those who discover his music, don’t care about categories, and get irresistibly drawn into his narrative wheels within wheels—he is the postmodern opera composer. There really is no one else.

Because of the unconventionality of Ashley’s methods, his achievement as a composer has been greatly underrated. It’s true that he leaves “Blue” Gene Tyranny free to invent some of the gorgeous piano textures for his operas, and since that’s what people hear on the surface, it leads some to think that Ashley’s not really composing his own music. It’s a classical music hang-up—one might as well say the same of Duke Ellington, a predecessor Ashley acknowledges: “It’s like when Duke Ellington sets up his band. It’s a collection of characters, and Ellington understands it that way. Ellington’s music is not written in the way a symphony, which can be played by anybody, is written. If you pull out a player in Ellington’s band, you have to rewrite the part. Perfect Lives is based on that model.” I once asked Tyranny if he felt that Ashley’s operas should be considered multiple-author works, and he quickly answered, “No. I think my part of it was akin to scenic design. The whole conception/structural thing is all Robert’s.”

What’s also little realized is how remarkably, even fanatically, structured Ashley’s operas are, with types of structure that only a composer with big ideas could imagine. The ecstatic outpouring of words sounds improvisatory, but look closely and you’ll notice that all the scenes in one opera have the same number of beats, that two different operas may have the same number of beats and same-sized sections, or that the drone pitches the singers are chanting on spell out an overarching tone row that also runs through the work at other speeds. The discipline to create such free-sounding streams of consciousness within obsessively ordered forms requires amazing forethought and winnowing and reshaping, and Ashley is as rigorous about following his own rules as any sixteenth-century composer of intricate canons. In college, he absorbed J. S. Bach as an important model. No one else has ever applied to opera the kinds of structure that Ashley has invented, and so few know where to look for his purely musical innovations.

We commonly think of great composers as revealing their talent early in life and developing their style incrementally. Some have stunning early successes, as Igor Stravinsky did with The Firebird. Others start out more imitatively and gradually find their voice, as Beethoven did at thirty-five with the Eroica Symphony. One conundrum of Robert Ashley is that at age forty-eight—pretty late in life by composers’ standards—he suddenly emerged as a full-blown genius of opera. Before 1978 he had possessed some profile as an avant-garde composer, but mainly as part of a crowd: he was one of the composers associated with the wild and crazy ONCE festivals, which made the unlikely college town of Ann Arbor, Michigan, an international center for new music in the 1960s. Then, in 1979, Perfect Lives appeared, and with it a whole new conception of technology-driven music theater.

Many of Ashley’s subsequent large works—Atalanta, Your Money My Life Goodbye, Music Word Fire and I Would Do It Again (Coo Coo), Yellow Man with Heart with Wings, the four operas of Now Eleanor’s Idea—came from Perfect Lives. This is true in an unusually literal way, since to some extent these works all had their narrative origin in the hectic climax of the whimsical plot for Perfect Lives. It’s somewhat like the way a novelist keeps bringing back the same characters in different novels—Robertson Davies and John Le Carré are examples—but it applies here to historical constructs and musical structures as well. Of course, Perfect Lives also came from two decades’ worth of Ashley’s previous works, such as the infamous The Wolfman and the more ambitious That Morning Thing—but this is a more difficult proposition to demonstrate, and doing so is one of the challenges of this book. Nothing in the first forty-eight years of Ashley’s life made it look likely that he would create a new, well-defined form of electronic opera, though in hindsight links are not difficult to find. The inspiration for Perfect Lives is the point that divides Ashley’s creative life cleanly in half. Before 1978 he was a visible but fairly typical 1960s avant-gardist; after that date, he appeared, like Monteverdi, as simultaneously the revolutionary of opera and also its master, transcending in one athletic leap the milieu from which his aesthetic developed. Specifically, the pre-1978 music gives us little hint of Ashley’s subsequent magical verbal expertise with phrases, sentences, and entire paragraphs. To quote a line reused in several of Ashley’s works, How is that possible? Rendering this transformation intelligible is no small feat. But we must do it in order to understand how Ashley seemed to jump a century or so ahead in the history of music theater.

Before I proceed to biography, allow me a cautionary word about the reception of Ashley’s operas. The main focus of this book is the nine operas spanning from Perfect Lives to Concrete, twenty-five to thirty hours of text-dense music (and perhaps I should throw in the briefer yet stellar Your Money My Life Goodbye). It’s an astoundingly imaginative and engaging body of music, but Ashley remains as controversial today as he has always been. Many love him; some can’t stand him. First of all, I think one misses some streak of Ashley’s genius if one fails to note a tongue-in-cheek aspect to his music theater—not that he’s putting anything over on the audience, but he’s often putting something over on his characters. As he says of the people in one work, “Everybody’s crazy.” I would characterize his genre as sacro-philosophico-comedic. Streams of philosophical ideas, both serious and absurd, course through the operas, and they sometimes crescendo to a cathartic level of spiritual release, but the characters are somewhat humorously self-aware and self-effacing, Buddhistic in their willingness to accept events as they come. Ashley’s profundity and his laid-back cynicism complement and need each other. The too-literal listener may sometimes be frustrated. The fan willing to enter into the personal mythology will be delighted by layers and layers of new meaning.

In addition, let me confess that I have not myself consistently found Ashley’s works easy to approach. Perfect Lives I loved from the get-go, and then Improvement: Don Leaves Linda disappointed me because I wanted it to be like Perfect Lives; today I consider Improvement slightly the more perfect work. Much of Foreign Experiences I found chaotic and off-putting until I read carefully through the text a couple of times and learned to love its raw, spitting grandeur. Dust, so disconcertingly vulnerable and harmonically simple, knocked me off my feet on the first listen; I’m still coming to terms with the conceptual complexity of Atalanta after twenty-five years. Like John Cage’s and Karlheinz Stockhausen’s, Ashley’s is a wide-ranging, unfettered imagination unafraid to wander outside the boundaries of what most consider art. Some people can’t handle him. But every one of these works has come to impress me more and more upon closer analysis, and affection, whether immediate or gradual, has always been the result. There’s a lot in Ashley to entice the ear at once, but when it isn’t initially evident, I recommend immersion and patience. As the narrator in Improvement says about Linda’s actions, “Oh, how we misunderstand.”

Chapter Two

The Vessel of the Eternal Present

The Early Years

TO A REMARKABLE EXTENT, ROBERT ASHLEY is the unofficial token composer of Ann Arbor, Michigan. It’s a college town; the University of Michigan has a distinguished music department, and many famous composers have taught there. Ashley never has, but he was born in Ann Arbor, and to some extent he thinks of his operas as drawn from the melody of the distinctive southeastern Michigan accent. Ashley earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan and later worked on a doctorate there, which he never completed. Afterward, though, he spent the early part of his creative life in Ann Arbor as co-founder and co-director of the ONCE festivals. On and off, the town remained his center of activities for thirty-nine years. In the operas, he refers to it as “Headquarters.”

In the early twentieth century, Ann Arbor’s principal industry was milling, followed by light manufacturing, furniture making, piano building, brewing, gas fixture making, and rug making. The university was an important economic base: between 1900 and 1920 the student population more than doubled, rising from 3,441 to 9,401. The area was conservative overall, and Washtenaw County was one of the few in Michigan to vote for Herbert Hoover in the 1932 election, 15,368 votes to 12,552. The area was hard hit by the Depression—the number of families on relief soared from 162 to 405 between 1931 and 1933, and the unemployment rate would hit 20 percent—but it recovered more quickly than most towns in the state, in part due to the buoying effects of the university.

There Robert Reynolds Ashley was born March 28, 1930. His paternal grandfather, Alvah J. Ashley, had come to Ann Arbor in 1893 from the town of Bay City to the north; Ashley thinks his family had worked there in the timber business. Alvah (his first name is sometimes listed in public documents without the h) brought with him his wife Sarah Ashley (1857–1936) and his sons Ward J. (1883–1950) and Alvah J. Ashley (1886–1961); the latter was called not Alvah or Junior but for some reason Cy, short for Cyrus. Alvah Senior was listed in the Ann Arbor city directories of the time as a clerk, and he seems to have died in 1908 or 1909. Ward is first listed in 1900 as a messenger for the Post Office; on January 1, 1902, at age seventeen, he started a job there as a dispatch clerk and worked there for a total of fifty years. Following Alvah’s death, Sarah and her sons lived in various apartments until Ward, in 1914, bought them a house at 702 Ingalls Street, a block north of the present University of Michigan campus. Ironically, given his son’s ultimate profession, Ward became deaf in his late twenties, a victim of (Ashley thinks) a streptococcus epidemic that tended to cause deafness in men. Able to lip-read and barely register loud speech, he would figure in a story in Ashley’s opera Dust.

(Continues…)

Excerpted from Robert Ashleyby Kyle Gann Copyright © 2012 by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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