BBC - Cut and Splice 2005

Robert Ashley

Robert Ashley (b.1930), 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; his operatic works are distinctly original in style and distinctly American in their subject matter and in their use of language. A prolific composer and writer, Ashley's operas are so vast in their vision that they are comparable only to Wagner's Ring or Stockhausen's seven-evening Licht cycle.

Born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, 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.

During the 1960s, Ashley organized the ONCE Festival, the annual festival of contemporary performing arts in Ann Arbor which, from 1961 to 1969, presented most of the decade's pioneers of the performing arts. He directed the highly influential ONCE Group, a music-theatre ensemble that toured the United States from 1964 to 1969. During these years he developed and produced the first of his mixed-media operas, notably That Morning Thing and In Memoriam...Kit Carson , as well as composing sound tracks for films by George Manupelli.

In 1969 Ashley was appointed Director of the Centre for Contemporary Music at Mills College (Oakland, California), where he organized the first public-access music 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. With the support of the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, Ashley produced and directed, Music with Roots in the Aether: video portraits of composers and their music , a 14 hour television opera/documentary about the work and ideas of seven American composers, which premiered at the Festival d'Automne à Paris in 1976 and has since been shown worldwide in over 100 television broadcasts and closed-circuit installations.

The Kitchen(New York) commissioned Perfect Lives in 1980, an opera for television in seven half-hour episodes. Co-produced by Channel 4 the opera was first broadcast in Great Britain in April 1984. Perfect Lives has since been seen on television in Austria, Germany, Spain and the United States and has been shown at film and video festivals around the world. It is widely considered to be the pre-cursor of music-television.

Staged versions of the operas Perfect Lives , Atalanta (Acts of God), and the tetralogy, NowEleanor's Idea, have toured throughout Europe, Asia and the United States. Other commissioned works include Van Cao's Meditation (1992), for pianist Lois Svard; Outcome Inevitable (1991), for chamber ensemble, by Philadelphia's renowned Relâche Ensemble. He has also provided music for the dance companies of Trisha Brown, Merce Cunningham, Douglas Dunn and Steve Paxton. His recorded work is available on Lovely Music, Ltd., Nonesuch/Elektra, New World Records, Mainstream, CBS Odyssey, O.O. Discs, Koch International and Einstein Records.

More on Robert Ashley's Wolfman