Robert Ashley

American Composers

by Kyle Gann

This book explores the life and works of the pioneering opera composer Robert Ashley, one of the leading American composers of the post-Cage generation. Ashley's innovations began in the 1960s when he, along with Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma, and David Behrman, formed the Sonic Arts Union, a group that turned conceptualism toward electronics. He was also instrumental in the influential ONCE Group, a theatrical ensemble that toured extensively in the 1960s.During his tenure as its director, the ONCE Festival in Ann Arbor presented most of the decade's pioneers of the performing arts. Particularly known for his development of television operas beginning with Perfect Lives, Ashley spun a long series of similar text/music works, sometimes termed "performance novels." These massive pieces have been compared with Wagner's Ring Cycle for the vastness of their vision, though the materials are completely different, often incorporating noise backgrounds, vernacular music, and highly structured, even serialized, musical structures.

 

Drawing on extensive research into Ashley's early years in Ann Arbor and interviews with Ashley and his collaborators, Kyle Gann chronicles the life and work of this musical innovator and provides an overview of the avant-garde milieu of the 1960s and 1970s to which he was so central. Gann examines all nine of Ashley's major operas to date in detail, along with many minor works, revealing the fanatical structures that underlie Ashley's music as well as private references hidden in his opera librettos.

Genres: Music, Biography Memoir

184 pages, Hardcover

First published October 30, 2012

About the author

Kyle Gann is Associate Professor of Music at Bard College, a composer, and former new-music critic for the Village Voice. He lives in Germantown, NY.

Reviews

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm a self-confessed Robert Ashley fanatic. I've listened to "Perfect Lives" time after time, during which paragraphs of esoteric text and cadence have melted into my brain. I've read the story of John Barton Wolgamot a dozen times or more. I want "The Wolfman" played at my funeral. For those reason and more, I was just a smidge disappointed with Kyle Gann's excellent book.

Though I love Ashley's earlier, more abstract work ("The Wolfman," "In Sara, Mencken, Christ & Beethoven..."), the decision to make the operas the central focus was a good one. The first chapter in particular did a great job explaining why Ashley's take on the Opera form is so radical, and yet so natural for the times we live in. He also provided me with several fresh insights into works I've heard (and read) over and over, so I would never call this book a failure. If anything, I think it's a bit skimpy in its analysis.

Last year, I gave Gann's "No Such Thing As Silence," a comprehensive, hyper-detailed analysis of the roots of John Cage's most infamous composition, 4'33", a 5-star rating. One of the reasons was Gann's tight focus -- examining just one piece of the Cage puzzle with a detailed focus over 200+ pages of influences, strategies, live performances, reactions, and other research -- made for a great piece of investigative journalism.

With "Robert Ashley," Gann takes roughly the same amount of pages and applies them to dozens of hours (and tens of thousands of words) of Robert Ashley's recorded works, giving us a Cliff's Notes version of each opera, offering many genuine insights and some solid journalism, but also tantalizing us with a burning need to go further. Gann does a lovely job analyzing the architecturally precise musical and textual structures of all of Ashley's operas, showing just how labored these works are -- no "stream of consciousness" here -- and offers some big-picture analysis of most works, which anyone who is enough of an Ashley fanatic to plunk down $25 for a paperback has likely drawn for themselves. (200+ pages later, and I still don't know what the hell a "p'monkey bride" is!) Whether this was a choice of the publisher or the author, it does make one pine for a series of "skeleton key"-style books on each opera, the type of which we see in abundance for books like "Ulysses" or "V." (I believe Ashley's operas warrant them.)

Gann makes a compelling case that Ashley's operas deserve close scrutiny, and reward whatever dedicated research and scholarship you want to throw at them. That he takes us to the garage, shows us the cherry-red new Mustang, hands us the keys, and then whispers, "there's still about 14 more payments to be made on this...they're in your name," is a little disappointing. Not a lot. A little. Fanatics of any discipline are bound to be disappointed...it just comes with the territory. If you are a casual fan of Robert Ashley (or a noise gnarler who only listens to the crazy early stuff), this will sway you to the cause. If you've already been following the exploits of Raoul, Buddy, Baby, D., Don Jr., Linda, Junior Jr., Now Eleanor, and others, and want a few strong through-lines on which to hang your theories, you'll come back to this book (as I will) dozens of times as you revisit each opera anew. If you're hoping for every cloudy thing to be made clear, well buddy, that's your stone to roll.

[Evan Pincus · Rating 3 out of 5]

Obviously indispensable as a source of information, but I was hoping for a bit - okay, a lot - more rigor. Analysis of the underlying structures of the compositions is interesting and all, but parts of it read more like capsule record reviews rather than musicological scholarship - lots of directing the reader to "this charming recording" in favor of actually discussing smaller works, stuff like that. Just a weirdly informal tone in places that doesn't entirely work for me. I'm struck by the reference to "mayor [of New York City] David Bloomberg," doubled in the index - NYC never had a mayor of that name (although Cape Town did). Editorial oversight? A private joke or an editorial oversight? Oh my! What a shame! What did Kyle Gann do, who's to blame?

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

The analysis of Ashley's operas and other work goes into more detail than I desired at this time. I appreciate what I read since I now am better able to appreciate his creative output and will rewatch his opera Private Lives.

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

This gets 3 stars mainly because what other biography of Robert Ashley is there? Gann is so intellectually dishonest elsewhere (Laurie Anderson invented performance art? WTF?) that it's hard to know whether to believe anything herein.