HE IS A VISITOR: A look at the life and work of Robert Ashley
Jeremy E. Bentley
MRT 373 Electronic Music
Final Report
April 25, 1999
The twentieth century has seen great upheaval in the realm of music. Jazz completely changed the way people thought about music, and like so many other drastic changes in this worldís history, was ill-received at its inception. Today jazz music (as seen and heard in the earlier part of this century) has become about as commonly accepted as wheels on a car. Another musical upheaval of this century came with the advent of electronic music, and to this day has still not become as widely accepted in its earliest forms as jazz is today. Electronic music is a ripe medium for experimentation, and its composers have always tended to stray away from any sort of convention. One such composer is Robert Ashley, probably one this centuryís biggest pioneers of musical experimentation.
Ashley, an American composer of electronic and experimental music, was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1930 (he is still alive today). Ashley was educated at two schools: the University of Michigan and the Manhattan School of Music. During his education at the University of Michigan, he worked with psychoacoustics and cultural speech patterns at the Speech Research Laboratories. Ashley was also employed at the Architectural Research Laboratory as a Research Assistant in Acoustics. He studied with the likes of Ross Lee Finney, Roberto Gerhard, and Leslie Basset. During the 1960s, Ashley established the Once Festival, which was an annual festival for contemporary performing arts held in his birthplace, Ann Arbor.
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MRT 373 Electronic Music
Final Report
April 26, 1999
It ran from 1961 to 1969, showcasing most of the decadeís innovators in performing arts. In coordination with the festival and very highly influential, Ashley directed the ONCE Group, a musical theater ensemble that toured for five years (1964-1969) throughout the United States. He also spent a period of a few years collaborating with visual artist Milton Cohen on productions involving light projections, dance, sculpture, and electronic sounds for Space Theater (otherminds, 1).
In 1969, Ashley was appointed Director of the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College, located in Oakland, California. While here, he set up the first public-access music and media facility. From 1966 to 1976, Ashley toured America and Europe with a composersí collective called the Sonic Arts Union, including David Behrman, Alvin Lucier and Gordon Mumma. The sixties also witnessed the opening of the Cooperative Studio for Electronic Music in Ann Arbor, co-founded by Ashley (documenta, 1).
The 1960s decade saw the development and production of Robert Ashleyís first mixed-media operas, some prominent ones being In Memoriam...Kit Carson and That Morning Thing. The first of the previously-noted operas was part of an "in memoriam" series, which also included In Memoriam...John Smith (a concerto), In Memoriam...Esteban Gomez (a quartet), and In Memoriam...Crazy Horse (a symphony). The series of notably improvisational pieces with part verbal, part graphical scores was composed in 1963. The performers themselves are given somewhat of a freedom to recompose the music, for the scores outline a "situation in which a sound may occur, a process of generating action, a field delineated by certain compositional
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MRT 373 Electronic Music
Final Report
April 26, 1999
rules, yet each time produce a unique performance"(McCabe, 3). The series involves the collaboration of performers, each called upon to interpret the piece in his or her own individual way.
The opera That Morning Thing, composed in 1966, is an opera Ashley composed in order to address the "intellectual problem of the idea of suicide" (lovely). Inspired as a result of the suicide of three of Ashleyís friends, That Morning Thing is made up of a number of scenes of rationalizations (explanations) and scenes of descriptions. A notable electronic music piece from
this opera is "She Was a Visitor." The piece is included in a scene of description, where a group of people (or a "chorus") is divided into a series of smaller groups, each one with a leader. A single and separate speaker repeats the title sentence, "she was a visitor," throughout the entire performance. The separate phonemes of the sentence are taken freely by the individual group leaders and are relayed to the group members, who speak the phonemes softly for the duration of one breath. The time between the group leadersí choices of phoneme and the group membersí vocalizing create a staggered chant. The effect of this particular piece in the opera comes out like the expression of a rumor, as the sounds move in an outward manner from the nearest performer to the farthest (lovely).
The aforementioned operas are evidences of Ashleyís strong belief in the collaborative process. He thinks it best to use the full creative minds of the artists (musicians and performers) towards a single goal – producing works based on the composite of the artistsí imaginations. He thinks that there should be no traditional separation between the composer and the performers,
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MRT 373 Electronic Music
Final Report
April 26, 1999
and if anything, the composer should be a nearly absent figure after the performerís interpretations of the work. A Robert Ashley piece performed live is never the same thing twice (uakron, 1).
Many of Ashleyís works also show evidence of his studies with speech patterns. The "singing" style he utilizes through his performers would most accurately be described as "speaking on pitch." It is almost as if he redefines (or maybe a better word to use would be "expands") not only what we know of as singing, but also creates new forms of narrative (Goodale, B5)
A final innovation (at least for the scope of this report) was Robert Ashleyís ushering of opera to the television. His first opera for television was Music with Roots in the Aether in 1974. In addition, The Kitchen in New York City commissioned Perfect Lives from Ashley in 1980, a television opera composed of seven one half-hour episodes. The opera was made up of Ashleyís unique text narrative "singing" style, piano improvisations, and syntho-rhythms. The first broadcast of Perfect Lives was in Great Britain in 1984. It has since aired on television in many other different countries as well (uakron, 1).
Robert Ashley, still living today, is also still an active composer of electronic and experimental music. Mark Swed, a music critic from Los Angeles Times agrees that "Ashley seems to get only more contemporary as he gets older... heís interested in today, in seemingly mundane people and events, but he wants to get at the deeply universal in these individual experiences, which elevates it to the grandly operatic" (Goodale, 1). Robert Ashley appears to
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be one of those few people that will only let death put a halt to the passion and strong ideals of their life's work.
SOURCES
Goodale, Gloria (issue 99). Cutting Edge Classical Composer Lives for the Now. Christian Science Monitor, 90, B5.