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).
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. 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.
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, on March 3, 2014, from liver disease, aged 83.
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"
1963 "In Memoriam...Esteban Gomez"
1963 "In Memoriam...Crazy Horse"
1963 "In Memoriam...Kit Carson"
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"
1976 "Music with Roots in the Aether" (television opera)