Sound Portraits Radio {EP15} Robert Ashley

ROBERT ASHLEY

EPISODE 15

A distinguished figure in American contemporary music, Robert Ashley holds an international reputation for his work in new forms of opera and multi-disciplinary projects. In the mid 1960s Ashley founded the Sonic Arts Union with Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma, and David Behrman, and later directed the Mills College Center for Contemporary Music. His recorded works are acknowledged classics of language in a musical setting, and he is best known for his epic opera-for-television, Perfect Lives, which is centered around Ashley’s hypnotic voice. Distinctly original in style, and distinctly American in their subject matter and in their use of American language, Robert Ashley’s operas are “so vast in their vision that they are comparable only to Wagner’s Ring cycle or Stockhausen’s seven-evening Licht cycle. In form and content, in musical, vocal, literary and media technique, they are, however, comparable to nothing else.” (The Los Angeles Times) This episode of Sound Portraits Radio is hosted by Doron Sadja.

“Popular music always ends after three minutes. Popular music, when it works, reminds us of something we already know, or it reminds us of something we’ve already experienced. It turns back the hands of time to something that we know from experience. It puts a label on that thing. That’s why so much popular music has to do with love. It puts a label on it and when it’s good, that label really works. It can’t do anything but that, no matter how hard people try. No matter how hard Bob Dylan tried or John Lennon tried, you can’t make popular music into anything except a labeling of your own experience that you never realized needed a label. Opera doesn’t do that. Opera is supposed to present you with characters in the same way that a great novel presents you with characters. In that sense, it becomes amoral. You’re supposed to be able to see it because it’s brought to you. That’s totally different than labeling an experience. You have to continually refer back to what human beings know. My job is to establish those characters.”
Robert Ashley
“I had been working for years on an idea of an opera whose characters were all my composer friends,” says Ashley, “and they would be represented in the opera by their music and by their conversation.Finally, when I figured out that I could do it on videotape it just came together very quickly.”
Robert Ashley on Music With Roots In The Aether
“There’s no chance for me to do a piece of any scale in live performance. I’m 53 years old. If I were to wait for the Metropolitan Opera to give me a performance, I’d die first.”
Robert Ashley
“The collaborative aspect of the work follows principles I have used for many years in search of a new operatic style. The collaborators are given almost absolute freedom to develop characterizations from the textual and musical materials I provide. The musical and visual materials are coordinated through ‘templates’, a term I have come to use to describe the subjective assignment of emotional values and moods to visual forms and corresponding musical structures. Within the rules defined by the ‘templates’ the collaborators in all aspects of the work are free to interpret, ‘improvise’, invent and superimpose characteristics of their own artistic styles onto the texture of the work. In essence, the collaborators become ‘characters’ in the opera at a deeper level than the illusionistic characters who appear on stage.”
Robert Ashley on Perfect Lives
“I’ve always been unhappy with American English set to a European musical form. Because American English, American English doesn’t sing that way. American English has always been most successful as words. It’s always been most successful in popular music and it’s been that way probably in musical theater since like George M. Cohan. I just decided that I was going to write operas where we speak English. And therefore, I had to figure out a new way to make English fit with the music.”
Robert Ashley

Sound Portraits is a series of lectures/listening sessions, curated by Doron Sadja, focusing on the work of iconic composers who have paved the way for contemporary electronic music. Started in 2015 as a live event at Spektrum in Berlin, the series quickly grew and exists now as both a live lecture series and a radio show on Cashmere Radio. After an introduction of each artist’s life and work, we listen to a selection of excerpts and complete works from the artist’s repertoire. Besides providing an opportunity to introduce these seminal artists to a new audience, the Sound Portraits series also offers an open forum to engage in group listening in a quiet atmosphere.

Doron Sadja is an American artist, composer, and curator whose work explores modes of perception and the experience of sound, light, and space. Find out more at www.doron.sadja.com

SOUND PORTRAITS ROBERT ASHLEY

About Sound Portraits