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1 Oh, How We 1 Misunderstand Introduction All the world’s people revel in oral sex We had to stop asking the question except the British We don’t do it OK you don’t do it and we know why Nobody takes a bath Jane Austen didn’t take a bath She wrote her ass off but she didn’t take a bath Mr. Darcy never took a bath Disraeli never took a bath The whole place smelled to high heaven whole Cults jumped on boats to the New World they knew Something was amiss Charles Dickens never took a bath Until he met Mark Twain who kidded him so bad about stinking That he took a bath he hadn’t seen his own legs in 15 years The fucker almost drowned End of insert back to scene ten —Foreign Experiences, Act 1 that’s opera? The voices chant ecstatically on one pitch, echoing and overlapping in almost unintelligible profusion. The piano beats out a sporadic, dissonant pointillism, though the background electronics reinforce an immobile tonality, a frozen ritual, an undistinguishable fragment of eternity. Each of four scenes is a few seconds over eighteen minutes in length, and all are at the same tempo, a peculiar formal symmetry given the seemingly frantic outpouring of words from someone’s babbling subconscious. Where do these ideas come from? How can these voices jabber the same non sequiturs in unison? Robert Ashley’s works do not fit the profile of what people generally think of as opera. In his pieces people sing in a style that resembles speech, within a small pitch range and with pitch and stress inflections based on speech; one of Ashley’s guiding premises is that speech is itself music, that the melody of speech patterns can be composed. Plots are rarely evident in his works, or, rather, if there’s 2 r o b e r t a s h l e y | Oh, How We Misunderstand a background plot (and several of his operas share one overarching background plot), you can’t necessarily reconstruct it from the text. His works are made not for the stage but for television. As he told me in a 1991 interview, I put my pieces in television format because I believe that’s really the only possibility for music. I hate to say that. But I don’t believe that this recent fashion of American composers trying to imitate stage opera from Europe means anything. It’s not going to go anywhere. We don’t have any tradition. If you’ve never been to the Paris Opera, never been to La Scala, never been to the Met more than once, we’re talking primitivism. How can you write the pieces if you’ve never been there? It’s like Eskimos playing baseball. It’s crazy! It’s nuts! It’s superstition. The form is related to the architecture. La Scala’s architecture doesn’t mean anything to us. We don’t go there. We stay home and watch television. We go there like we go to the Statue of Liberty, but it’s from another time, like the pyramids.1 The theorist Arthur Sabatini has sidestepped the terminology issue by dubbing Ashley’s works “performance novels,” in other words, expansions of the “idea of story-telling modeled on the technology of the electronic media.”2 Then again, as Ashley once exclaimed in good humor to a music critic, “Well, if I say it’s opera, it’s opera! Who’s running this show, anyway?”3 In fact, it is a thesis of this book that Ashley is not only an opera composer but the greatest opera composer of the last half-century and the most innovative opera composer since at least Harry Partch, if not Monteverdi. The word opera literally means “works,” and the genre originally took this name in the seventeenth century because it was a fusion of different media: music, text, scenery, and action. In this sense Ashley is a quintessentially operatic composer in the same way Richard Wagner was. Like Wagner, he writes his own texts (one hesitates to call them librettos in the conventional sense). As with Wagner’s texts, Ashley’s are poetic; they are, in fact, epic poems. Like the ancient epics of Homer and Hesiod, they are made of episodes and are meant to be heard while being read aloud—which is how we experience them in his operas. Moreover, it is thought...

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