Outside of Time: Ideas about Music (review)

“The unrecognized continue to die of striving.”

—Robert Ashley, Improvement (Don Leaves Linda)

For nearly forty-five years, composer Robert Ashley has pursued his vision of opera in the face of near complete indifference from the American mainstream culture industry. Ashley’s experience parallels that of other American independent avant-garde figures such as Terry Riley, Alvin Lucier, and Pauline Oliveros. Like these composers, Ashley uses notation only to the extent that it conveys his ideas to a longtime “band” of collaborators (which includes singers Jacqueline Humbert, Sam Ashley, Thomas Buckner, and Joan La Barbara, along with engineer/ mixer Tom Hamilton). Like Oliveros, Ashley is also keenly interested in performance as ritual; for the past three decades he has composed operas that rely upon the inflections and rhythms of American English and are set against the backdrop of a largely static “electronic orchestra.” Although much of Ashley’s work is conceived for television, only the seven-part Perfect Lives (1977–83) has been completely realized in its intended medium, and it has never been shown on American networks. Now, as Ashley enters his eighties, a European musicologist—Ralf Dietrich—has taken on the task of gathering Ashley’s essays, sketches of pieces, and program notes into one volume.

This bilingual collection—with verso pages in English and recto pages in German—is divided into four parts, the first three of which are arranged in roughly reverse chronological order. Ordering the collection in this way arguably serves two purposes: First, it helps familiarize readers who might be unfamiliar with Ashley’s work with an overview of his aesthetic and how it was shaped by changes in technology, collaborators, and economic realities. Second, by laying out the various guiding “threads” through Ashley’s career, one is better able to follow the divergent strands as they stretch back into his past work.

The first section, “Towards a New Kind of Opera,” begins with a detailed “musical autobiography”—Ashley’s recollections of changes in the American contemporary music scene over his long career—and is followed by a series of essays that establish the groundwork for Ashley’s brand of music theater. One distinctive strand running through Ashley’s varied compositional career is the drone, appearing in early pieces such as the In Memoriam series from 1963 as a “reference sonority,” and also found in the recent operas in the form of a sustained harmonic backdrop or “cloud” that the singers use to establish the modality and inflection (contour) of their singing. A second unifying factor is a preoccupation with numbers and predetermined “formulas,” revealed in greatest detail in Ashley’s discussion of the individual “templates” in Perfect Lives. In this work, each episode has a characteristic visual structure (composition of images, distinctive colors, times of day, camera angles / movements, and so on), which also occurs in a fractal-like self-similar fashion within each episode—in other words, each episode is itself made up of seven sections that follow the same procession through the templates, and some sections of some episodes are further subdivided into seven subsections. The thorough descriptions of Ashley’s working methods—illustrated with fragments from his sketches and production notebooks—are especially valuable, since almost none of this music is published in conventional score format.

The second section, “Discovering the Musicality of Speech: Mills College,” focuses on the works composed during Ashley’s tenure at Mills College in Oakland, California, from 1969 to 1978, a period during which Ashley “stopped composing” in order to “make music.” (This is a fine distinction—Ashley did in fact create several works during this period, most notably the nearly one-hour In Sara, Mencken, Christ and Beethoven There Were Men and Women (1972–73), as well as perform with the Sonic Arts Union, a collective that also included composers Alvin Lucier, David Behrman and Gordon Mumma.) Originally brought to Mills to build an electronic music studio, which soon developed...