Private Parts (The Record)

• The Park
• The Backyard

1990 CD issue of a 1977 recording, which was the first Lovely Music release. A softly pedaling mood enhancer of exotically weird proportions, this suffers quite a bit from mis-appreciation in today’s harsh reality scenario. Ashley’s words hover just above your lips like a glowing lung, and it’s easy to understand why all of Kyle Gann’s friends in the 70s were going around reciting phrases memorized from this album, as they emanate connectively to some false dream society like little else in the world of 70s contemporary art. Not for everyone, I suppose, but the properly channeled will melt right into the couch. “Eventually he recognizes what he’s created as the first and last episodes of his opera for television, Perfect Lives, the middle opera of a monumental trilogy tracing the history of the movement of consciousness across America (east to west). This original recording with Ashley’s voice, accompanied by ‘Blue’ Gene Tyranny on keyboards, and ‘Kris’ on tablas, remains a classic. It is a masterpiece in its simplicity of form and in the purity and intensity of its effect on the listener . . . Everything in Ashley’s creation makes metabolic connections; there’s a transpersonal, time-exempt freedom in it; ‘the feeling of the idea of silk scarves in the air.’ In other words, the effect of his engaging, lyrical expression is that the mind opens. Only a masterpiece does that." — Melody Sumner.

“Blue” Gene Tyranny, keyboards
Kris, tablas

Automatic Writing

• Automatic Writing
• Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon
• She was a Visitor

Three of Ashley’s landmark recordings, Automatic Writing (1979), Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon (1971) and She Was A Visitor (1967). Composed in recorded form over a period of five years, Automatic Writing is the result of Robert Ashley’s fascination with involuntary speech. He has recorded and analyzed the repeated lines of his own mantra and extracted four musical characters. The result is quiet, mysterious, melancholy and an early form of ambient music. Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon, and She Was a Visitor are excerpts from an opera entitled That Morning Thing that was composed in 1966–67, as a result of Ashley’s impulse to express something about the suicides of three friends, in particular the intellectual problem of the idea of suicide. The opera takes the form of an alternation of scenes of rationalizations (or explanations) and scenes of descriptions. Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon is a woman’s description of a sexual experience. It is Ashley’s attempt “to demonstrate the dichotomy between the rational-whatever can be explained in words-and its opposite-which is not irrational or a-rational, but which cannot be explained in words.” The lead voice, the processed back-up chorus, the recurring bell tone, and the pervading tape hiss, create an unsettling mood. She Was a Visitor is another form of description, it is intended to be understood as a form of rumor. The chorus is divided into groups, each headed by a leader. A lone speaker repeats the title sentence throughout the entire performance. The separate phonemes of this sentence are picked up freely by the group leaders and are relayed to the group members, who sustain them softly and for the duration of one natural breath. The time lag between the group leaders’ phoneme choices and those phonemes being picked up by members of the group produces a staggered, chant-like effect, with the sounds moving outward from the nearest performer to the farthest. Booklet notes by Robert Ashley.

Robert Ashley, Cynthia Liddell, Mary Ashley, Mary Lucier,  Barbara Lloyd – voices
The Brandeis University Chamber Chorus, Alvin Lucier, Director

eL/Aficionado

This is the fourth opera in Ashley’s Now Eleanor’s Idea tetralogy: Junior, Jr.’s story. A group of scenes from the life of an Agent. The scenes are a kind of debriefing to a jury of Interrogators, in which the Interrogators challenge the Agent in various forms of musical dialogue. The mood of the opera owes much to our fascination with espionage and with the character of those people who lead double lives.

Thomas Buckner, The Agent
Jacqueline Humbert, Sam Ashley and Robert Ashley, interrogators
Orchestration by Robert Ashley
Engineering and mixing by Tom Hamilton

Das Beiheft enthält das volle Libretto

Dust – An Opera

Dust, an opera by Robert Ashley and Yukihiro Yoshihara (video direction) whose imaginary setting is a street corner anywhere in the world, where those who live on the fringes of society gather to talk, to each other and to themselves, about life-changing events, missed opportunities, memory, loss and regret.

Five “street people” recount the memories and experiences of one of their group, a man who has lost his legs in some unnamed war. As part of the experience of losing his legs, he began a conversation with God, under the influence of the morphine he was given to ease his pain. Now he wishes that the conversation, which was interrupted when the morphine wore off, could be continued so that he could get the “secret word” that would stop all wars and suffering.

Voices: Robert Ashley, Sam Ashley, Thomas Buckner, Jacqueline Humbert, Joan La Barbara
Musicians: “Blue” Gene Tyranny, synthesizer, Tom Hamilton, live mixing and sound processing
Electronic orchestration by Robert Ashley, Tom Hamilton and “Blue” Gene Tyranny
Sound effects for “Friends” composed by Tom Hamilton

Zwei Compact Discs mit Libretto

Atalanta (Acts of God)

Disc 1

• “Max” Odalisque & Character Reference
• “Max” Anecdote with Chorale “No, Never, No”
• “Willard” Odalisque & Character Reference

Disc 2

Ashley makes use of the story of “Atalanta”—a royal princess, discarded by her family, who was raised by the animals to become the fastest-running human, and who was later reclaimed by her father to marry her off for dynastic purposes--to present the character aspects of the “successful suitor.” These three aspects of character are presented in the opera as anecdotes about three extraordinary men of our times: Max Ernst (surrealist painter), Willard Reynolds (shaman storyteller) and Bud Powell (composer pianist). The genius of these three men can be taken to represent three aspects of the opera itself: image, narrative and music. In the imaginary setting of Atalanta (Acts of God), one companion (singer) reminds her of her excellence (the “Odalisque” arias); another recommends to her the characteristics of excellence in men (the “Character Reference” arias); and a third amuses her with anecdotes, as if told to her by each of the three men (the “Anecdotes”).

Robert Ashley, solo voice
Thomas Buckner, Carla Tato, Jacqueline Humbert –  voices;
“Blue” Gene Tyranny, keyboards;
Paul Shorr, mixing and electronics.

Recorded live at the Teatro Olimpico in Rome.
Sung in English and Italian.

Zwei Compact Discs mit Libretto

Perfect Lives

Perfect Lives has been called “the most influential music/theater/literary work of the 1980s.” At its center is the hypnotic voice of Robert Ashley. His continuous song narrates the events of the story and describes a 1980's update of the mythology of small town America. Perfect Lives is populated with myriad characters revolving around two musicians —“R”, the singer of myth and legend, and his friend, Buddy, “The World's Greatest Piano Player”. They have come to a small town in the Midwest to entertain at the Perfect Lives Lounge. As Robert Ashley describes in the opera synopsis, “they fall in with two locals to commit the perfect crime, a metaphor for something philosophical: in this case, to remove a sizable about of money from The Bank for one day (and one day only) and let the whole world know that it was missing.”

The eloping couple, Ed and Gwyn, the old people at the home, the sheriff and his wife (Will and Ida) who finally unravel the mystery, and Isolde who watches the celebration of the changing of the light at sundown from the doorway of her mother’s house are some of the characters who journey through the seven episodes of the opera.

Derived from a colloquial idiom, Perfect Lives transforms familiar material into an elaborate metaphor for the rebirth of the human soul. It has been called a comic opera about reincarnation.

Robert Ashley, solo voice
Jill Kroesen and David Van Tieghem, chorus
“Blue” Gene Tyranny, keyboards
David Van Tieghem, non-keyboard percussion;
Peter Gordon, music producer
Paul Shorr, soundtrack producer

Drei Compact Discs

In Sara, Mencken, Christ and Beethoven There Were Men and Women

New definitive CD reissue of this original Cramps label album from 1974, an early classic from Robert Ashley (previous CD version on Cramps is now deleted). This deluxe slipcased version features a 110-page book, reproducing the original Wolgamot text along with fascinating liner notes explaining the whole project from Keith Waldrop and Robert Ashley. The CD features one long composition with Ashley reading a text by poet John Barton Wolgamot. The poem has 128 stanzas; each stanza is made up of the same phrase, into which are introduced four variables, three are names or groups of names or constructions of names, and the fourth variable is formed by the adverb of the active verb. The result is considered “one of the most unusual and difficult linguistic textures in the English language”. The underlying music is supplied by Paul DeMarinis on Moog synthesizer. Ashley on DeMarinis: “{Paul} has elaborated seven different modular combinations, each of which can be controlled by programmed impulses. These derive from the sound of the reading of the poem passed through the regeneration high frequency filter and successively translated into a series of command impulses.”

Robert Ashley, voice
Paul De Marinis, synthesizer

Celestial Excursions

Disc 1

• Act I     “Is It Light Yet”
• Act II    “Asylum”

Disc 2

• Act III   “The River Deepens”

After the ground-breaking work, Dust, godfather of experimental opera Robert Ashley returns with Celestial Excursions. Ashley’s latest endeavor explores remarkably uncharted territory—the kind of language that is common among “old” people who talk all the time or not at all, to anyone passing by or to themselves. The opera premiered at the Hebbel Theater in Berlin, before coming to The Kitchen for it’s U.S. premiere in April 2003.
Celestial Excursions delves into the wild intermingling of reminiscence, regret, love, nightmare, old sayings, and songs on the radio—all seemingly to no purpose, except for the operatic end of relentless speed and precision in ensemble singing and the possible stage magic inherent in illusion, hallucination, and a physically changed state of the senses. The opera’s originality lies in a use of a new vocal technique Ashley has built over the last 20 years, which enables several stories to be heard at the same time. In an intricate vocal system, a principal voice is “chased” by other voices whose parts rotate in sequence in a given order. The result of this technique creates a complex jungle of voices, delivered with an extraordinary rhythmic intensity rarely heard in ensemble singing.

As for all of Ashley’s latest works, the orchestra music of Celestial Excursions was composed in the computer-synthesizer studio. All the voices and the orchestra (on multi-track tape or on disc) are processed again during the concert in order to match the sound of the opera to the performance space.  And for this CD release, Ashley went back to the studio with live recordings to rework the piece, extending the orchestra in the final act.
“With the exception of a few condescending and silly movies, “old” people are one of the few “minority” groups basically unrecognized in the arts. Not that they care, but among the “marginalized,” old people are the most marginalized, because, obviously, unlike racial or ethnic groups or the poor, they have no future.  Or rather, in the most important sense, their future will never change for the better.” — Robert Ashley

Music, Libretto and Direction: Robert Ashley
Singers: Sam Ashley, Thomas Buckner, Jacqueline Humbert, Joan La Barbara and Robert Ashley
Piano: “Blue” Gene Tyranny
Electronic orchestra; Robert Ashley and Tom Hamilton
Live mixing and sound processing: Tom Hamilton
The Silent Character: Choreographed by Joan Jonas

Zwei Compact Discs mit Libretto

Foreign Experiences

Foreign Experiences was commissioned by Performing Artservices, Inc. (1993) with funds from the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust. The opera was premiered by the Robert Ashley Ensemble at the Festival d'Avignon in 1994.

This realization is a duet version by Sam Ashley and Jacqueline Humbert. The pre-recorded voices of the Ashley ensemble are the background chorus.

Robert Ashley's NOW ELEANOR'S IDEA is a quartet of short operas based on the notion of a sequence of events seen from four, different points of view. At the same time, each opera is an allegory, like Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, for an individual's self-realization within the context of a major religion found in the United States. Improvement takes its imagery and plot from Judaism, Foreign Experiences from Pentecostal Evangelism, eL/Aficionado from Corporate Mysticism, and Now Eleanor's Idea from (Spanish) Catholicism.

The inspiration for these works came specifically from four sources: the work of the historian, Frances A. Yates (1900–1983), whose specialty of interests included the influence of Kabbalistic mysticism on the birth of modernism and scientific philosophy in Italy in the sixteenthth century (as a result of the expulsion of Jews from Spain during the Inquisition); the writings of Carlos Castaneda (and the arguments about him as a writer and about the intentions of his work); Low Rider Magazine, the fan-cult magazine of the Low Rider movement in the Southwestern United States; and finally, corporate vocabulary, what it sounds like and how it is used in popular publications, like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal or Fortune Magazine.

The story, as Robert Ashley tells it —

Don Jr. has come to California with his family—Linda and Jr. Jr.—and his friend, "N," to take a job at a small college. They have moved from the Midwest of fractured identities to the world of no identities. California is the end of the Earth. That feeling is passed on from generation to generation without anyone recognizing that it is part of them. And it is passed on to the most recent arrivals. Even today in the precious palaces of Malibu, in the vast developments between Los Angeles and San Diego, in the spreading domestic comfort of the San Francisco Bay area it’s there. It poisons our movies and TV shows. It generates the most violent and interesting mystery novels. Even now jet travel doesn’t cure it. It comes down on you hard when you get off the plane and step outside the terminal. It drives some people mad.

Music and  Libretto by Robert Ashley
Voices: Sam Ashley, Jacqueline Humbert
Synthesized orchestra parts: Sam Ashley
MIDI driven orchestra parts: Robert Ashley, Tom Hamilton
Mixing and Processing: Sam Ashley
Background Voices: Robert Ashley, Sam Ashley, Thomas Buckner,  Marghreta Cordero, Jacqueline Humbert, Joan La Barbara, Amy X Neuburg

Compact Disc mit Libretto (96 Seiten)

Now Eleanor’s Idea

Disc 1

• 1. Change
• 2. The Miracle of Cars

Disc 2:

• 3. Questions and Answers
• 4. The Song

Now Eleanor’s Idea was made possible by grants from The Rockefeller Foundation (1984 & 1993), the National Endowment for the Arts’ Opera Musical Theater Program (1985) and InterArts Program (1992).

Robert Ashley's Now Eleanor’s Idea is a quartet of short operas based on the notion of a sequence of events seen from four, different points of view. At the same time, each opera is an allegory, like Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, for an individual's self-realization within the context of a major religion found in the United States. Improvement takes its imagery and plot from Judaism, Foreign Experiences from Pentecostal Evangelism, eL/Aficionado from Corporate Mysticism, and Now Eleanor's Idea from (Spanish) Catholicism.

The inspiration for these works came specifically from four sources: the work of the historian, Frances A. Yates (1900–1983), whose specialty of interests included the influence of Kabbalistic mysticism on the birth of modernism and scientific philosophy in Italy in the sixteenth century (as a result of the expulsion of Jews from Spain during the Inquisition); the writings of Carlos Castaneda (and the arguments about him as a writer and about the intentions of his work); Low Rider Magazine, the fan-cult magazine of the Low Rider movement in the Southwestern United States; and finally, corporate vocabulary, what it sounds like and how it is used in popular publications, like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal or Fortune Magazine.

While working at The Bank, the title character, Now Eleanor, has a sort of “religious experience” that fills her with an “approach of the end of the world feeling.” This feeling compels her to leave her job in the Midwest, move to New Mexico, and become a newscaster to try to discover the point where the religions of America—Judaism, Protestantism, Business and Catholicism—merge. But there is more in store for her than she realizes . . .

Music & Libretto by Robert Ashley
Featuring: Joan LaBarbara as Now Eleanor
Amy X Neuburg as Now Eleanor’s Low Rider Double
Marghreta Cordero as Now Eleanor’s Guardian Angel
Ensemble Voices: Robert Ashley, Sam Ashley, Thomas Buckner, Jacqueline Humbert
Mixing and Electronics: Tom Hamilton

Zwei Compact Discs mit Libretto (96 Seiten)