Photo by Joanne Savio

Robert Ashley composed operas for television sets. He assembled librettos taken from hot rod rags and Buddhist texts. He was a composer who was also a performer who was an improviser who also spent years formulating every scintilla of his work. He was one of the most quietly influential musicians of the 20th century. He died last week at 83, and still, no one knows quite how to talk about him. 

The composer and longtime Village Voice critic Kyle Gann, who was Ashley’s biographer and most vocal proponent, offered helpful advice in a 1991 column: “Call them performance novels if ‘opera’ raises too many expectations.” Ashley’s works had multiple lives: They lived as albums, on the Lovely Music imprint; as television programs; as barely-staged theatrical works. He specialized in liminal feelings, ones that don’t have easy analogues in music or in language, so he cobbled together a unique toolset to express them. This is part of why his reach was so broad. He was simultaneously a pioneer in electronic music, in multimedia installations, and in “opera,” but that isn’t quite the right way to put it—Ashley didn’t compose operas so much as he filled the hollowed-out structure of “opera” with his own luminous, quizzical ideas. 

Robert Ashley was not terribly well-known, but no one who felt the imprint of his sensibility thought the same afterwards. His work was jelly: sticky stuff with no discernible form. It was impossible to get ahold of, to find a spot for in your mind, but it coated you nonetheless. In tribute to his spirit, we’ve assembled a tapestry of artists who have felt themselves transformed by Ashley's work.

Drew Daniel (Matmos)

Part of starting my relationship with M.C. Schmidt—and our band—hinged upon listening to this composer that he was wild about: Robert Ashley. In awe Ashley's hypnotic drawl and the precision of the cadence behind it, one early unreleased Matmos song involved loops and manipulations of some of the cryptic, poetic phrases that stud the libretto of his hypnotic longform operas. 

In 2008, we played two shows featuring our cover of “The Backyard”, from his masterpiece Private Parts at The Stone in NYC; we lost our cool when Robert Ashley himself walked in, sat down in the front row, and proceeded to conduct the rhythms of the piece with his hand, tapping out the patterns on his knees. Terrified, our first set was inhibited, kinda not-quite-there. It was too scary to meet him in person!

But when we talked to him afterward, he revealed himself to be an incredibly patient, kind, and generous man (though hearing him speak in That Voice was still jarring). He stayed for the second show (I wasn’t kidding when I said he was patient) and if I say so myself, we got it right, thanks in no small part to his encouragement and focus. Martin and I are scheduled to play in Paris this a month at the Presences Electroniques festival, at which Robert Ashley was originally scheduled to perform, and we intend to dedicate our performance to his memory. His loss silences a powerfully generative force in American music, but his recorded legacy is going to keep stunning and rewiring all who surrender to it.

Damon Krukowski (Galaxie 500, Damon & Naomi)

I've always thought of Robert Ashley's work as a bridge between contemporary American poetry and new music. Actually, it was never his music that I connected with, so much as his use of language in it. Ashley's anti-narrative use of found sources—"normal" speech sentences rather than lyric—is a strategy I believe he shared with some of the most difficult avant-garde writers of his era, the Language Poets. Married to Ashley's consonant-yet-anchorless music, these devices somehow become more approachable than puzzling. 

The flat tone of his TV opera Perfect Lives, for example, seems comfortably ironic in that late 70s/early 80s way, like the soap opera parody "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman", or Talking Heads. But it's way more strange than funny—and more disquieting than amusing, especially if you swallow the whole, 175-minute thing. Ashley's work doesn't skewer normalcy; it wallows in it until the strangeness of the world around you makes his operas not only long, but never-ending. We are all leading perfect lives. Get used to it.

Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never)

Robert Ashley showed me that language and music aren't so different from one another. Neither are reducible, and both are much more elusive than they seem.

Owen Pallett

Robert Ashley is my best friend Steve Kado's favorite composer; "The sculptor has made the horse look stupid," was Steve's hook to get me into listening to Perfect Lives with him. Afterward, we had a debate about what it is to be "a composer." I took an anti-essentialist "no problem!" kind of bullshit stance—"Whatever Ashley wants to call himself, I will call him that"—but pointed out that, functionally, what "I, composer" did on a minute-to-minute basis was a world away from what Ashley did. I used compromised terms like "word opera,” and Steve was incensed: "You should thank Robert Ashley for expanding your possibilities as a composer, he is a gift to your practice."

What followed, for me, was the Greenaway movie [Four American Composers], the videos, the subsequent investigation into all Lovely Music releases, and the glorious frustration those albums have created in me. My generation, the worst generation, unable or unwilling to react to, or to expand upon such subtly beautiful and powerful music, idiots debating the semantics of “what is composing?” instead of allowing ourselves to shaped by Ashley's innovations, re-shaping our own voices. I called Steve when I heard Robert Ashley had died, and we sat on the phone in silence. "I knew he was dying," he told me, "I just didn't realize how soon." Ashley makes me and Steve and every composer who follows him look stupid. We'll always live in his shadow.

Nico Muhly

I think Automatic Writing is one of the most gorgeous pieces of art about sleeplessness and living in a city ever. It’s an obsessive piece but one that captures precisely the claustrophobia of being in a small space, alone with one’s thoughts and the (slightly horrifying) noises internal to one’s body.

Richard Reed Parry (Arcade Fire)

The loss of Robert Ashley is the loss of that rarest of birds, the Truly Unique Composer, one who was unafraid to invite some of the chaos of his own body's involuntary actions (in this case, Tourette's syndrome) into his idea of what composing could be, and to use whatever and whomever he could find to make something beautiful that no one else was making. What else can we ask of a composer? With his absence, a special piece of the horizon disappears from the landscape of contemporary composition.

Bryce Dessner (The National)

I remember studying Robert Ashley's innovative use of electronics in school, from when he was head of the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills in the late 60s. Even as a student, I remember being impressed. As for his operas, I sadly never got to see one of them performed live. But his deeply original work was always intent on breaking new ground, and in a tradition that so steadfastly looks backwards, Ashley was one of few voices stewarding "opera" into the future as a living and vital art form.

Ryan Lott (Son Lux)

Robert Ashley was a composer whose diligent work in near-obscurity led to fundamental changes in the way music is made. Those of us who make music with synthesis and electronics have many like Ashley to thank for both our tools and the ideas upon which our tools are based. The pioneering voice is usually the quietest, but reverberates the longest.

Glenn Kotche (Wilco)

My introduction to Robert Ashley was on a mix tape made by my friend Darin Gray—the piece was "Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon". I was shocked; the chilling account was unlike anything I had heard before.  The eerie music and disturbing story made me rethink a lot of things and ask many questions. I had no idea modern composition could be so unorthodox, brave, and out. It definitely made me think in broader terms of what was possible in music.

Christian Fennesz

R.I.P. Robert Ashley. Thank you for the wonderful work. Always innovative, pioneering, and so influential to me and many others. He will be missed.

Tim Miller (head of NYC experimental performance space The Kitchen)

Robert Ashley is one of the most radical innovators of his generation. I can think of any number of people who he’s influenced, but there is no one comparable to him. In his reconceptualization of opera, his ability to collaborate across disciplines, to straddle popular and classical worlds—and that’s even setting aside his experiments in electronic music, which had an enormous impact as well—someone without whom a place like The Kitchen could never truly have existed. I think his music will be discovered and rediscovered for years to come.

The last piece he had performed The Kitchen was a restaging of That Morning Thing, which was originally composed in 1967. What’s remarkable about that piece is its incredibly deep relationship to the organization of culture and all the inter-relationships of disciplines. His ability to get at classical themes at the same time as what was happening in the culture was matchless. He could be both incredibly humorous and philosophical at the same time. I probably had three really long conversations with him over the years, and what struck me was how he was both incredibly elegant as well as wryly whimsical.