Robert Ashley: Built For Speed

"Popular music always ends after three minutes," remarks Robert Ashley without a hint of judgment in his voice. In his TriBeca studio in downtown New York, we're talking about the operas he's been writing since the mid-70s, which leads to a discussion of popular song. He pauses, forging his next sentence. "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."

Even at 72 years old, Ashley exists in defiance of history, and he continues to move ahead at an accelerating clip. He is always composing and touring, completing a new opera about every three years and following it with select performances that might take him across the United States and over to Europe and Japan. He edits his conversation with great care, as if determined to verbalise the best take of each thought. He and partner Mimi Johnson live in an old brick warehouse that was converted into residential lofts back in the 70s. She runs Lovely Music, the record label devoted to documenting key works of the American electronic and electroacoustic avant garde. The two are longtime residents, occupying two floors Ð one for their studio and the other for their living space. Today, the windows are open due to the warm weather. Ashley's computers, keyboards and recording equipment are clustered in the centre of the space underneath a marquee-like canopy. The tent is there to protect the equipment from falling crumbs of concrete and ceiling plaster while the roof undergoes repairs. Despite the disruption, Ashley never loses his train of thought. "That's why so much popular music has to do with love," he continues. "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 labelling of your own experience that you never realised needed a label." He sits up straight and places the palms of his hands firmly on the table in front of him. "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 labelling an experience. You have to continually refer back to what human beings know. My job is to establish those characters." We have just crossed the line where popular music ends and opera begins. Welcome to Robert Ashley's territory.

Ashley often talks about history, perhaps because he had such a hand in forging it. He and his contemporaries were initially linked to John Cage and David Tudor through a variety of encounters and collaborations in the 1960s, and then went on to become the most consistent practitioners of American experimental music into the 70s. This 'post-Cage generation' - Ashley, Gordon Mumma, Alvin Lucier and David Behrman - acquired their initial momentum through their founding of The Sonic Arts Union (1966- 76), a mutually supportive thinktank for live experimental music. If Cage and Tudor represented the first wave of live electronic music production - the use of magnetic tape and the amplification of small sounds - then Ashley, Mumma, Lucier and Behrman in their different ways represented four extensions of that abstraction, each indicating musical practices that are still being explored and utilised today. Ashley's contribution consisted of his attempts to seamlessly integrate electronic performance with human performance. One of the earliest and most notorious examples was The Wolfman (1964), where he played his own vocals through loudspeakers simultaneously with a tape composition and controlled the feedback by putting his mouth up against the mic. The avalanche of noise was "so overpowering to the listener that no one ever understands how the sound is made".

The Wolfman was emblematic of the performance pieces Ashley tested during his years of work in Ann Arbor, Michigan, particularly with Gordon Mumma for Milton Cohen's Space Theater (1957-64), and with Mumma and others for the ONCE Festivals (1961 and 1965). Ashley was constantly experimenting with combinations of available technology and live performers. His 60s portfolio is a melange of performance approaches, including purely electronic works for tape such as Big Danger In Five Parts (1964) and Untitled Mixes (1965), and soundtracks for the experimental films of George Manupelli. The ONCE Festival became a remarkable laboratory for New Music and mixed media before Ashley and Mumma wound it down in 1966 in Ann Arbor to concentrate on other outlets and contexts for their music. While Mumma went to work with Tudor, Cage and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (see The Wire 216), Ashley extended his forays into electronic music theatre into works he called operas for voices, dancers and tape. Drawn from his own That Morning Thing (1967), She Was A Visitor (1967), for speaker and chorus, was an early work featuring the soothing drone of his voice. The repeated line "She was a visitor" cascades gently, sleepily, into a chanted murmur, as an accompanying chorus freely repeats given phonemes from the sentence. Ashley likened it to the process of rumour mongering, where the content of the original message becomes distorted and transformed with repetition.

But one morning in April 1968, he decided to stop composing altogether. Fully intending the decision to be final, his reasons were many, such as the economic pressures of trying to produce concerts while eking out a living with day jobs. With little money available for composers, he began to believe that "there was no reality" to his dreams. He had also been deeply discouraged by one of the last performances of the touring ONCE Group, when the audience physically assaulted the musicians.

"The performance we did at Brandeis [1968] was a beautiful piece called Night Train," Ashley recalls. "It involved, among a lot of other things, giving the audience something when they came in. The idea of the piece was that we were aliens trying to make friends with the Earth people. So, everybody who came in along with their ticket got something edible, like an apple or an onion or a fish or a loaf of bread or something like that. Somehow in the middle of the performance the audience kind of lost it and started attacking us. They were throwing things... Besides the hard pieces of vegetable, like an onion, we were passing out lights. [Architecture professor] Harold Borkin had a group of ten or so students there who were soldering one end of a flashlight bulb to one end of a battery and then soldering a wire to the other end of the battery. When the audience started throwing those, I knew we were in deep trouble. We got through the performance but it was very ugly. It was very discouraging. I had had enough. I didn't compose music for another five years."

Though he had stopped composing, Ashley didn't remove himself entirely from the world of New Music. The Sonic Arts Union gave him a way to perform without having to actually compose. He also took the job of Director of the Center for Contemporary Music at Oakland's Mills College in 1969, revitalising one of the most influential music programmes in the country after several of its founding members - most notably Morton Subotnick and Pauline Oliveros - had left to pursue other opportunities. Ultimately, it was Mimi Johnson who challenged Ashley to return to composing, saying, "Well, if you are a famous composer, you've got to compose music."