Robert Ashley was a renowned American composer, known for his innovative work in new forms of opera and multi-disciplinary projects. He held an international reputation for his recorded works, which are regarded as classics of language in a musical setting. Ashley was a pioneer in the field of opera-for-television, and his work has been widely acclaimed and influential.
Born on March 28, 1930, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Ashley was educated at the University of Michigan and the Manhattan School of Music. He continued his studies at the University of Michigan's Speech Research Laboratories, where he focused on psycho-acoustics and cultural speech patterns. Ashley's research in this area led to his employment as a Research Assistant in Acoustics at the Architectural Research Laboratory.
In the 1960s, Ashley founded the ONCE Festival, an annual festival of contemporary performing arts in Ann Arbor. The festival presented many of the decade's pioneers of the performing arts, and it played an important role in the development of contemporary music and theater.
In 1980, the Kitchen in New York commissioned Ashley to create an opera for television, Perfect Lives. The opera was broadcast in seven half-hour episodes and was widely acclaimed. It was co-produced with Channel Four in Great Britain and has since been seen on television in Austria, Germany, Spain, and the United States.
Ashley's work has been the subject of a film by Peter Greenaway, one of a series entitled Four American Composers. His book Perfect Lives was published in 1991, and his book Outside of Time: Ideas about Music was published in 2009. A biography of Ashley by Kyle Gann was published in 2012.
Ashley died on March 3, 2014.
