Robert Ashley

Robert Ashley (1930–2014) was an American composer best known for reinventing opera for television, most extensively across the Perfect Lives (1977–83) and Music with Roots in the Aether (1976) cycles. He co-founded the ONCE Festival and Group in Ann Arbor in the early 1960s and, in 1966, the electronic composers’ collective Sonic Arts Union with Gordon Mumma, David Behrman, and Alvin Lucier. His work developed a distinctive vocal style suspended between speech and song, built on close-miked, conversational delivery and layered electronics — heard most directly in Automatic Writing, drawn from his own involuntary speech.