Robert Ashley
(Lovely Music)
Some contemporary American composers who use minimalism, electronics and/or repetition have been recognized by a larger audience as kindred spirits with our more conceptual and experimental pop artists - John Adams, Philip Glass, Terry Riley, Laurie Anderson. Robert Ashley, 78, who is from Ann Arbor, hasn't enjoyed that kind of popularity, although his operas and theater pieces have kept him busy in the world of New Music for several decades now. Yet anyone who ever got excited hearing Anderson's "O Superman" for the first time will get where his latest avant-garde opera, Concrete, is coming from, even if it isn't as rock-influenced.
It's a work of fierce intellect and touching (but unsentimental) emotionalism, effective as both experimentalism and old-fashioned storytelling. It also has the elegiac feel of a summation, yet never is pretentious or overreaching. And while not everyone will easily hear or respond to the musicality, those who do will be grateful for having some aural cobwebs dusted off. In Concrete, which debuted at New York's La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in 2007 but only was released as a two-disc set this year, Ashley has - in simplest terms - set voice to music. But it's also far more than that.
The opera's libretto consists of nine separate pieces - or, really, songs - based on the thoughts of an old man who is a composer, presumably Ashley, himself. Three of them are "discussions" - free-associating ideas and words, sung by four separate vocalists, that overlap and recede like waves breaking on a nighttime shore. But the other four are "reminiscences" - monologues by a soloist - about people from the old man's past. Musically, Ashley has sequenced groupings of orchestra samples into a computer, which plays them in an improvised manner that forces the vocalists to choose appropriate pitches for their talk-singing. This could come off as excessively complicated and willfully obscurant, but it doesn't sound like that at all. Rather, everything is in harmonious balance. The reminiscences, which seem to have autobiographical elements, have fully developed narratives the equivalent of rich yet enigmatic short stories. The language is everyday, but flowing with precise details.
"Ideas About Thinking," for instance, recalls a female friend whose life moves from golf to fashion to drugs to living in Hawaii with a fisherman-husband who is lost at sea. It is hauntingly sung by Jacqueline Humbert. Two pieces - "Insatiable Desire" sung by Thomas Buckner and "Interchangeability" by Joan La Barbara - are about friends the old man had while playing in a military jazz band. "A Day on Planet Gilbert," sung by Sam Ashley, is an extended remembrance, prompted by news of his death, of the old man's strange friendship with a younger deejay for an independent Detroit radio station who wanted to play contemporary music on his show. The lyrics wander off - as does the younger man's life - into digressions and developments that constantly make the narrative richer.
Without trumpeting or hyping his intentions, but by remaining true to his minimalist instincts, Ashley has created a breathtaking American saga. By the way, Concrete and two other recent operas - Dust and Celestial Excursions - will be performed in new productions by La Mama from Jan. 15-25. Check his website, www.robertashley.org, for details.
Standout Tracks: "Ideas About Thinking," "A Day on Planet Gilbert" STEVEN ROSEN
