Music
Robert Ashley
1930–2014 · composer
Ann Arbor-born avant-garde composer who co-founded the ONCE Festival of new music in his hometown and later invented the “television opera”.
- Born
Ann Arbor, Michigan- Died
New York City, New York
aged 83- Birth name
- Robert Reynolds Ashley
- Detroit years
- 1930–1969
- Field
- Music
01 / The Detroit story
The Detroit story
Robert Ashley was born in Ann Arbor and studied at the University of Michigan from 1948 to 1952, where he met the composer Ross Lee Finney. After graduate study in New York he came back to Michigan and worked at the university's Speech Research Laboratories, experience that fed his lifelong interest in voice, language and electronics. From 1961 he organized the ONCE Festival in Ann Arbor with Gordon Mumma, Roger Reynolds and other local composers and artists. The festivals brought John Cage, Pauline Oliveros and other radical artists to a college town that greeted them with both enthusiasm and hostility, and they made Ann Arbor an unlikely center of the 1960s avant-garde. Ashley later co-founded the Sonic Arts Union, directed the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College in California and settled in New York, where he created narrative “television operas” such as Perfect Lives.
Highlights
- Co-organized the ONCE Festival in Ann Arbor (1961–1969)
- Co-founded the Sonic Arts Union (1966)
- Television opera Perfect Lives (1983)
- Automatic Writing (1979), a landmark of experimental music
02 / Their Detroit places
Their Detroit places 1
Where they lived, worked, performed and liked to hang out. Closed and demolished places stay here too, because they are part of the city's history.
Studied here · 1948–1952, late 1950s–1960s
University of Michigan
He studied music here and later worked at the university's Speech Research Laboratories.