Robert Ashley, Opera Composer Who Painted Outside the Lines

NYTimes.com profiles Robert Ashley, who passed away this week.

A prolific composer who first came to prominence in the 1960s, Mr. Ashley decided early to concentrate on opera. To him, though, the definition of opera was far different from what it had been for centuries, or even from what it was for many modern composers. In Mr. Ashley’s hands, “opera” could take in spoken dialogue, chanting and even mumbling. His librettos, most of which he wrote, had little conventional plot. Unlike the gods, ghosts and noblemen that have long peopled grand opera, his characters were ordinary, even marginal. The result — performed over the years at La MaMa Experimental Theater Club, the Kitchen and Merkin Concert Hall in Manhattan; the Brooklyn Academy of Music; Florida Grand Opera in Miami; and throughout Europe — was a series of operas “so unconventional that they tend to be received as either profoundly revolutionary or incomprehensibly peculiar,” as The Los Angeles Times wrote in 1992.