Robert Ashley Movies

In 1975 the composer Robert Ashley embarked on an ambitious work titled Music With Roots in the Aether. He called it an Opera (or piece of theater depending on the case) for television. The work is comprised of seven, two hours sections. Each “episode” is dedicated to investigations,...

The story of Willard from Ashley's opera Atalanta, recounted in 3 parts.

This work is Woody's first entry into the narrative sphere, whereby the "story" is continually undermined with the aid of various anti-narrative strategies: In each of the eleven segments of this "electronic opera", different effects are used. Fascinated with the remarkable personality of infamous...

Set in the American Midwest, Perfect Lives is “about” bank robbery, cocktail lounges, geriatric love, adolescent elopement, the changing of the light at sundown, et al. One of the definitive text-sound compositions of the late 20th century, it has been called "the most influential...

Buried inside the epic American opera for television, “Perfect Lives” are the boogie-woogie lessons being sold by Buddy to untalented people in the middle of America. This pilot for the series is an abstraction that plays on the meaning of life (which is unknowable) and how to make art...

A television documentary produced for British Television directed by Peter Greenaway.

Originally a vocal performance on the album Automatic Writing.

A girl wanders through an abandoned farmhouse; doors open and close of themselves; when the girl finds a mark over a lipstick circle she had made on a mirror, the film ends.

Automatic Writing transforms involuntary speech into an ambient soundscape, conjuring four spectral musical "characters." Object Collection reimagines this on a stage of flickering monitors and shifting light, weaving a dense, ephemeral sound world—less a recreation, more an elusive, living...

A new production of Robert Ashley's 1991 opera, "Improvement (Don Leaves Linda," featuring Gelsey Bell, Amirtha Kidambi, Brian McCorkle, Paul Pinto, Dave Ruder and Aliza Simons. Music Director: Tom Hamilton Live Sound and Processing: Tom Hamilton Stage Design and Lighting: David Moodey ...