As I sat outside of 2640 Space waiting for the heavy church doors to open, a young woman walked up and asked, “Is this the line?” Glancing at the row of waiting people that was just beginning to turn the corner of the block, the man sitting next to me replied, “We’re not in line, but I think some of the other people are.”
This type of banal yet oddly elusive phrase might fit perfectly in Robert Ashley’s “television opera” Perfect Lives, like this one which we all either were or were not in line to see on Tuesday night. Sections of the seven-part opera were performed by Matmos, a Baltimore-based experimental band made up of Drew Daniel and Martin “MC” Schmidt (Daniel daylights as an English professor at Hopkins).
Ashley conceived this startlingly innovative piece of television-art in 1984 for the BBC, after developing it in live performances, like this one, that featured a 13-person ensemble including Schmidt as the narrator, “R” (played by Ashley in the TV version) and Daniel operating the electronics and sound board, where he mixed in percussion and kept tempo with Schmidt’s speech.
Part one (titled “The Park”) of Perfect Lives begins modestly, with Schmidt smoothly whispering about a man doing nothing in particular, “picks up a phone... hangs up — very dramatic.” Simple piano and percussion drift in and out, giving the section an ethereal, dreamlike quality. R is guiding us in meditation on consciousness itself. “He prefers gravity,” R calmly said. “...To what other state!” a chorus of backing vocalists (Katie Bernstein and Lexie Mountain) reacts.
It’s all so soothing that it’s easy to lose track of the loose narrative R is spinning. Most of the text functions as a stream-of-consciousness inner monologue, replete with spontaneous retractions (“remove but, remove thankless”). Relaying the plot in detail would miss the point, but I’ll relate a few of the characters and scenarios R sings about in the roughly three-hour opera (Matmos performed parts 1, 4 and 7). Each section begins with a dedication, followed by the declaration, “These are songs about the corn belt and some of the people in it. Or on it.”
Ashley grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan and studied music at the University of Michigan.
Midwestern sensibilities are abound in the story, but for Ashley — who became a staple of the New York City 1960s avant-garde scene — there’s nothing ironic about this celebration of small town life. Unlike many independent-minded noir or horror films (Blue Velvet, Texas Chainsaw Massacre), Perfect Lives doesn’t mime the cheery facade of small town American life for its grim, hidden undersides. It relishes in the ordinary.
We meet Raoul and Buddy, musicians who arrive in a small Midwestern town to perform at the Perfect Lives Lounge but instead wind up accessories to a bank heist pulled off by a pair of local sweethearts (the “perfect crime”). Along the way we meet Gwyn (who “works at the bank/that’s her job/mostly she helps people count their money/she likes it”), hear “the sound of god” in the voice of Rodney, the local barkeep. We hear him pity his wife, Baby, who wants to boogie-woogie, but the outlook for that is grim.
“Imagine the self, shaving for the first time,” R posits in part four [The Bar (Differences)], a lively number featuring stride piano and a rousing chorus that harmonizes the lyrics “CCEE, CCGG.” That’s right. The lyrics are just the piano notes. Form and content have merged into a postmodern vortex made of boogie-woogie.
It has become clear by now that the sound and rhythm of Ashley’s words are more important than the actual content of the dialogue. There is so much going on here, but it’s impossible not to get caught up in the swing; Schmidt performs the scene as a campy night club act, donning a slick black suit but affecting the cadence of a heady jazz band leader who just invented rap.
Is this sound poetry? R could be reading a cereal box and somehow find slick wisdom in pronouncing, “percentage daily values are based on a 2,000 calorie diet.”
But wait, a moment of clarity! “She has learned that short ideas repeated massage the brain,” R concludes, and this feels like the thesis statement of Perfect Lives, if not Ashley’s oeuvre writ large.
“It’s a funny line,” Daniel said to me (Matmos sampled this line in an older song), “because you could take it to be a sort of jab at minimalism [of composers like Phillip Glass, who often overshadowed Ashley’s work]... (saying it’s) therapeutic massage; It’s feel good music.”
This is but one interpretation, however, and Daniel extols the “sly and portable” nature of Ashley’s enigmatic writing: “It could be about advertising... ‘short phrases repeated massage the brain’; That’s true about ‘make America great again.’”
Here’s a far more typical section and my favorite moment in the opera — it’s cryptic and evasive, delighting in the simplicity of ordinary moments of everyday life.
“You say to me, ‘We don’t serve fine wine in half pints, buddy,’ and that sound is just what we expect and need. We take sound so much for granted, don’t we? It’s the sound of god... you say, ‘We don’t serve fine wine in half pints, buddy,’ is the sound of god,” he said.
Others in the audience seemed intrigued too. The house was full about 20 minutes after doors opened. “It makes me sleepy but not in a bad way,” said the woman sitting behind me, during intermission. I think this is true and as sneakily erudite as something R would say.
Ashley was emphatic about the collaborative nature of the piece. The musicians developed each instrument’s part during live performances, freely riffing on the loose arrangement Ashley wrote to build their own ‘character.’
Likewise, Matmos’ performance featured the string arrangements of bassist Britton Powell, who cued the orchestra in part one through a cycle of loose chord structures they improvised off of.
The raucous, bluesy piano score in part four (The Bar) was transcribed by Walker Teret from the recordings of Ashley’s closest collaborator, “Blue” Gene Tyranny. The final scene (The Backyard) was improvised completely, using just Ashley’s libretto (text).
Other ensemble members included flutist Brooks Kossover, bassist Luke Wilson, cellist Owen Gardner (of Horse Lords), Anna Roberts-Gevalt on viola and Peabody students Ledah Finck on violin and Irene Han on cello. The show also featured original video projections by Max Eilbacher and sound by John Lucaterrini.
Schmidt’s narration as R was restrained; He didn’t try to impersonate Ashley. “You get into a weird uncanny valley if you’re trying to imitate a record too closely,” Daniel said, adding that Matmos consciously aimed to “not slip into a karaoke imitation of Robert Ashley.”
Schmidt is not new at adapting vocal works; He has performed John Cage’s 45’ for a Speaker, a piece consisting of 45 minutes of a notated lecture. “There’s a script for when you take a sip of water, when you cough.”
Daniel and Schmidt, who are married, met as undergraduates at Berkeley, where they formed Matmos shortly after. They first performed Perfect Lives in 2007, around the time Daniel joined the faculty at Hopkins. Recent performances include a European tour in 2016 and a show in NYC, which Robert Ashley himself attended.
The interpretive, improvisational qualities that make Ashley’s music so innovative and affecting also render it difficult to reproduce (not to mention Ashley’s singular vocal style). Consequently, Perfect Lives is not widely performed outside of a few New York ensembles.
“What do we make of this music after its interpreter has died?” Daniel said.
What record we do have is the 1984 “television opera” Ashley created. Daniel marvels at the ambitiousness of Ashley’s TV special, how it explodes the boundaries of high and low culture.
“What would happen if opera had a short attention span, as far as constantly bombarding you with new images in the way that television does... but what if television was about experiencing lyrical, long form musical beauty?”
Perfect Lives is innovative in so many aspects — the improvised parts and orchestration, psychedelic narrative, seamless blending of musical rhythms and styles, use of repetition and the voice as an instrument – that are too numerous to list exhaustively here.
It creates an entirely new medium for which the tag “television opera” seems insufficient. Call it a great American novel. Ashley’s narration churns out an endless poetic spew on a series of constantly shifting topics (or are they all the same topic?).
Like an improbably comforting beat poet, R’s plainspoken wisdom is infectiously charming; Listening to his words feels like being, as he puts it, “at the center of a bowl of hot stuff that we haven’t put our minds to yet.”
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