Exploring the Unique Structure of Robert Ashley’s Television Opera
Robert Ashley’s Perfect Lives employs a deliberately unconventional narrative structure that significantly departs from traditional opera and typical linear storytelling. It is described as a “truly labyrinthine meta-work” and a “new approach to developing a long narrative structure.“
Here are some key aspects of its structure:
Perfect Lives – Episodic and Televised Format
Perfect Lives consists of seven episodes. It was specifically created for American television and premiered on the British Channel 4 as a series broadcast over the span of a week. Each episode was crafted to fit approximately within a 30-minute television slot. This serialized, televised format adds to its unique structure, even prompting Ashley to refer to it as a “soap opera.”
Non-Linearity and Digression
Unlike traditional narratives with clear beginnings and ends, the sources suggest that in Perfect Lives, “no story has a beginning or an end. It’s all digressions.” The ending is not predicted at the beginning; rather, it stems from the “point of digression.” The plot is described as “fragmented and frequently absurdist” and “chronology-hopping.” The opera is “straightforward in neither plot nor score” and doesn’t hinge on a structured narrative but on the “specific recitation of patterns of words.” Ashley’s “aversion to plot, to ‘eventfulness,’ makes it nearly impossible to say what Perfect Lives is ‘about'” in a conventional sense.
Focus on Details and Accumulation
Ashley’s approach is to gather a substantial number of details that may not seem significant individually but gain meaning when they accumulate. He states that the libretto is not about the refinement of language but “just a huge number of details that make up a story.” These details arise from their association with musical patterns. The desired audience experience, especially when watching the intended television format, is that the details build up over multiple viewings until “finally, there is a glimmer of the larger idea.”
Language and Speech as Music
The narrative is presented through speaking and occasionally singing. Ashley aimed to reproduce the music of the way people talk; he calls it “song” in the sense that The Iliad was a song. The words are spoken in a specific, rhythmic way, anchored by a constant tempo of 72 beats per minute throughout. Ashley intentionally moved away from setting American English to European musical forms, believing American English is most successful as words, particularly in popular music. His operas are described as being “really about language,” using a kind of “speak-singing” that employs the rhythms and timbres of vernacular American speech rather than the heightened vowels of classical opera. The saying or singing of the words is intended to sound like another instrument, not just accompaniment.
Themes and “Ordinary” Plot
The opera focuses on events like the bank robbery and the ways in which the characters are impacted by them. However, it explores “ordinary themes” of American life, such as money, confusion, forgetfulness, and time, rather than the typical dramatic tropes found in grand opera, like betrayal, love, or tuberculosis. Some elements are inspired by Ashley’s real life.
Collaboration and Open Structure
The music and structure emerge from collaboration and are not necessarily fixed. It’s an “open structure” where Ashley allows collaborators, like “Blue” Gene Tyranny, who provided the harmonic progressions, and the singers who shaped the melodies, to create significant content. This empowers them to feel ownership of their roles.
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Perfect Lives isn’t about telling a story—it’s about letting one emerge from rhythm, voice, and the accumulation of small moments. It’s not classical. It’s not pop. It’s something else entirely: a strangely familiar, totally American opera for people who don’t even like opera.
