Perfect Lives

One of the foremost composers in contemporary music, American Robert Ashley is also a multimedia artist of international standing. The composer and textwriter revolutionized opera when in 1983 he created a unique and visionary work which reviews hailed as the first genuinely American counterpart to the operas of Monteverdi, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, and Stockhausen’s Licht cycle. Robert Ashley’s Perfect Lives – an opera for television in seven episodes was to become the most influential composition of the American 1980s avant-garde. The three-and-a-half-hour work for television uses music, recitative and video to tell seemingly mundane tales of life in a small Midwestern town. The multimedia work of art also offers an ironic take on the methods and strategies of commercial mass media. It emerged from the many years that Ashley spent working in various collaborations and organizing live performances in the United States and Europe. Perfect Lives premièred on Channel Four Television in Britain in 1984.