Robert Ashley’s Crash at the Lovely Music festival: Riveting in a way that leaves you wanting to dive in again

Robert Ashley: Crash

Varispeed Collective

Lovely Music festival, Dundalk

★★★★★

It’s hard to know where to start with the American composer Robert Ashley (1930-2014), a key subject of the Lovely Music festival staged over the weekend by Louth Contemporary Music Society. Let’s try his imprint in the archives of this newspaper. The earliest mention is in TV listings in 1984, when Channel 4 screened Peter Greenaway’s Four American Composers (which covers Ashley as well as John Cage, Philip Glass and Meredith Monk), plus all six episodes of Perfect Lives, Ashley’s TV opera.

In July 2021 Amanda Feery brought him up in connection with A Thing I Cannot Name, her own video opera, with libretto by Megan Nolan. She quoted him saying: “‘If you think it’s an opera, it’s an opera. If you want it to be an opera, it’s an opera.’ It’s such a simple line, but I felt really happy to hear that. It was validating and comforting.”

In a 2015 interview in with Donnacha Dennehy about his first opera, The Last Hotel, the composer listed Ashley’s Perfect Lives (“which, funnily enough, opens in a hotel room”) along with works by Alban Berg and Philip Glass. Two years earlier, the singer-songwriter Julia Holter cited him as an influence, saying: “I love the way Robert Ashley lets any voice just pour stuff out, but it’s all kind of in his way somehow.”

And in 2012, David Bremner and Elizabeth Hilliard’s Béal Festival featured the baritone Thomas Buckner in The Producer Speaks (from Atalanta (Acts of God)), When Famous Last Words Fail You, and World War III Just the Highlights.

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The things that stand out about Ashley’s work are the inseparability of words and music, the spaced-out articulation of the words, as if following some kind of ritualistically ordained processes of rhythm and articulation, and the mix of the commonplace, the zany, the incomprehensible and the inspired in the texts themselves, which somehow are at once almost scatterbrained and highly focused.

As the New Grove Dictionary of Music explains, “Convinced that he suffered a mild form of Tourette syndrome, which can compel automatic speech, he began to record his spells of compulsive speaking, and ... he also generated texts that have eventually grown into a series of operatic works, in which one opera derives from the plot and characters of another.”

His final opera, Crash, which had its European premiere at An Táin Arts Centre in Dundalk on Friday, is a tightly structured but almost macaronic-seeming personal and philosophical narrative.

Six performers, the astonishingly, quietly virtuosic Varispeed Collective, are seated at tables, intoning in three different styles to a trio of babbling voices that function as a kind of orchestra.

[ Varispeed Collective on Crash: ‘What a magical, bizarre, tragic way to learn a piece of music’ ]

Although each year of his life is touched on in a raw and open way, the whole is at risk of sounding rather abstract, not least because the words and ideas pass by in a profusion that causes a kind of sensory overload. But it’s the kind of overload you might experience from being taken through a gallery, museum, garden or landscape at a speed where you don’t have the time you want to spend with any of the wonders.

Yes, it is frustrating. But it is also riveting. Riveting in a way that leaves me wanting to dive into it at least one more time.