Perfect Lives
Regular price
€16.99
Raoul de Noget, an over-the-hill singer, and his younger pal Buddy ( The World s Greatest Piano Player ), find themselves in a small town in the Midwest. They become friends with the son and daughter of the local sheriff, and the four hatch a plan to do something that, if they are caught, will be seen as a crime, but if they are not, will be art: they will rob the town bank, take the money over the border into Indiana, and then return it all the next day. With this story at its center, Robert Ashley s inimitable Perfect Lives goes on to demolish every narrative convention in the book, taking in conflicting perspectives, texts, tones, narrators, and philosophies, roping in Midwestern ennui, pop songs, self-help tapes, heist movies, the lost city of Atlantis, dirty jokes, the history of American immigration, the preternatural flatness of Illinois, boogie-woogie, Giordano Bruno, and, finally, an elegy for thought itself. Perfect Lives is as much a summation of America as All in the Family or Paterson, and is every bit as essential.
Robert Ashley is a prolific composer and writer, best known for his work in new forms of opera: epic prose poems he sets to music, which have been awarded, commissioned, and performed internationally for over forty-five years. In the 1960s, Ashley organized Ann Arbor's legendary ONCE Festival and directed the ONCE Group. During the 1970s, he directed the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College, toured with the Sonic Arts Union, and wrote and producedPerfect Lives, an opera for television widely praised as the precursor of "music-television." Staged versions of ATALANTA (ACTS OF GOD) have toured throughout Europe and the United States. Kyle Gann is music critic for the "Village Voice "and Associate Professor of Music at Bard College. He is the author of "American Music in the Twentieth Century "(1997) and "The Music of Conlon Nancarrow "(1995).