Robert Ashley
Robert Ashley (1930 to 2014) wrote operas for television, with characters who talk rather than sing over a slow electronic pulse, and in doing so invented a form that still has no proper name. Perfect Lives (1983), a seven part story about a bank robbery in a small Midwestern town, is its masterpiece; Automatic Writing (1979) turned his own involuntary speech into a whispered, hypnotic score.
