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“Private Parts is as mesmerizingly odd four decades later as it was then; the only music it closely resembles is other work by Robert Ashley.”
No one sounded exactly like Robert Ashley. The storied composer, who died in 2014 at the age of eighty-three, reinvented opera. His works were not operas in any traditional sense; they were more like hypnotic multilayered monologues, often delivered against a backdrop of eccentric instrumentation. His librettos lacked conventional plot lines, using humdrum phrases and familiar patterns of the English language that disguised the emotional depth and complexity hidden underneath the surface.
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