Wagner 1

Kaitlyn Wagner

Changing the Perception of Mental Illness: Disability in Operas By

Philip Glass and Robert Ashley

All throughout opera, there has been Madness. From Handels Orlando to

Bergs Wozzeck the mad scene has been a common trope of opera since its

inception as a genre. Sadly, the mad scene has been the main portrayal of mental

illness in opera from its inception, and the explicitly negative (and often dangerous)

view it portrays has tainted Western art music until the 20th Century, when two

composers, Robert Ashley and Philip Glass changed that standard in the late 1970s

and early 1980s. In the case of Robert Ashley, his monumental television opera

Perfect Lives was inspired by the Tourettes Syndrome Ashley perceived himself as

having. Philip Glass, along with his collaborator Robert Wilson, were both heavily

inspired by the postmodern writings of 14-year-old mentally disabled Christopher

Knowles when writing the opera Einstein on the Beach. Tourettes inspired the

bizarre and often unsettling text (narrated by Ashley himself) and the complex,

modulating rhythmic structures of Perfect Lives. Knowles writing can be seen not

only in his contributions towards the libretto, but also in Glasss musical structures

and Wilsons aesthetic ideas. The two operas are similar in their settings of the text,

use of collaboration, and strict rhythmical processes, all of which were intertwined

with each artists dealings with mental illness.

In his program notes for the 1974-1979 tape piece Automatic Writing, Ashley

writes:
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Automatic Writing was composed and recorded over a period of 5 years,

during which time, I was fascinated with involuntary speech. I had come to

recognize that I might have a mild form of Tourettes syndrome

(characterized in my case only by purely involuntary speech) and I wondered,

naturally, because the syndrome has to do with sound-making and because

the manifestation of the syndrome seemed so much like a primitive form of

composing an urgency connected to the sound-making and the unavoidable

feeling that I was trying to get something right whether the syndrome

was connected in some way to my obvious tendencies as a composer.1

Perfect Lives, which was composed from 1978-1980 overlapped with Automatic

Writing. This epistemological notion was obviously in the forefront of Ashleys mind

when he began Perfect Lives. In the afterward of the print edition of the Perfect

Lives libretto, Ashley writes: Years ago, I became interested in the notion of

involuntary speech. My way of approaching Perfect Lives evolved out of that

interest. Inoticed that many many people were talking to themselves, publicly.

Since I talk to myself privately, there seemed to bea thin line between their

madness and my madness. (Except I thought of mine as music.)2 Tourettes

Syndrome is even referenced directly in the opera itself, in scene V (The Living

Room) where one of the female characters, Ida (Will, the sheriffs wife), asks Why

do people swear? Her husband responds with: The thing itself is called Tourettes

Syndrome, named for Gilles de la Touretteone, unnamed, thinks that areas on

2 Ashley, Outside of Time, 590.
2 Robert Ashley. Perfect Lives: An Opera (New York: Burning Books,1991), 150
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Gilles right were breaking into language, where in other times he would have

suffered mere hallucinations. My theory is that its just exploration3 Another

reference is made in the following scene (Scene VI), when Lucille, a new character,

describes a wedding ceremony with three rules: Dont talk to yourselfstop

arranging things when youre alonedont use for yourself what belongs to all of

us; Speak only when spoken to; and Make sense.4 According to Ashley

biographer Kyle Gann, these are references to Julian Jaynes 1976 book The Origin

of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral that speculated that voices of

God came from voices outside of mans left hemisphere, because his left and right

parts of the brain were not yet integrated.5 (The character Lucille is based off a

mentally unstable homeless woman who lived in Tribeca Park, whom Ashley

befriended.)6 Whether or not Ashley actually had Tourettes Syndrome has been

questioned by the few individuals who have devoted serious study to his life. In his

paper Robert Ashley and the Tourettic Voice, Gavin Steingo says that Ashley does

not have Tourettes in the medical sense, but rather is appropriat[ing] Tourettes

Syndrome as both a compositional strategy anda political praxis.7 Steingo

further argues that Tourettes Syndrome must always be understood as both

neurological and cultural.8 The cultural aspect involves what parts of speech are

Ashley, Perfect Lives, 97.
3

Ashley, Perfect Lives, 119.

4

Kyle Gann, Robert Ashley (Urbana: University of Illinois Press), 2012, 71.
5

Gann, Robert Ashley, 73.

6

Gavin Steingo, Robert Ashley and the Tourettic Voice, Review of Disability
7

Studies 4, no. 1 (January 1, 2008): 30-32.

8 Steingo, Tourettic Voice, 31.
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and are not socially correct, such as the Tourettic tendancy towards swearing. The

stream-of-consciousness nature of Ashleys spoken word projects always seems to

teeter on the unstable and unnerving to the listener, even if they are fastidiously

premeditated (as they are in Perfect Lives). The text is the structure of the rhythmic

patterns of the operaan alternating meter of stressed and unstressed syllables,

which Ashley would notate on what he called templates. These templates are the

closest thing to an Ashley score for Perfect Lives and his other spoken text pieces.

The entirety of Perfect Lives takes place at 72 beats per minute, with each act

involving a different grouping of beats within that 72 beat per minute pulse. The

template not only determines the rhythm of the speaker, but also acts as a guide for

all of the operas collaborators: the choice of instruments and timbre, the color

scheme used in each scene, the video templates, camera angles, and video

processing.9 The whole opera, however, revolves around the spoken part of the

narrator, a role Ashley himself plays. Ashley is Perfect Lives.

Incidentally, another opera being written at this time by composer Philip

Glass, and artist Robert Wilson also has ties to the use of mental illness as a

creative device. A large part of the libretto for the seminal opera Einstein on the

Beach (1978) was composed by Christopher Knowles, a mentally-damaged child

whom fascinated Glass collaborator, Robert Wilson. Knowles was the son of an

architect Wilson knew from his studies at the Pratt School of Design.10 Knowles

Outside of Time, 266. Ashley,
9

Bill Simmer, Robert Wilson and Therapy, in the Drama Review 20/1
10

(March 1976), 106.

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father had shown Wilson a tape his son had made titled Emily Likes the TV, that

featured looped and spliced taped speech recorded on two tape recorders. Wilson

was fascinated by the fourteen-year olds use of language, and invited Knowles to

join him at his avant-garde institute the Byrd Hoffman School.11 Wilson found

himself drawn to how Knowles arranged his words and the content of the

languagefor the sound and how sound was structured.12 Wilson saw disability as

a social model, and criticized the institutions in which Knowles resided for trying to

correct the child, rather than accept him for what he was.13 Interestingly enough, in

the final libretto for Einstein on the Beach, the text Knowles contributed to the

opera is not set to music. Glass and Wilson preferred that this text be left in its

original form as the Knee Plays. Knowles inspired other aspects of Einstein as

well. Stephanie Jensen-Moulton claims that Knowles visual art, which he mostly

created using a typewriter, inspired some of Wilsons most iconic sets for the opera,

including the Spaceship from Act IV.14

In Einstein on the Beach, Glass uses his trademark additive processthe

concept of adding a beat to the end of a repeating phrase creating a long and

expansive melodic line bit by bit. What is interesting is that Knowles speech also

has the same sort of effect. Knowles text for the part of the Young Judge is an

Robert Wilson and Therapy, 106. Simmer,
11

Mark Obenhaus, Chrisann Verges, Philip Glass, Robert Wilson, Lucinda
12

Childs, and Sheryl Sutton, Einstein on the Beach: The Changing Image of Opera.
VHS, Los Angeles: Direct Cinema, 1987.
13 Stephanie Jensen-Moulton, Disability as Postmodernism: Christopher

Knowles and Einstein on the Beach (lecture, Society for American Music Annual
Conference, Charlotte, NC, March 2012), 17.
14 Stephanie Jensen-Moulton, Disability as Postmodernism, 27-28.
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excellent example: WouldWould IWould I getWould I get someWould I get

some windWould I get some wind forWould I get some wind for theWould I

get some wind for the sailboat.15 This is the exact same additive process Glass has

used in many of his pre-Einstein compositions as well as in Einsteins violin part in

the opera itself.16

The connection between Einstein on the Beach and mental illness is both

direct and indirectdirect because Knowles had an impact on and was a part of the

compositional process, and indirect because Glass, who wrote the music, was an

interpreter of the text rather than its author. Ashleys Perfect Lives is more like

Wagners concept of a total work of art in which both the text, direction, and music

is under the control of the composer. However, this is only a cursory perspective of

Ashleys work. Both Ashley and Glass are very similar in their advocacy of

collaboration. Ashley collaborated with the pianist Blue Gene Tyranny, the

videographer John Sandborn and many others in his production of Perfect Lives.

Most of the music in the opera is produced by Tyranny, improvising within a given

structure within a key. Glass work with Einstein on the Beach involved heavy

collaboration with not only Robert Wilson and Christopher Knowles, but also

Lucinda Childs. Without any of these central figures, neither opera would exist in

any shape or form. Einstein on the Beach and Perfect Lives draw heavy influence

from the beauty of the spoken word (something Ashley firmly believed in as music

Philip Glass, Robert T. Jones, Music by Philip Glass, (New York: Harper &
15

Row, 1987), 70.

Stephanie Jensen-Moulton, Disability as Postmodernism, 23.
16

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itself) and the concept that words have their own musicality and meaning without

music being set to them. The monologues by Christopher Knowles that comprise the

Knee plays of Einstein on the Beach are spoken rather than sung, in order to draw

attention to the nature of the words themselves; their drama, contours, both

individual and as a cohesive structure.

Both operas are significant in their new view of mental illness, which is

refreshing for a genre plagued by so-called madness. Ashley and Glass saw mental

illness as merely a different way of seeing and interacting with the world, rather

than a social stigma. Part of why Ashley and Glass and their respective

collaborators took this view was because of their own personal associations with the

mentally ill. Ashley believed he suffered from Tourettes Syndrome, and frequently

socialized amongst the homeless population in Tribeca. Glass collaborated with

Christopher Knowles who was mentally disabled in some way (whether or not

Knowles had autism spectrum disorder is heavily disputed). Wilson, who co-wrote

and produced Einstein, firmly believed that Knowles had a unique way of thinking

that could be valued, unchanged.17 Overall, these two productions, while not about

the mentally ill directly, but indirectlythrough their mannerisms of text-setting,

rhythmic structure, and absence of plothad indeed changed the image of opera,

and it is most certainly a friendlier, more inclusive image.

Bibliography

Jensen-Moulton, Disability as Postmodernism, 17.
17
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Ashley, Robert. Perfect Lives: An Opera. New York: Burning Books, 1991.
Ashley, Robert. Music With Roots in the Aether. Koln: Musiktexte, 2000.
Ashley, Robert. Outside of Time: Ideas About Music Koln: Musiktexte, 2009.
Ashley, Robert, Carlotta Schoolman, John Sanborn, Blue Gene Tyranny, David Van
Tieghem, and Jill Kroesen. Perfect Lives An Opera. DVD. New York, N.Y.:
Lovely Music, 2005.
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Gann, Kyle. Robert Ashley. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012.
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