Robert Ashley
Now Eleanor's Idea
Lovely Music 2007

01. Change
02. The Miracle of Cars

01. Questions and Answers
02. The Song

Last time we had an 'opera' - Frank London's A Night in the Old Marketplace - the toughest challenge to confront was following the very very twisted plot for the duration of an entire hour. It was all artfully done, of course, but as well pointed out by a reviewer, the characters had way too little contour to be clearly understood, and there were almost no clues as for why anyone is doing what they're doing. An equally ambitious work spanning one hour and ½, Now Eleanor's Idea is composer Robert Ashley's quartet of short operas "based on the notion of a sequence of events seen from four, different points of view". Thank goodness... four are surely enough.

Ashley's approach is not less complex, but radically different from a variety of factors. Firstly, you hear barely any singing - words tend only to be spoken, either by him or a different narrator (here Joan LaBarbara, Amy X Neuburg, Marghreta Cordero and others), and nothing effectively stands in the way of the plot. In parallel, whilst London stays devoted to his Yiddish culture and traditions, Ashley's scope grows even larger, trying to discover "the point where the religions of America - Judaism, Protestantism, Business and Catholicism - merge". Now Eleanor, the title character, has a sort of "religious experience" that fills her with an "approach of the end of the world feeling." This feeling compels her to leave her job in the Midwest and move to New Mexico, where the actual story takes place. There are a lot of interesting ideas running through it, like the unexpected connections between people and objects, and the equally strange directions life can take when these connections are allowed to develop naturally. "Opera likes to simplify and enlarge its characters to make them fit grand themes. Mr. Ashley goes in the opposite direction and arrives at the cosmos just as easily. Mundane chitchat about good eating habits or car repair turns to metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, not to mention psychiatry, before we know it".

Ashley also plays a great card with the rather sparse instrumentation, making his operas lots more easy to attend in one sitting. Some pieces seem a bit 'too long' for what they're ready to communicate, yet never too long to cloud a certain sense of vision, of "connecting". Such gentle music, so repetitive and so impeccably blended with the ensemble voices. There is no slightest doubt in my mind, this is sheer genius.

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"The sounds of these voices - and the sounds of her own voice in response - evoke in her those kinds of feelings that are almost without a name. Deeper than the words that science uses, deeper than, "I have been here before". Is it possible to find a part of yourself that you did not know was "lost"? Is it possible to discover that you are someone other than who you think you are?" –from Act III, 'Questions and Answers'