What little I know of 20th-century avant opera concerns the otherworldly work of Robert Ashley, the iconoclastic Ann Arbor-born composer of Perfect Lives and other droning, enigmatic slices of American surrealism intended for TV whether the medium was ready or not for his Lynchian “sitcoms.” Ashley, who in his mature years resembled Andy Williams’ Martian doppelganger, something of an avuncular extraterrestrial, familiar yet unnameable, recently passed away. Here’s the opening of Mark Swed’s 1992 Los Angeles Times piece about his singular career at midpoint:

“One of the most offbeat incidents in American opera occurred a dozen years ago when the city of Chicago hosted the now-defunct annual New Music America Festival and presented a complete performance of Robert Ashley’s radically innovative seven-part opera Perfect Lives. The incident was the unwitting involvement of then-Mayor Jane Byrne.

The mayor, wanting election-year publicity any way she could get it, insisted the festival be named ‘Mayor Byrne’s New Music America’ in return for her allocating considerable city resources and cash. So at her welcoming speech, which was covered by local television news and given on the Perfect Lives set, someone played a joke on her. The opera employs lots of voice-altering electronics, and the microphone she spoke into was rigged, splitting her voice into octaves. She became a breathy soprano and male baritone duet. She sounded like Laurie Anderson.

What made the occasion remarkable was not that a puerile prank was played on a public official, but the brilliance of the result. In the reality-skewered world of Ashley, Jane Byrne belongs on the late-night news impersonating Laurie Anderson, not the other way around.

Ashley’s operas are about the transformation of just such ordinary landscapes into astonishing ones. They are operas intended for television, surreal as rock videos.”

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“The Park,” part one of Perfect Lives: