MUSIC : Grand Sitcom : Robert Ashley’s operas are for TV, but prime time isn’t quite ready for them yet so they are performed live

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. But since television doesn’t seem quite ready for them yet, they are mostly encountered in live performances, as the two latest, “Improvement (Don Leaves Linda)” and “eL/Aficionado,” will be at the CalArts Contemporary Music Festival next weekend.

“Improvement” and “eL/Aficionado” are two parts of the extended finale of a trilogy of operas that, when completed, will be an epic television work in 40 approximately half-hour segments. They are operas so vast in their vision that they are comparable only to Wagner’s “Ring” cycle or Stockhausen’s continuing mystical seven-evening “Licht” cycle.

In form and content, in musical, vocal, literary and media technique, they are, however, comparable to nothing else. They are, in fact, operas so unconventional that they tend to be received as either profoundly revolutionary or incomprehensibly peculiar.

During the last three decades, Ashley, who will turn 62 this week, has probably been, after John Cage, America’s most determined, theatrical and controversial experimental composer. And neither he nor his work is easily described or comprehended.

On first acquaintance he can appear an aging hipster, sort of the William Burroughs of new music. In his best- known pieces, and especially the operas of recent years, he stands on stage and drones his seeming stream-of-consciousness texts, which can mingle, say, the most banal images of Midwestern popular culture with flamboyant meditations on Renaissance philosophy in unpredictable ways.

Influenced by jazz to an unusual degree for an experimental composer, Ashley is regularly joined in his operas by the pianist and composer Gene (Blue) Tyranny, whose style is a kind of Lisztian transcendental etude approach to cocktail piano music, with some Bud Powell and minimalism thrown in. There are other singers, sometimes specialists in extended vocal techniques (such as Joan La Barbara, who appears in “Improvement,” and Thomas Buckner, who is in both works at CalArts), and reciters. Occasionally there is room for another instrumentalist or two. Always there are electronics.

If all of this sounds hardly operatic or, at least, highly irregular for opera, it is. But Ashley’s operas are without neither intricate structure nor serious content. His academic background includes his having taught, throughout the ‘60s, at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where he founded the ONCE Group and produced the leading Midwest festival of multimedia work. He spent the ‘70s heading the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College in Oakland. Since 1981, he has lived in New York, where he has been something of a father figure in the downtown music scene and where he has been creating his operatic magnum opus .

Met at his TriBeCa studio loft, Ashley looks the conventional working composer. His worktable is spread with musical staff paper, pencils and erasers. Around the loft is considerable electronic gear--sound-generating equipment and computers--but these are increasingly the tools of traditional composers these days too, now that it is possible to produce electronic facsimiles of orchestral scores. He even smokes the large, distinguished cigar that has been favored by composers from Brahms to Berio.

“It’s always disturbed me a little bit when people don’t understand that my operas are not really intended to be grand opera,” Ashley says of his trilogy and his need to invent a new operatic language.

“As far as I understand it, in the tradition of opera, there were once many givens, many cultural things that everybody understood. Because we didn’t inherit that tradition, Americans haven’t come to opera through an evolution.

“But then around 1970, all of a sudden people said, ‘Let’s do opera.’ So we invented the form for ourselves.”

Taking a cue from the fact that 19th-Century Italian opera was based on familiar musical references, such as dance rhythms, Ashley says, he looked around to find references that related to America in the late 20th Century and to our own particular interest in narrative. And what more central reference could there be than television?

“My ideas about finding a person and letting that person become a character are related to contemporary ways of doing movies and television,” he says. “I must admit that I think I’m more influenced by Francis Coppola than I am by John Cage, to be blunt about it. But I think that what I’m doing is just a little bit ahead of the practical nature of doing it.

“My intuition is that the next big subject matter is going to be music. MTV is just scratching the surface. MTV is marvelous--I have no quarrel with it all--and I think it’s an indicator that the marriage of music and television is inevitable. Not just three-minute songs, but real extended music. And I don’t mean documentaries or Karajan concerts or ‘Live From the Met.’ ”

Thus far, only “Perfect Lives,” the trilogy’s central opera (and the first to be written and performed), has been realized on video, made in collaboration with video artist John Sanborn. In it, an over-the-hill singer and his pal hatch a bank heist with a couple of local high school kids. If they are caught, it will be a crime; if not, it will be art.

“My references are not to Puccini,” Ashley says. “The only visual quotes are actually references to television.” But nothing is as it seems, and there is as much Tibetan Book of the Dead in it as there are supermarkets and convertibles. Yet somehow we, of the postmodern television generations, intuitively grasp such narrative disjointedness.

“Atalanta (Acts of God),” the first opera in the series (written after the composer moved to New York), is, Ashley says, about immigration: “It’s about where we came from and the ideas we brought with us.” It also brings a heroine from Greek mythology up to date in a typically surreal Ashley fashion.

For the third opera, “Now Eleanor’s Idea,” a megawork that will ultimately contain four individual operas--including the two to be presented at CalArts--Ashley moves to the West Coast as an allegory for America’s future.

“I don’t mean to make this sound too grand, but when you think about the future of America you see very clearly that there are big religious partitions or themes,” he says. “You have to deal with the idea of radical Protestantism. One of the operas, ‘Foreign Experiences,’ deals with that. Another, the title opera, presents America in the Roman Catholic iconography that is all around us.”

“Improvement (Don Leaves Linda)” is a vocally lush meditation on the mysticism and paranoia of the big city. Its plot synopsis--Don leaves Linda off at a roadside diner; Linda meets “the amazing Mr. Payne, who remembers everything” and who proposes to her and teachers her son, Junior Jr., left-handed golf, etc.--is full of trite sitcom imagery. But everybody and everything stand for something mysterious, and it doesn’t take long for the remarkable flights of fancy and kaleidoscopic logic to take over completely, often leaving the listener psychedelically stranded.

Ashley calls “eL/Aficionado” “my version of corporate mysticism.” Here a group of scenes follow the debriefing of an “agent” who describes everyone who enters a watched building in a code that takes the form of personal ads.

Still to come is a segment that will feature the lowrider community from the Southwest, which Ashley describes as “this very beautiful and very ritualistic lifestyle that centers on modified American cars.”

Also to come is far more popular media exposure to Ashley. Nonesuch has recorded “Improvement (Don Leaves Linda)” for imminent CD release, and sooner or later someone on television will discover “Perfect Lives” (which is available on CD and video from Lovely Music in New York).

It was produced by the British Broadcasting Corp. nine years ago and has been successfully shown on the more progressive British television and all around Europe. But the more wary American television has yet to invent a slot for such work.

“If you try to put all that down on paper,” Ashley admits of the 40-part opera, “it looks like you’ve gone mad.”