Robert ASHLEY
“Now Eleanor’s idea”

Music and libretto by Robert Ashley. With Joan La Barbara, Amy X Neuberg, Marghreta Cordero, Robert Ashley, Sam Ashley, Thomas Buckner and Jacqueline Humbert. Performance Orchestra mixed and processed by Tom Hamilton. 2CD + 132 pages booklet. Robert Ashley’s Now Eleanor’s idea is a quartet of short operas based on the notion of a sequence of events seen from four different points of view. At the same time, each opera is an allegory, like Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, for an individual’s self-realization within the context of a major “religion” found in the United States. “Improvement” takes its imagery and plot from Judaism, “Foreign Experiences” from Pentecostal Evangelism, “eL-Aficionado” from corporate mysticism, and “Now Eleanor’s Idea” from (Spanish) Catholicism. As “versions” of a single series of events, the four libretti involve a common group of characters. But the continuation of the characters’ roles in the different versions is not dramatized and so the four operas can be heard (and described) as separate projects. They may be produced separately, or together, as a single performance work. The operas share principal characters and vocal techniques (including the relationship of the voice to instrumental settings.) The operas differ, principally, in the language style of the librettos and in the relationship of the music to the presentation of the visual imagery.Robert Ashley tells us that the inspiration for these works came specifically from four sources: the work of the historian, Frances A. Yates (1900-1983), whose specialty of interests included the influence of Kabalistic mysticism on the birth of modernism and scientific philosophy in Italy in the 16th century (as a result of the expulsion of Jews from Spain during the Inquisition); the writings of Carlos Castaneda (and the arguments about him as a writer and about the intentions of his work); “Low Rider Magazine,” the fan-cult magazine of the “Low Rider” movement in the Southwestern United States; and finally, “corporate vocabulary”-what it sounds like and how it is used in popular publications, like “The New York Times,” “The Wall Street Journal” or “Fortune Magazine.”