Robert Ashley has achieved an international reputation for his work in new forms of opera and multi-disciplinary projects. His recorded works, Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon, She Was A Visitor, and Automatic Writing, are acknowledged classics of the use of language in a musical setting. He is a pioneer in opera-for-television. In Ann Arbor in the 1960s, Ashley organized the ONCE Festival and directed the legendary ONCE Group, with whom he developed his first operas. Throughout the 1970s, he directed the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College and toured with David Behrman, Alvin Lucier and Gordon Mumma as the Sonic Arts Union. He produced and directed a 14-hour television opera/documentary entitled Music with Roots in the Aether, about the work and ideas of seven American composers. In the early 1980s the Kitchen commissioned Ashley’s Perfect Lives, the opera for television that is widely considered the precursor of “music-television.”