Robert Reynolds Ashley was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan on 28 March 1930. His paternal grandfather had moved the family to the the area in 1993 after selling his timber business further north. His father, who had become deaf as the result of an illness (most likely Spanish flu), worked for more than fifty years at the local post office, where he died suddenly, having never missed a single day of work, except in 1946, because of a heart attack. Ashley (like the character Don in his opera Perfect Lives) was captain of the football team at University High School, which gave its students a great deal of freedom and was part of a network of experimental schools that offered teaching opportunities to graduate students in education studying at the University of Michigan.

Growing up, Ashley had little exposure to music except for what he was able to hear on the radio. At the age of fifteen, he heard a concert by the jazz pianist Dickie Johnson. He rapidly became enamored with the work of pianists such as Meade Lux Lewis and Albert Ammons, and formed a boogie-woogie band at his high school, playing in the style of Lewis, Ammons, Nat King Cole, and the other pop music greats of the time.

Ashley attended the University of Michigan from 1948 to 1952, graduating with a degree in music theory. While there, he studied with composers Homer Keller, Ross Lee Finney and Leslie Bassett, as well as music historian and Bach expert Hans T. David. David’s passion for complex canons, strict counterpoint, and musical puzzles doubtless helped to influence Ashley’s taste for strict formulae in his own compositions. After graduation, Ashley moved to New York City, where he studied with Ursula Mamlok and Wallingford Riegger at the Manhattan School of Music. On 11 April 1954, about two weeks after they met, he married an art student named Mary Tsaltas. Ashley was drafted into the army just a few days before the birth of his son, Sam, and sent for basic training at Fort Dix, in New Jersey, after which he was stationed at Fort Hood, in Texas, where he played clarinet, bassoon, and piano in military bands.

In 1956, Ashley was discharged from the army and returned to the University of Michigan to begin work on his doctorate, where he encountered composer Ross Finney, who declared that everything Ashley wrote was unplayable. Ashley ended up changing disciplines, and studying in the nascent field of speech recognition and computerized speech, which was being researched at the University’s Speech Research Institute. This gave him access to an electronics studio, thereby setting the course of his career. During this time he also studied with composer Roberto Gerhard, who replaced Finney in the University’s music program for a year. Surrounded by composition students who shared the same mentality, Ashley and his friends launched the ONCE Festival on campus, inviting John Cage and David Tudor as guests. Ashley became the de facto director of the festival, which hosted thirty-five concerts between 1961 and 1969.

In the autumn of 1969, Ashley was appointed to direct the new center for electronic music at Mills College, giving his electronic music career new impetus. He produced an impressive series of video interviews with composers titled Music with Roots in the Aether. He and Mary separated in 1972, and in 1973, he met Mimi Johnson, the director of Performing Arts Services, the agency that represented John Cage and other members of the experimental music scene of the time. In 1981, Ashley left Mills College to live in New York City with Johnson, who he married in 1979. Johnson’s record label, Lovely Music, became Ashley’s main bridge to a broader audience, and most of his recordings appeared on the label. The premiere of Perfect Lives in its entirety took place at Northwestern University on 24 October 1979. Don Leaves Linda, completed in 1985 and released on Nonesuch records, was Ashley’s only opera to be released on a label other than Lovely Music. Atalanta followed in 1987, then Now Eleanor’s Idea and Foreign Experiences in 1993 and 1994.

The last year’s of Ashley’s life were devoted to writing operas about old age. Dust (1998), Celestial Excursions (2003), Concrete (2006), and Crash (2013) are his most explicitely biographical operas, based on different parts of his life. Several of his productions have been performed in Europe, including Dust in Ferrara, Celestial Excursions at the Hebbel Theater in Berlin, and his last opera, Quicksand, at the Festival d’Automne in Paris. Ashley died on 3 March 2014. His operas continue to be performed by groups such as the New York City-based performance collective Varispeed.