"[1] Finney went on to approve a paper Ashley wrote on a Bartók string quartet during a weekly analysis seminar.

Although he was not officially a student in the acoustic research program there, he was offered the chance to obtain a doctorate, but turned it down to pursue his music.

[2] From 1961 to 1969, he organised the ONCE Festival in Ann Arbor with Roger Reynolds, Gordon Mumma, and other local composers and artists.

He was a co-founder of the ONCE Group, as well as a member of the Sonic Arts Union, which also included David Behrman, Alvin Lucier, and Gordon Mumma.

His first album with Lovely Music was 1978's Private Parts, an early version of the first and last acts from Perfect Lives.

Since he first came to prominence, Ashley was indelibly linked to the performance of his pieces, particularly through the use of his voice in such works as Automatic Writing and Perfect Lives.

Starting in the 1980s, he formed a band that lasted for decades consisting of himself, Sam Ashley, Joan LaBarbara, Thomas Buckner, and Jacqueline Humbert as vocalists and Tom Hamilton on electronics.

He was featured, alongside Kunga Rinpoche, on Eliane Radigue's 1987 piece Mila's Journey Inspired by a Dream.

On December 9, 1992, Ashley publicly read William Gibson's electronic poem Agrippa (A Book of the Dead), on its premiere at The Kitchen in Chelsea, Manhattan.

[13] In 2011, Ashley's 1967 opera That Morning Thing was restaged as part of the Performa Biennial with direction from Fast Forward.

[14] Crash was remounted a year later at Roulette with the same cast: Gelsey Bell, Brian McCorkle, Paul Pinto, Dave Ruder, and Aliza Simons from the music collective Varispeed, as well as Amirtha Kidambi, with projected photos by Philip Makanna.

It served as the venue for semiweekly multimedia performances from 1957 to 1964; its creators asked Gordon Mumma and Ashley to produce live electronic music for the productions.

The performances included music produced by things such as the "rubbing together of stones" and steel rings thrown along wires.

Other musician participants included Roger Reynolds, George Cacioppo, Bruce Wise, and Donald Scarvada.

Other collaborating artists were Harold Borkin and Joseph Wehrer, architects; George Manupelli, filmmaker; and Mary Ashley and Milton Cohen, painter-sculptors.

[2][19] The festivals invited European and jazz composers to participate, and were a major influence on contemporary music of the time.

Linda, Susie, and Jennifer see visions of the three suitors of Atalanta, Willard Reynolds, Bud Powell, and Max Ernst, who have accidentally appeared in a spaceship at the moment of the bank incident.

Linda meets many characters in her travels, including a tap dancer who is a stand-in for Giordano Bruno, and settles into a cosmopolitan existence with her son, Junior Jr.

In a dream that echoes the uncertain journey of his father, Junior, Jr.'s opera, el/Aficionado, is a post-mortem on a mysteriously botched exercise in espionage.

Ashley says that each of these scenarios is in reality the simultaneous dream of the protagonist, happening at the focal moment of Perfect Lives.

Now Eleanor's Idea is about the journey beyond the familiar to the West Coast, presumably the end of the world, i.e. a certain civilization was established when European adventurers found themselves in California and figured they would likely never make it home.

[2] In the dialogue for Automatic Writing, the words themselves were not necessarily the primary source of meaning—especially not after the kind of audio manipulation Ashley used to modify them.

[2] Ashley appreciated the use of voice and words for more than their explicit denotation, believing their rhythm and inflection could convey meaning without being able to understand the actual phonemes.