The Overtone over Robert Ashley's Opera Novel Quicksand

Abstract

© 2021 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System uicksand bewilders. Robert Ashley published it as an opera libretto “written in the form of a novel” in 2011,1 and it premiered in 2016 as an “opera-novel.”2 Described by Ashley as “plot-driven,” Quicksand follows an aging composer’s last adventure as an undercover spy who helps overthrow a South Asian dictatorship with his unsuspecting wife and her yoga group in tow (8). The story, told erratically and inconsistently by its narrator, is muddled, and a larger ambiguity looms over the work, unsettling conceptions of whatever puzzling story its narrator is telling, which is, at its root: what is Quicksand? Simultaneously a novel and an opera, Quicksand has a plot, like all narratives, that undergirds a telling and produces the sense of a first-person narrator. At the same time, it has a score with libretto (musically speaking) in an opera where the role of narrator is performed. Because in performance there are several media operating simultaneously, contradictory temporalities wrap through the story. While multiple media operate in all opera performances, Quicksand uses conceptions of narrative to turn time distinctively into a