Robert Ashley, the American composer, has died at the age of 83. Ashley, whose piece Improvement: An Opera for Television was released on Nonesuch Records in 1992, died at his home in New York from complications of cirrhosis of the liver on March 3, 2014. "Before there was Spalding Gray or Laurie Anderson or the 1980s," wrote the critic Josef Woodard, "there was Robert Ashley, the composer who dissected speech, envisioned television opera, and concocted a new kind of musical-theatrical experience." Ashley finished his last opera, Crash, in December 2013; it will premiere at the 2014 Whitney Museum Biennial, April 10–13, 2014.