dear marshall

ROBERT ASHLEY

Robert Ashley's Perfect Lives proposed a new terrain for music and television. It was not music video, yet its structure, character development and narrative acknowledged the norms of television programming, as if Ashley had taken a template from everyday life as televised and converted it. Scene from Episode Five "The Living Room" from Perfect LIves an opera for television (1983). Photo credit: Gwen Thomas. June 25, 1992 Dear Marshall, After we talked I started having second thoughts about my promise to write something and I decided finally that I shouldn’t try. All because I seemed to have lost the vision. It’s hard to describe, but at the moment I’m having a hard time imagining anything I might wish for and especially anything of mine being on TV. The situation seems so drab and desperate. I mean second-hand violence, sports close-ups, people slumped in chairs and talking. What are we doing? But a promise is a promise. I believe that just one channel in every city devoted to a different kind of timeworld and to some form of meditation and spiritual dignity and to imagery offered without reproach would change everything. You would think that somebody would be able to see that and make it happen. But what are the chances? Even that idea would get a bad review. So I am not in a good mood. Still, I wanted the article to be positive in some way -- to make a contribution, not just to nag, and I thought that one way to get something readable into it might be to go back in time, hoping that I might have been more optimistic then. It turns out that quoting from letters and interviews makes them sort of impersonal. In some cases I don’t even recognize that I wrote them. That’s nice. Because of Felix, I picked things that were about TV or music-for-television. It’s important for me to think in terms of television, even if I can’t work much as a composer of opera "in television." Outside of television, nothing much will change as far as my chances to have a work developed by an opera company apart from my own. If anything my chances have gotten worse because the motives in the opera world are more or less the same ones we see in TV. As far as my own "company" goes, it gets better all the time, but it is definitely a low budget operation as "opera" is defined in our expectations. So I keep on making the work in a form for television and hoping that things will change eventually (and in my lifetime.) ------------------------- The reason I haven’t worked with opera-for-motion pictures is mainly a technical one. Motion picture production stops every minute or so and repeats what has just been done in order to "improve" it. The idea of movies is that there is really only one version, and your job is to find it. The idea of movies is to create time captured. Like memory. I would like something more timeless, like music. I would like the audience to feel that what they are seeing would have taken place whether or not the camera is there. ------------------------- The way I work on developing a new piece is exactly the way it’s always been done in music. By the time I got PERFECT LIVES on tape we had performed it hundreds of times. There were thousands of hours of history in the piece, so the recorded version is only one version of the opera. It’s not meant to be the version. The idea is to be able to feel that quality in hearing and seeing the television broadcast. This quality is hard to get when you have to commit to a tape, but I think John Sanborn did a good job. I had imagined that we could actually do the television assembly (or assemblies) live from seven isotapes, with as many different versions as there were directors who wanted to make one, as is the reason for different performance versions of a piece of music.l But I couldn’t persuade anybody of the wisdom of that idea, so finally we had to go to the "definitive" version. Now more than ever, nine years later, I wish I had the piece on seven isotapes. ------------------------- I use things that have happened to me and that seem important now because I haven’t been able to forget them. I have a problem of thinking that what has happened to me is the only thing I can really understand. PERFECT LIVES, for instance, is mostly a collection of ideas I got from things that were said in my presence, either said to me or that I merely overheard. Many of those sayings are verbatim in the text. At one level the opera is a collection of dozens of short portraits of real people, all of whom are more or less "invoked" by the characters in the plot. ------------------------- I worked on ATALANTA (ACTS OF GOD) in performance for five years. There were about forty performances. Maybe more. I composed new musical materials and new scenes for every performance so that no two would be the same. So that no two audiences would see the same piece. In order to make every performance have a "mythical" reputation. In order that the opera would have the form of a myth. In honor of the subject, which is about where we come from as Americans. Finally, for the last performances in London in 1987 the opera lasted more that nine hours over three performances. I stopped doing it then. The myth was as complete as it could be. Then I edited it to four and a half hours of libretto and score for television. Now I don’t know what to do. It is, so far, too huge to be produced. One lesson is don’t work too big. ------------------------- Remember that a long time ago there was the ideal of wanting to know every thing in order to be wise. That was a long time ago (1000 years, I read this), so we assume that then everything was not too much to want. Even when I was much younger there were moments when I was sad that I had wasted my life, because it seemed that with more devotion I could have known everything and been wise. I think that wish would be impossible now. Now all information is just exemplary, because there is so much of it. I think TV has taught us that. ------------------------- In one kind of music the ideal is to create the image of music in general so that the listener is caused to "compose" when listening. The listener has opinions. This might actually be happening in TV. I can’t tell. Certainly it happens for me, but I can’t tell how general it is in the population of TV watchers. Usually, though, what happens for me happens for everybody eventually. ------------------------- In music the ideal of reading the music at sight has been made obsolete by sample software. What we require now is authority of interpretation. This has been absent from the avant garde for at least a generation. Same thing for TV, except it translates into access to technical ideas. I can’t forgive TV anymore if it doesn’t look dignified. ------------------------- I don’t think my music is much different in the matter of self-consciousness than most other serious music. The question of what "entertains" you is complicated. I don’t know why anybody goes to anything. I know the reasons I go, but I don’t know about anybody else. I am perfectly happy listening to music even while I’m self-conscious. In fact, I think that’s supposed to be the idea. Why else would we need music? When I go to a concert I don’t forget about the suffering outside. I am listening to the music and thinking at the same time. In some way I am "comparing" the musical experience to the thought. I would expect everybody else to do that too. It’s the civilized thing to do.