ROBERT
ASHLEY Reinventing
the
Wheel.
Different
Periods
in
My
Work
There are many kinds of problems that arise in writing about one’s music toward the end of one’s life. One of these problems, perhaps trivial, is the question of whether the music can be grouped into different “periods.”
certain
a
has
already
one
esperience
of
life,
to
start
directly
on
another
path?
Or
is
there
danger
involved
in
practicesa without
if
advanced having
possible,
do the
it
to proper
“Is
trying foundation?”
I agree with this idea, but because there have been big external changes in my life (almost out of my control). I do see my music as having distinct, “different periods.” The question of “different periods” brings out that all of my observations and opinions in this book are about the past,
I am not at all interested in the European tradition any more. As much as I like the music that kept developing through the first half of the twentieth century, I find that the tradition – that is, the harmonic tradition right up through serialism and the formal “architecture” that came from the harmonic tradition – is not helpful to what I would like to compose.
I won’t bother with the details, but I think the Hindu idea is right. From the high of age twenty-two to the low of age twenty-nine I more or less “decided” to be a composer. I think this means I started thinking of composing – as opposed to thinking about piano playing or something else – and it became a habit.
All kinds of music more and more sound foreign and exotic to me. As an American I don’t feel that I have a tradition to work with. The tradition is still being invented. We are still reinventing the wheel.
The matter of thinking of myself as a “composer” is different. Probably I just concluded there was nothing else I could do. That meant I stopped thinking about making a living as a “composer,” because clearly that was out of the question. In effect, I stopped thinking about making a living at all and just took whatever came along as work to make a living.
The large influences seem to be almost unnamable. And you understand them only after you have made your peace with them. It’s not important to say what some of the large influences have been for me, but the large influences are what have made things happen differently in different parts of my life. Also, I have what skeptics or people of a “scientific” frame of mind would call a major superstition. I read in a wonderful book called The Speaking Tree that in Hindu belief there is a fourteen-year cycle in men’s lives and a ten-year cycle for women. Or, so to speak, your masculine nature has a fourteen-year cycle and your feminine nature has a ten-year cycle.1 Fourteen seems to fit me exactly. The big ups and the horrible downs are spaced almost on a sine curve (actually on a “sawtooth” wave, with the recovery coming quicker than the predicted seven years). The downs have been fifteen, twenty-nine, forty-three, fifty-seven, seventy-one (I seem to be one year out of phase). The between times are of the who-could-ask-for-anything-more sort. Richard Lannoy, The Speaking Tree. A Study of Indian Culture and Society, London: Oxford University Press, 1974. I owned the book thirty years ago. It was given to me by Hank Bull, an artist of great importance to me, because he has been so loyal in his support of radical ideas. He didn’t get more conservative as he got older. When Hank handed me the book backstage after a concert, he said, “This will change your life.” He was right (Robert Ashley, 2006). 1
Having decided that there was no sense in trying to make a “profit” in music and realizing that there was nothing else to be had, except making a profit – there was no “establishment” to want to be a part of, as far as I could see; nobody was making music of any interest to me, because there wasn’t any music, except popular music, in American life (and after a couple of years of experience, I certainly didn’t want to play popular music) – I fell into what might appear to be reinventing the wheel. The serious question was “What Is Music?,” and how do you get to hear that music, if you come up with an answer. This experience is not uncommon in our culture, which is only about one hundred years old now. (Just a little more than one hundred years ago we were laying railroad tracks, destroying everything in sight, killing buffalo and murdering Indians and mostly playing fiddle around the campfires. In two or three major cities in the East there were musical rumors of what was going to be Europe. There were a few traveling musical acts, probably on the level of circuses for the better off. But forget Vienna and Mahler and such.)
Also, I have what skeptics or people of a “scientific” frame of mind would call a major superstition. I read in a wonderful book called The Speaking Tree that in Hindu belief there is a fourteen-year cycle in men’s lives and a ten-year cycle for women. Or, so to speak, your masculine nature has a fourteen-year cycle and your feminine nature has a ten-year cycle. Fourteen seems to fit me exactly. The big ups and the horrible downs are spaced almost on a sine curve (actually on a “sawtooth” wave, with the recovery coming quicker than the predicted seven years). The downs have been fifteen, twenty-nine, forty-three, fifty-seven, seventy-one (I seem to be one year out of phase). The between times are of the who-could-ask-for-anything-more sort.
rhythms. speech on based
The large influences seem to be almost unnamable. And you understand them only after you have made your peace with them. It’s not important to say what some of the large influences have been for me, but the large influences are what have made things happen differently in different parts of my life.
opera
All kinds of music more and more sound foreign and exotic to me. As an American I don’t feel that I have a tradition to work with. The tradition is still being invented. We are still reinventing the wheel.
of
I am not at all interested in the European tradition any more. As much as I like the music that kept developing through the first half of the twentieth century, I find that the tradition – that is, the harmonic tradition right up through serialism and the formal “architecture” that came from the harmonic tradition – is not helpful to what I would like to compose.
This experience is not uncommon in our culture, which is only about one hundred years old now. (Just a little more than one hundred years ago we were laying railroad tracks, destroying everything in sight, killing buffalo and murdering Indians and mostly playing fiddle around the campfires. In two or three major cities in the East there were musical rumors of what was going to be Europe. There were a few traveling musical acts, probably on the level of circuses for the better off. But forget Vienna and Mahler and such.)
new a with fascination
Having decided that there was no sense in trying to make a “profit” in music and realizing that there was nothing else to be had, except making a profit – there was no “establishment” to want to be a part of, as far as I could see; nobody was making music of any interest to me, because there wasn’t any music, except popular music, in American life (and after a couple of years of experience, I certainly didn’t want to play popular music) – I fell into what might appear to be reinventing the wheel. The serious question was “What Is Music?,” and how do you get to hear that music, if you come up with an answer.
my
The matter of thinking of myself as a “composer” is different. Probably I just concluded there was nothing else I could do. That meant I stopped thinking about making a living as a “composer,” because clearly that was out of the question. In effect, I stopped thinking about making a living at all and just took whatever came along as work to make a living.
–
From the high of age twenty-two to the low of age twenty-nine I more or less “decided” to be a composer. I think this means I started thinking of composing – as opposed to thinking about piano playing or something else – and it became a habit.
kind
I won’t bother with the details, but I think the Hindu idea is right.
The different periods in my work can be seen most simply as in four parts.
to continues and – was
When there are quite a few people inventing the wheel, you get a bunch of different kinds of wheels. As an American my experience was not unique. Everybody I knew was struggling to invent a music for themselves. The result was a huge variety of musical ideas that I think had no precedent in what was called “music.” The nineteen-fifties and sixties were a time of great inventiveness. Some of the ideas of the time are still being explored – and some are still not thought of as “music.” But more and more they seem fruitful as I see them being rediscovered in the work of young composers. There was a strongly conservative political turn around 1970 that affected everybody. As a result of that conservatism some of the ideas became solidified in what new music is today. Certain ideas of the previous decades became “minimalism” and what has followed from minimalism. Other ideas became “neo-Romanticism” and the return to the principles of architectural harmony. Other ideas became an American and extreme version of serialism. The composers who had to decide who they were in 1970 are still around and their followers are still radically at odds with composers in other camps. Other sections of this book will show where my sympathies lie.
be
In the nineteen-fifties “What Is Music?” was not a facetious question.
and
Third was a fallow period when I had stopped composing and when I was, apparently, trying to put together what I had learned about myself. I directed the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College and taught as best I could. I discovered the musical and political possibilities of opera for television and made one major contribution, Music with Roots in the Aether. I did deep personal research on the nature of “involuntary speech” and realized the possibilities of that aspect of speech as music in the recording of Automatic Writing.
Fourth
Second was a period of work with the legendary ONCE Group and the discovery that the rhythms of speech were deeply connected to the rhythms of music.
last
First was an early period of discovering that I made music with formulas and that I had to invent new kinds of formulas to make music.
Throughout all of these times I have been devoted to electronic sounds. I have been discouraged that acoustical instruments and ensembles sound so “old.” Not only “oldfashioned” in the limitations they imposed on music, but “worn out” in their sound as a source of spiritual and musical inspiration. I like electronic sounds of all kinds. When I work with traditional instruments and ensembles, I try to make them do something they have never done before. I try to make them play in a new kind of way and make a new kind of sound. 2
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