ROBERT ASHLEY
April 7, 1992
ALVIN LUCIER
I’ve known Bob Ashley since the early 1960s. I first met him in New York. He had driven from Ann Arbor to attend a concert in Town Hall in which I participated. At that time, I was director of the Brandeis Chamber Chorus devoted to the performance of contemporary music. We had been invited to perform a couple of works of Morton Feldman and Earle Brown in Town Hall. A couple of carloads of people drove down from Ann Arbor, Michigan, to hear that concert. Ashley had founded, with Gordon Mumma, one of the first independent electronic studios in the United States. It was a place that anyone could come and work. This was before studios really started to proliferate in all the universities in the country. At the same time, Bob was the director of the Once Group, a group of musicians, visual artists, and architects in Ann Arbor that, along with Anna Halprin in California, created the first intermedia works. Under Bob’s leadership, the Once Group created the most amazing performances in such unlikely places as parking structures, automobiles, trucks, hearses, and other alternative venues. He wrote numerous works for conventional instruments as well. I guess you could say that he was one of the first inventors of graphic notation, too. After his talk, I. M. Harjito and Sumarsam (rebabs), Subramanian (South Indian violin), and Roy Wiseman (double bass) will present a performance of one of his graphic scores, In Memoriam: Esteban Gomez (Quartet).
The most astonishing thing about Bob’s work is his discovery that human speech is music. Once, as accompaniment to a Merce Cunningham dance performance in New York, Bob gathered some of his old Ann Arbor friends for an unrehearsed conversation. All they did was talk. That’s all it was. It was compelling. It was music.
She Was a Visitor is a work for speaking chorus in which all the phonemes contained in the title sentence are detached and sustained for long breaths, revealing hidden meanings and images: “sh” (hush); “oo” (delight); “ah” (surprise); ’“er” (hesitation), and so forth.
Wolfman was the loudest musical work one ever heard at that time. It was also the most ironic. Contrary to popular belief, the performer makes extremely soft vocal sounds. The loudness is produced by enormous amplifier gain, the feedback stopped only by the barely audible input from the vocalist.
Ashley does astonishing things with time in String Quartet Describing the Motions of Large Real Bodies. First he asks the players to bow slackened strings so slowly (one bow length up to ten minutes) and with such pressure that no continuous sound is produced, only pops and clicks. He then routes these signals through a series of delays of from five to 250 milliseconds (slow for computers, fast for humans), causing subtle shifts in timbre. These extremes of scale give the listener the uncanny feeling of slow and fast at the same time, as when a Boeing 747 barely moves, hovering, while landing.
For the last fifteen years, Ashley has devoted himself to creating a new genre of work: opera for television. I don’t mean opera simply put on television, but opera for the medium itself. These wonderful pieces exist on video and can also be performed live. I am delighted that he is here to talk you in person.
ROBERT ASHLEY
I said I would talk about technique, and it’s hard to start because Alvin stole some of my lines. Against all the wisdom of watching television, it occurred to me that because I was interested in music and words—without knowing anything more about it than that, and because I was working with people who were, lucky for me, great with words, I mean great, great talkers and willing and not afraid to do things with their voices—I got caught up with the idea of narrative music. All of you will have this experience. I went through a period of about ten or twelve years where everything was quite wonderful for me, working in concert not stage; then suddenly for political reasons everything was not quite wonderful, and I didn’t do anything for four or five years. It occurred to me that, because of my peculiar obsession with words, television was the place that I should try to get into.
So I started working with the idea that I would make music for television. So far, not very much of it has been seen on television, not in the United States at least. But I have nothing to complain about. I started making pieces in which speaking was a form of music, and I got great composer-performers who were also great speakers to participate in my pieces. Then one thing led to another, and I found myself able to work on this idea that had been somewhat of an obsession with me—to just let the words be the music. That’s pretty much what I’ve been working on for the past ten or twelve years.
I’m about at the end of it now. I have written forty half hours for television. It is like a series. When and if I finish producing them, I will retire. That’s enough work to do in one person’s lifetime. Probably it will take the rest of my life just to get them produced. So far, I have only eight of them produced, so I have thirty-two more of them to go. I have performed a lot of them in concert, however.
Basically, I take the smallest core ensemble for a particular opera, that is to say, the people who sing all the principal characters and the people who add to whatever music we bring with us. In that way, the singers are able to develop the characters, and I’m able to see what each piece needs, how it needs to grow. This is an introduction to an anecdote about technique. Right now I’m working on the last four so-called operas of this set. Each one is in an eighty-eight-minute format. Four parts of twenty-two minutes each, direct sequels to a piece I produced about twelve years ago that some of you might have seen parts of, called Perfect Lives. I produced that for British television. Typically, it hasn’t been broadcast in the United States.
One of the ideas of the last four futuristic pieces is to make a map of our mental history as Americans, where we came from and where we’re going. Naturally, we start in the ancient past and go into the future. Since I’m working on the last four right now, I’ve been dealing with the idea of how you show and dramatize a cultural technique. The gamelan ensemble you see behind me is obviously a dramatic version of a cultural technique, and we all presume that that technique can be articulated; that one person can tell another person how to do it brings with it the cultural technique. In other words, if you know how to do it and tell me how to do it, by virtue of me learning how to do it, I become part of it.
What we know about what we think are our roots in European music is almost exclusively embodied in techniques. Even though we are in Middletown, Connecticut, which is quite close to the Atlantic coast, for all sorts of bizarre reasons we pretty much have forgotten what our belief roots are. We haven’t forgotten as much as if we lived in California. We operate with respect to European techniques pretty much the same way we operate with respect to the gamelan. We take a young person from Omaha, and we teach that young person to play Chopin. How bizarre. And what Alvin and I went through—especially what people of my generation went through—was that the notion of music composition became exclusively a matter of the organization of techniques. You’ve probably heard of Arnold Schoenberg. He had a technique. And you’ve probably heard of other people in the Viennese school who had techniques, something that you measure out and that you can talk about and learn how to do if you paid enough attention to it. In other words, you could learn Webern exactly the same way as you could learn the Macintosh. You would actually feel as if you were Webern.
After all, what is music about? You want to go back to that wonderful time when things were less complicated than they are now. Everybody would want to be Webern, and everybody would want to study Webern. So what Alvin and I went through—and a lot of other people—was that we were exposed to the notion of technique. At the same time, we heard—this is like a history—we heard rumors of American techniques. Chauvinistic considerations apart, it was an idea that there were different techniques. Instead of wanting to be Viennese, you would want to be whatever the other thing was. You would want to be Californian or you would want to be something else.
Throughout my life, I have been surrounded by techniques, all of which have almost no cultural value except as they appeared as packaged. If I adapted myself to the package, then presumably I could be … Charles Ives. There’s a technique. It’s a hundred years old. I mean, who’s interested in Charles Ives? Nobody is interested in Charles Ives because it’s too old. But, we all know about all of the techniques.
Having gotten to a certain age, I realized it was about time for me to produce a technique. I’m almost ready to go away, and I don’t even have a technique to my credit yet. The other day, I had to give a lecture at a critic’s conference. I asked for a show of hands. “Raise your hand if you’ve done a profound analysis of Morton Feldman, if you have taken a Morton Feldman piece to a place where you know where every note comes from.” No hands. “How about Alvin Lucier?” No hands. “John Cage?” One guy’s hand went halfway up. He had probably read Silence. “Phil Glass?” No hands. “Maggi Payne?” No hands. I asked, “How could one be a critic if you don’t know facts?” Then I realized afterward that this was unfair of me because I was actually talking about techniques.
I’ve been trying to figure out what my technique is. This is a serious problem for me. It may not be a serious problem for you. We may be entering a cultural era where there are no techniques. Maybe we are all out of fashion, that there is some other thing going on. It may be that something is replacing technique. I don’t know about this.
Now, to go back to the story of the opera. Just a couple of days ago, I was in New Mexico. I decided that I would make a collaboration between my idea and the ideas of a large community of Spanish Americans who modify cars. They call themselves lowriders. They take old American cars and transform them. They don’t make them go faster. They don’t make them go slower. They don’t actually do much to the cars that could be considered different from the cars as they come from the factories in Detroit. Probably some of you know about these cars. One thing they do is to put a hydraulic system on the four wheels, either independently or in pairs so that they can make the car jump up and down. They can actually make the car jump off the ground or they can make the car go right to the ground and just drive along scraping the ground. Or, they can make the front wheels go down and then drive sideways, scraping the front wheel. They do things with the mufflers like most American kids have done since the beginning of cars, because they make beautiful sounds. The engine is still connected to the transmission. The wheels turn and move. And they make the sound in the car louder than most American cars, but everything is superficial. The cars are extraordinary. When you are in the presence of one of them, you feel as if you’re in the presence of a piece of art. Actually, it only occurred to me, finally, after I had been out there for a few times, that it was like being in the presence of quilts in the Amish country.
When you see one lowrider car, it’s just a paint job. Or, if it jumps, it’s just weird. And if a guy turns on the hi-fi very loud, you say, “That’s just a hi-fi.” It’s odd in the same way that Watts Towers is odd, and all the other things that are our accumulations of American culture are odd. But when you see a hundred lowrider cars all in one parking lot, it’s actually beyond my ability to speak of it. So I thought that I would ask these guys about their technique. I mean, how stupid could I be? I thought it would be clever and interesting if I could have them describe their technique, and I could put their descriptions in my piece, and then I could put that piece on television. That was my idea, among a bunch of other ideas. It was like I would ask a composer, “How do you write music?” And I would put that description of how you write music on television. How clever. Of course, none of them can describe their technique. I can actually talk more about their technique than they can. They would say, “Well, you know, me and my brother we just cut the springs in half and put it down and we put this …” And I would say, “When you cut the springs in half that makes it quite low, you know, and you don’t have any shocks.” He says, “Well, yah, you just take this piece of rubber out of a truck”—there’s a piece of heavy-duty rubber that comes with a truck suspension—“and you put that underneath the bumper so that when the thing, like, hits the ground in a big bump it doesn’t break the A-frame.” Right? That’s interesting, but he could say it in actually just half a sentence. He would just shrug and say, “You know … the rubber.”
Then you ask, “Well, what about the paint job?” And he says, “Well, me and my brother, we just, like, do this, and then this, this, this.” And what I had imagined would be a brilliant discussion of technique, you know, on the order of Schoenberg or some guy who wins the Nobel Prize—I’m in the presence of what I consider to be a rather extraordinary piece of art, and the guy can only just shrug his shoulders and say, “Well, that’s what I do.”
When I was enthralled by European technique, when I was reading Stockhausen, Boulez, Nono—brilliant composers whose music I loved—when I read their descriptions of their techniques, I was embarrassed because I didn’t have a technique, and nobody I knew had any techniques. I always thought that I had the idea that American music was—American music meaning me and Alvin, but, yes, I mean Leonard Bernstein too—I had always thought that American music was primitive in the sense that the composer had a very limited historical perspective and an enormous command of detail by virtue of cultural isolation.
That’s what primitivism is. If you cut any human being away from their society so that they have no externals—nobody telling them anything—then their obsession with the symbolic materials that they live with everyday, whether it’s a quilt or cooking or music or, you know, whatever … Watts Towers becomes an example of a huge mastery of detail without reference to the outside world. This has been the story of American music. We see it in Charles Ives. We see it in Harry Partch. We see a beautiful remnant of it in John Cage. You probably see it in Alvin. You see it in me. You see it in all of my friends.
It’s like Eskimo baseball. We see the example of people who have an idea of something that exists outside them. But, they didn’t have any contact with the idea so they just started making it out of what they had around them. I thought that was characteristic of our music and that I was, how should we say, deprived or that it was sad that I was outside the historical mainstream. I thought the historical mainstream went from Vienna to Paris and that, since I was in either Michigan or California, it was a long way from the historical mainstream and that the mainstream would just go on as it always goes on. And I would just still be out there, and everybody would still be out there with me.
Having talked to the lowriders, I think I might have been wrong. I think I might have just changed my mind this weekend. I think I might have had a huge cultural conversion, which I would like to explain to you. I think that, in having said what I just said, then, I can just offer a few opinions. I think there is actually no cultural mainstream.
Maybe it’s because of television. Maybe there was never a mainstream. Maybe we made it up. Maybe the whole idea of the mainstream is just an illusion. We have every reason to see that, for instance, Beethoven, to take a good example of a mainstream composer, comes at the intersection of wars, you know, Jesus, all that stuff! It’s possible that he’s just as primitive as I am. It’s just that, for some other reason, he’s interesting to us.
In my age group, I have been surrounded by, fascinated by, and obsessed by the actual facts of people living in North America who have no cultural contacts to what I consider to be mainstream. They have absolutely none, and they continue to make things. They will always continue to make things. I had just set them aside. You’ve probably all heard about Watts Towers. Every night this guy comes home and brings three tin cans, a pan, and a couple of pipes. He welds them together and makes a tower. Now that is not unusual. There was a time fifteen or twenty years ago when I was totally fascinated with this kind of American culture. I knew dozens of examples of people who made amazing sculpture, people who made amazing poetry, amazing music that nobody ever saw or heard. The only reason everybody saw Watts Tower is that Watts grew up around it. In the middle of Wisconsin—bang—a guy makes a totally amazing piece. I knew dozens of those examples and thought I was one of those examples. Maybe I am.
I have been trying to develop a technique that, in the context of European music, and in the context of American music, and in the context of Asian music, and in the context of everything is just totally my own. Idiosyncratic. Not my own because I want it. But it’s not my own because I don’t know anything else to do, and I’m not interested in anything else.
I’ve been trying to figure out how to make music that follows the rules of speech and that comes from all of the parent rules and conditions of speech. I start by speaking, instead of going into a room and playing the piano with some imagination of what that particular act is going to result in. Instead of imagining that it is going to be played by a great jazz ensemble or a great new music ensemble or a great orchestra, I go into the room and lock the door and talk to myself. And I keep on talking to myself until the music of the talk takes over. Until there are rules operating—for lack of a better word I call musical rules—until there are rules operating that govern the sounds that are coming out of my mouth. Tonight is not a good example. When that condition is satisfied, that’s what I call composing.
As a result of having done that practice I know the tune, as it were. I know it backwards and forwards. I could write it down, or type it, or put it into a computer. I allow its manifestation on the page to be effectively a score. Now, that’s not hard to understand for a composer. I mean, you can look at pretty much anything and analyze it visually, and you can use that as a metaphor for some sort of action.
And, as you all know, that metaphor can be more or less interesting depending on how seriously you take it. In the case of John Cage, the I Ching, or some other weird thing. The result can be grand or it can be not so grand depending on how seriously you’re willing to go along with it, how deep you’re going into it spiritually. So among composers, the question of using any particular manifestation, any particular form, is not a problem.
The obvious factor of what I see on the paper or on a computer screen or what I hear myself saying can be translated as any of the dimensions of music that we could name—pitch, duration, or any of the newer ones. I’ve been trying to allow this template, the notion of a plan, the notion of a three-dimensional or four-dimensional plan, a template that will give you back exactly what you put into it as in a machine template. I’ve been trying to get this so it will control the other aspects of the work, that is to say, the visual and the narrative aspects.
I found the notion of a technique at the beginning of these searches of mine fifteen years ago. I found the notion of a technique because I was coming from a relatively tame suburban Californian environment to New York City, but I wasn’t staying long enough so that I could get immune to it. I was visiting New York a lot and, as a result, I was stunned and attracted by the number of people on the street who talk to themselves, who rant. I decided that I would try to learn how to do that. I know that there are a lot of prejudices against people who rant.
I recognized in myself a slight structural tendency to rant. I recognized that I had a very low level of Tourette’s syndrome and that, either in addition to Tourette’s syndrome, or as an embellishment to Tourette’s, I had the tendency to repeat myself. I recognized that the tendency to say everything twice was actually the beginning of ranting. So I thought that was a good place to start. New York is full of people who are Nobel Prize winners in ranting. They are the Olympic athletes of ranting. I’ve never seen anything like the excellence and the high quality of ranting that you see in New York. New York has some of the greatest talkers in the world.
So I decided I would learn to rant. I practiced the state of mind that allowed me to rant. I actually got to the point, because I’m such a good musician—because I’m so obsessed with this idea—where I could actually rant. I didn’t show off, but I got to the point where I could actually do it. And after three or four years of very serious study, I decided I would test it for myself to see if I was actually doing what I thought I was doing. I had access to the studio at Mills College one summer. I set the thing up so that all I had to do was push one button, and it would record anything that went on in the room. It would record it at very low levels. I knew how to do this. I left it there for two days while I went home and got in the mood to rant. Finally one evening, it seemed to be time. I went into the studio and I punched the button and I ranted. I actually allowed myself to make music.
The problem with why you can’t play the piano is because, as you start playing, you get distracted by something outside you. Whatever that distraction is—in this case it could have been the distraction of a schedule; I could have worried about whether the tape was running out. I ranted for exactly forty-four minutes. Then I played it back and, indeed, it sounded just like what I thought it was supposed to sound like. I played it for my friends, and they were embarrassed for me. I was embarrassed for myself because I had actually practiced.
One time I was on an escalator in the San Francisco airport and right ahead of me there was a Chinese family—a man, his wife, and three or four kids. I just couldn’t resist ranting. When they heard me, they actually ran. So I knew that I had something going. I knew that I could do it.
The trick is that what I had always imagined was happening in other people’s ranting— happening in the way that you can see the larger scale of things by just looking at a little detail— when I had heard these people ranting, I knew that there was something going on that you could analyze just like technique. I decided that I would use this particular tape in combination with some other structure that I won’t even bother to tell you about now but that was sort of electronic ranting. I decided that I would use this to illustrate a performance on videotape. In other words, I wanted to try it out in the world. I had somebody transcribe it for me who didn’t know anything about the idea. I just said, “Please write it out. Write all the parts of the words, all the dot-dot-dots. Write everything you hear because I’m going to give it to a friend of mine to translate into French.” When I got the transcription back, it was more organized than Webern. I’m not kidding you. It was more organized than Webern.
There were four themes. There were four incantations that were repeated. One of them was “You guys are all …”; I had noticed it when I would be at a party, when I was feeling the old Tourette’s syndrome. I would go into the bathroom and say, “You guys are all, you guys are all …” for a few minutes, and then I would go back out to the party. Classic Tourette’s syndrome. “You guys are all …” I’ve forgotten what the other three are. Each of them had four syllables. The forty-four minutes was in four parts. It was a suite. Maybe it was a sonata. I don’t know. It was in four movements.
Now you understand that I was not doing this. You have to believe me that I was only ranting. You have to believe me. The four movements could be organized, could be analyzed around a module unit. I’ve forgotten what that unit was now. It was something like four minutes and twelve seconds or something like that. Each of the four movements had a theme that was repeated incessantly, which was made up of four syllables. Each of those four syllables, each of those four syllable themes, had a different accent pattern. “You guys are all …” is one. That’s like ba-dum ba-dum. Each had a different rhythm pattern. Each of the four had a subsidiary theme, which was made up of two, four, or eight syllables and a bunch of other things. It was as organized as Webern, I am telling you.
I knew I was onto something. So I’ve composed music like that ever since. That’s the way I do everything. I rant. I ranted Perfect Lives. Perfect Lives consists of seven half-hour episodes. Two of them I wrote in one sitting. I ranted them for a few days, a few weeks. Chu-ka, chu-ka, chu-ka, chu-ka, chu-ka, chu-ka, chu. Out it comes. A few of the other ones I did in two or three separate parts. If I had the time, I could go in and rant. I could actually write a big piece. I could actually say a big piece in the same way that a great jazz pianist could improvise a piece. So let’s quit.