John Adams: preference

Transcript context

…Why isn’t Robert Ashley better known? To me, he’s one of the greats, but no one ever tells me to listen to Robert Ashley. I knew Robert Ashley way back in the 1970s, because when I first came to California, a friend of mine said, “Oh, you have to get in touch with Bob Ashley.” At the time, Bob was teaching at Mills College, a very small college in Oakland, California. To answer your question, I think that one of the things about Ashley is that he’s just off the grid when it comes to finding a conventional way to describe it. Some people would say that he wrote great operas, but “opera” isn’t really the word. I think maybe Bob used the term opera, but he used it in a wry way. His greatest gifts were, really, this combination of his texts that he wrote, and of course, this fantastic droll manner of speaking them. They would be accompanied usually by his longtime collaborator, Blue Gene Tyranny, who played in a sort of light, bluesy, sometimes gospel-style piano. But it was Ashley’s — I don’t know — this very special Americana that you associate with road movies and quiet, anonymous people talking about their relationships or their experiences in a diner or a gas station or an automobile. That’s what makes him very special. For me, I don’t think of him in the musical realm. I think of him more in the literary realm. Do you think Morton Feldman has gone down as the truly great eternal American composer of his time?…

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