Robert Ashley Quotations

Do not rely on unplanned music; it comes out as though it were planned, but planned by someone you cross the street to avoid.

I was interested in opera and it seemed to me that the only possible theatre for contemporary opera would be television. So I started working towards a kind of television kind of opera.

I grew up listening to the radio and to records. I learned music mainly from that.

I thought if I could get television interested in opera, it would make a kind of new thing that would allow composers to build a whole new repertoire.

It's the racial aspect of this that will make this tough for her. The public perception is that this is a one-side investigation, and that will detract from her efforts to clean things up. There's merit to many of her positions, and she's on track. But she's always derailed by the city's polarization.

It's hard to say how you get influenced by something. When you work on something for seven years, it's bound to make an impression.

Opera on television in Europe is very important. If you think about it in the broadest sense: a lot of the dramas made in India with music are practically operas. They're not sung but they have a very big appeal. I don't know why American television people are so stupid but at the moment, they just seem to have some sort of a block. They just do what they do and they do it for a certain number of years. Then it wears out and they try something else. It's just a matter of time I think.

I like to talk about America. It's so mysterious.

If a piece of music is under three minutes long, it's rock. Over three minutes, it's classical.