Robert Ashley

7. “If You Have to Ask You Can’t Afford One” (Now Eleanor’s Idea)

87 If You Have to Ask 7 You Can’t Afford One Now Eleanor’s Idea the five-and-a-half-hour tetralogy Now Eleanor’s Idea (1985–94) represents the conclusion of the American adventure, of Ashley’s “history of our consciousness as Americans.” If Atalanta represented the life of European immigrants in the eastern United States, remembering stories about the old country, and Perfect Lives the life in the Midwest, preserved in sayings whose origins are murky, Now Eleanor’s Idea, with its four symmetrical parts, represents the great coming together in the Los Angeles of the future, with fragmented identities that need to be reconstituted. The tetralogy could be called Ashley’s magnum opus, a mammoth continuum. Its operas—Improvement: Don Leaves Linda, eL/Aficionado, Foreign Experiences, and (the “title opera”) Now Eleanor’s Idea—are clearly differentiated by style and density. The fact of a tetralogy owes at least something to the stable of four singers that Ashley had put together, and each opera capitalizes on a different voice, representing a character originally from Perfect Lives: Improvement Jacqueline Humbert Linda (one of the bank tellers) eL/Aficionado Thomas Buckner Don Jr. (D, captain of the football team) Foreign Experiences Sam Ashley Junior Jr. (Don and Linda’s son) Now Eleanor’s Idea Joan La Barbara Now Eleanor (another teller) 88 r o b e r t a s h l e y | If You Have to Ask (Additional characters also appear—a doctor and Mr. Payne in Improvement, interrogators in eL/Aficionado, and so on.) Nominally, all four operas are couched in a key signature of four flats (F minor), although the twenty-four-note row of Improvement and the bebop chords of the other three operas include plenty of accidentals. Broad areas of symmetry operate across the tetralogy, as can be seen from a comparison of durations and tempos (see table 1). table 1. Duration and tempo in the four operas of Now Eleanor’s Idea Opera Duration in minutes Tempo Duration in beats Improvement 88:05 𝅘𝅥 = 72 6,336 𝅘𝅥 eL/Aficionado 71:43 𝅘𝅥 = 72 not all measured Foreign Experiences 72:20 𝅘𝅥 = 90 6,336 𝅘𝅥 Now Eleanor’s Idea 88:28 𝅘𝅥 = 72 6,336 𝅘𝅥 The outer operas are each eighty-eight minutes long, the middle two operas seventy -two minutes each.All are at a tempo of 72 bpm except Foreign Experiences, at a faster 90 bpm. Three of the operas are the same length in quarter notes, 6,336; Improvement’s two acts divide that length in half (3,168 + 3,168), and the last two operas divide it into four equal acts of 1,584 beats each. Clearly this is not coincidence . In fact, the original plan was to make all the operas the same length and structure.1 The fact that eL/Aficionado doesn’t quite fit the pattern may be because it wasn’t originally conceived as part of this work.The remaining opera was originally meant to be titled “When Opportunity Knocks,” and eL/Aficionado, having grown out of a solo piece for Tom Buckner named My Brother Called, seemed to Ashley an acceptable substitute. Figure 3 reveals more aspects of symmetry among the four works. Act 1 of Improvement is in 3/4, and act 2 is in 4/4. In Foreign Experiences, the outer acts are in 4/4 and the middle acts in 3/4. Now Eleanor’s Idea is the opposite, except that the mostly 4/4 middle acts have intros and endings in 3/4. Improvement and eL/ Aficionado are both composed of scenes of irregular length, the two remaining operas in four acts of identical length. Is it important for the listener to know about these symmetries of proportion among Ashley’s work? I think on one level it is; at least, while listening to the endless and initially confusing outpouring of Ashley’s text, it is worth cultivating a sense that his is ultimately an ordered universe, so that one can learn to perceive the large-scale balance behind the sometimes apparent chaos. Ashley’s operas emulate the “theater of memory” of the Renaissance occult thinker Gior- 89 dano Bruno, in that an orderly, symmetrical structure is created to house all of the heterogeneous materials collected in them. Alternatively, one might read Hans T. David writing about the sonata from Bach’s Musical Offering: The sonata reflects the form of the...