Four American Composers : Robert Ashley ( Peter Greenaway, 1983)

Robert Ashley episode chronicles the work and career of the distinguished composer, an innovator of opera who has worked to make it American in subject matter and idiom, writing opera for television. Greenaway here provides viewers with performances excerpted from Ashley s sevenpart television opera Perfect Lives. The opera was coproduced by Britain s Channel Four television network in August of 1983. Four American Composers : This is a 4part documentary that follows four different contemporary composers performing, creating, building their shows. Peter Greenaway leads us, with a great sense of balance between the performances and the interviews, through the creative process of 4 very different composers in style (sound and noise, repetition and discipline, vocal experimentation, poetry and musical freedom) who are all framed under the same musical genre contemporary music. A Great way to get introduced to this music and to understand how much of it is intellectual or playful.