The cliché of the vision­ary artist is of some­one like William Blake, so involved in the worlds in his head that his wife said of him, “I have very lit­tle of Mr. Blake’s com­pany, he is always in Par­adise.” This is the idea of vision as hal­lu­ci­na­tion, a mys­ti­cal third eye see­ing into dimen­sions and uni­verses beyond human expe­ri­ence. If you visit the com­poser Robert Ash­ley, as I had the honor to do recently, you have a very dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence. The open-air ele­va­tor that runs through a cen­tral shaft in his build­ing requires some skill and expe­ri­ence to oper­ate, so he gladly comes down to greet you at the door and, eagerly pulling you inside, brings you up to his calm apart­ment to talk. His straight­for­ward cour­tesy belies that fun­da­men­tal vision of his work.

Ash­ley was in the midst of prepar­ing The Old Man Lives in Con­crete for a four night per­for­mance at Roulette, in Brook­lyn, NY. It’s the lat­est in what is now a sub­stan­tial body of dra­matic music, pieces that are absolutely operas and are also absolutely unlike not only any other operas, but unlike what any­one imag­ine the form to be. He is an avant-gardist in the true sense, not in mak­ing an obnox­ious racket in order to épater les bour­geoisie, but in dis­cov­er­ing a fun­da­men­tally sim­ple idea and spend­ing his career explor­ing every per­mu­ta­tion of it. It is a vision that Ash­ley has, and the vision is the flick­er­ing of the tele­vi­sion screen.

He makes opera for tele­vi­sion, although only one of his numer­ous works, Per­fect Lives, has been fully pro­duced for that screen. And why not? Ashley’s gen­er­a­tion is the first one that came of age in the TV era, and just as my daugh­ter sees the touch-screen of an iPad as a nat­ural part of her envi­ron­ment, so Ash­ley saw TV as another com­mon com­po­nent of life in an eco­nom­i­cally advanced coun­try. He also saw it, as any sen­si­tive viewer at the dawn of the broad­cast era would, as a stage. Before ABC, CBS and NBC knew what they could sell to adver­tis­ers, they tried all sorts of things, and so along with a vast waste­land, there is also the legacy of Omnibus, Ernie Kovacs, Grou­cho Marx host­ing one game show and John Cage appear­ing on another.

It’s a dif­fi­cult niche, with pres­sure com­ing from, cul­tur­ally, above and below. From below is the com­mer­cial goal of appeal­ing to the low­est com­mon denom­i­na­tor, from above the knee-jerk snooty atti­tude that TV is inher­ently declassé. It’s a medium, and what is made for it, like for the printed page or the com­pact disc, is mostly inane, dis­pos­able and dull. Don’t blame the screen, just turn it off.

Ash­ley and tele­vi­sion are a sym­pa­thetic fit, because his dra­matic and tech­ni­cal inter­ests suit a plat­form that, by putting a stage into the home, empha­sizes inti­mate ideas and expres­sion. Dra­mat­i­cally, he’s inter­ested in peo­ple at the fringes of society’s atten­tion, like the home­less sub­jects of Dust, or the elderly, espe­cially those liv­ing in care facil­i­ties. He’s fas­ci­nated with their inter­nal sense of time, and how it leads to a ten­dency to speak, to tell a tale, then fall silent, obliv­i­ous of the accu­mu­la­tion of sec­onds. Tech­ni­cally, his work is based around speech — an early per­sonal and aca­d­e­mic inter­est — and his char­ac­ters pri­mar­ily speak to the audi­ence, their voices fre­quently processed through elec­tron­ics and mixed in with more elec­tronic music. While it’s com­mon now to have a media sys­tem set up so that music com­ing through the tele­vi­sion can be played on a proper set of speak­ers, the built-in audio of the screen (and many com­put­ers) is poor for the type of singing that is stan­dard in opera. But the speak­ing voice, the sto­ry­telling voice, is perfect.

Ash­ley told me that “Amer­i­can com­posers want to tell their sto­ries, struc­tural ideas have never been of pri­mary impor­tance.” Through his char­ac­ters, he is one of the great sto­ry­tellers, and tele­vi­sion is the great sto­ry­telling medium. The break­through con­cept of The Sopra­nos, and the superb craft, demon­strated the power of long-form, episodic sto­ry­telling, the kind of thing that Dick­ens used to do. Ashley’s work takes hours, not years, but there’ll be some­thing of that feel­ing at Roulette, where The Old Man will be parsed out over two sets of two nights, sub­stan­tial and episodic but far more inti­mate than a Ring Cycle and most likely inspir­ing rather than exhausting.

The per­for­mances are part of a process that will cre­ate the final work. The Old Man showed at La Mama in 2009, and Ash­ley has added a sub­stan­tial amount of new mate­r­ial. After the Roulette per­for­mances, he’ll take the recorded audio and splice it together in the stu­dio into the final form that he wants. It’s “another step in my desire to write for tele­vi­sion,” although the only way to expe­ri­ence the live action will be in per­son. That’s been frus­trat­ing for him, pro­duc­ing tele­vised work or video record­ings was usu­ally too expen­sive in the past. But with dig­i­tal tools and web-based dis­tri­b­u­tion, the costs have dropped dra­mat­i­cally, and the expense of dis­trib­ut­ing tele­vi­sion opera is essen­tially noth­ing (you can watch Per­fect Lives on YouTube). And the lap­top, iPhone and iPad have made tele­vi­sion portable and dis­crete. “I’m con­fi­dent that the young gen­er­a­tion will be on tele­vi­sion” with their work, Ash­ley told me.

He’s eighty-two, so the limit of how much more pro­duces is per­haps vis­i­ble. The legacy of avant-garde com­posers in the post-WWII era is that of find­ing a voice, find­ing a ded­i­cated group of musi­cians to real­ize that voice, then find­ing that other musi­cians want to repro­duce it as well. Ash­ley has been work­ing with mostly the same per­form­ers — Joan La Bar­bara, Thomas Buck­ner, him­self — for decades, and it has been an open ques­tion of whom might pick up his work and fur­ther it, but in the past year espe­cially a cadre of young musi­cians and com­posers have begun to repro­duce his work in their own per­for­mances. Most promi­nent are Paul Pinto and Gelsey Bell, who per­formed Per­fect Lives last year with their group Varispeed, and the ensem­ble Thing NY, musi­cians who clearly have Ash­ley excited about his legacy: “I was des­per­ately wor­ried, now I’m not at all, I’m ecsta­tic. There has to be that con­ti­nu­ity from one gen­er­a­tion to the next that allows music to change.” And it will allow Ashley’s work to endure, whether or not on television.