Art & Creativity Quote by Robert Ashley

Ashley’s warning lands like a deadpan insult disguised as craft advice: unplanned music can sound “planned,” just not by anyone you’d trust with the aux cord, let alone a score. The joke is surgical. He flips the usual romantic defense of improvisation - spontaneity as authenticity - into a character judgment. The problem isn’t chaos; it’s the particular kind of order that emerges when nobody is accountable. What you get, he suggests, is intention without taste, structure without sensibility: the uncanny feeling that something is organized, yet organized badly.

The line works because it treats musical form as social behavior. “Someone you cross the street to avoid” isn’t merely eccentric; it’s a figure who broadcasts misread cues, who thinks they’re coherent while everyone else senses danger. Ashley implies that unplanned music often produces that same mismatch between self-perception and outward effect: performers feeling free, listeners hearing a nervy, self-involved logic. It’s an indictment of laziness masquerading as liberation.

Contextually, Ashley came out of a postwar American avant-garde where “indeterminacy” and process were real aesthetic positions, not buzzwords. His own work, especially in music-theater, is meticulously constructed while sounding conversational, even accidental. That tension is the tell. He’s not anti-improvisation; he’s anti-fake improvisation - the kind that uses “unplanned” as a permission slip, then accidentally reveals a plan anyway: the performer’s default habits, their clichés, their private tunnel. The sting is that your unconscious is composing, and it might be the composer nobody wants to meet.