Philip Glass
It’s hard to overstate the influence of New York City composer Philip Glass. Along with Steve Reich, his minimalist compositions transformed the world of classical music and, eventually, popular music in general. Glass’s early epiphanies occurred in Paris during his time in the mid-’60s studying under Nadia Boulanger and in New York when he heard Steve Reich’s “Piano Phase.” These events helped set Glass on a course toward the repetitive, dramatic, and conceptually rigorous style that has become his trademark. Throughout the ’70s Glass refined his work, resulting in career-defining compositions like Music In Twelve Parts and Einstein On The Beach. In the process, he became a popular sensation, a serious composer who wasn’t willfully obscure or too difficult to understand. Glass’s stunning soundtrack work for films like The Thin Blue Line and The Hours, and a symphony based on David Bowie’s album Heroes, has only elevated his standing as one of America’s most popular living composers.
In this talk at the 2013 Red Bull Music Academy, Glass waxed nostalgic on his time spent in Paris, musical tradition, and the art of performance.
Hosted by Todd L. Burns I usually say there’s no need for an introduction, but in this case
it’s absolutely, more-than-ever, true. Mr. Philip Glass, thank you for joining
us. [applause] Philip Glass Thank you, Todd. Todd L. Burns Obviously, we’re in New York, but I wanted to begin in Paris, because I think
that’s the city where music – although you had an enormous amount of training
in the United States – that’s where you... Philip Glass Well, a lot of important things happened to me in Paris. Not only was it the
music, but also that’s where I first began really working in the theater, too.
Oddly enough, there was a lot of theater going. Some of it was in English, and
some of it was in French. And I began working in movies then, too. So that
would’ve been in the early ‘60s. It’s quite a while ago. But I went there to kind of finish my training. It had begun in America. I’d been at Juilliard. But it turned out to be more like a complete – how can I say – renovation, almost like taking the whole thing apart and putting it back together. Todd L. Burns Why was that? Philip Glass Because I had a very good teacher. Todd L. Burns What was her name? Philip Glass Her name was Nadia Boulanger. And she was
entirely just a teacher. She didn’t write any music herself, but she held us
to the highest standards that she could find for us, and that would’ve been the classics. That was a lot of Bach and a lot of Mozart, and she really made you do that, until you actually could dream in that language. Todd L. Burns And you had already written a lot of music before then, but you almost stopped
when you were in Paris because you were studying... Philip Glass Well, I was too busy. She basically had me start all over again. For the first
year I was with her, I could do almost nothing but try to keep up with what
she wanted me to do. It was pretty much of an eight-hour... I got up... in
Paris it’s dark in the winter, because it’s in the north so, it was dark when
I woke up, and it was dark when I stopped. It was a good eight or nine hours
of work a day, just to keep up with that. So it was very intense. It was a kind of a crazy thing to do. I already had the final degrees that I needed
from Juilliard. I was 25-years old. I was supposedly done with that. And it
turned out I was just beginning. And I was very lucky to find someone who
could articulate a standard, for me, that was attainable, but with great
effort. Todd L. Burns Why did you decide to kind of begin again? I mean, what was it about her? What
had you heard about her? Philip Glass Because, frankly, I thought that the training I had was inadequate. I got a
Master’s degree from Juilliard, but I didn’t feel there were things about music that I didn’t understand. And which I, by the way, still don’t understand. I don’t mean to say that I even solved any of those problems. I
still feel the more I do, the less I understand about how it really works. But
at that age, I hadn’t really arrived at a personal language, which happened
very soon after that. Because, at the same time, I had the very good luck of
being hired by Ravi Shankar to be his assistant. So I had these two crazy
people, Nadia Boulanger and Ravi Shankar, who were both perfectionists. And one in a tradition in music which was unknown to me, until that moment. Todd L. Burns Let’s play a tune. I think you know it. It’s by Mr. Shankar. (music: Ravi Shankar – “Chappaqua”] Philip Glass I don’t know where you found that thing. That’s from a film score called
Chappaqua, which I was hired to notate, and I was listening to that, “I know
that music,” but I couldn’t remember where it was from. It’s from that, and
that would’ve been from 1964/’65. Todd L. Burns How’d you fall into that situation? Philip Glass Just blind luck. A friend of mine was a photographer who was working on the
set. Because usually they had a photographer who would photograph all the parts of the film, so if they had to go back and re-do something, they could set it up again. So that was his job. And they were looking for someone who spoke English and French and could write music, and he said, “Oh, I have this friend. He can do that.” And I got called, and I had no idea... you have to
remember, this is before The Beatles had met him, so he was pretty much
unknown in the West. And this music would’ve been very exotic, at that time. Which, now, it doesn’t seem exotic at all. But in the ‘60s, this was the first time this kind of music had been heard. At least in the West. Of course, a very big tradition in the East, of course. So I went to meet Ravi at that
time, I think he was about 45, and I was about 20 years younger than him. And
it was a very intense situation. It was my second year with Boulanger,
actually. And I had to solve the problem of notating the music. I had to write
his melodies down in a way that the Western, that the French musicians could
play but would reflect the actual rhythmic nuances of what he was writing. And
I had about half an hour to do that, because I would’ve been fired if I hadn’t
done it. And it’s not just that. It was a big problem, because no one had
really thought about it. This is before global music had really become a very
normal thing for us today, you know? I had never heard Indian music before, at
that point, and very few people in the West had, really knew it that way, knew
it in any thorough way. So, basically, what I had to do, I was listening to the music, I was writing it down, and the difficulty was getting the rhythmic emphasis on the right notes. And I would write it down, they would play it
back, and Alla Rakha, who was the drummer, the tabla player, he would say, “No, no,
no, no, no, no.” And I would write it again and again, and they kept saying,
“No, no, no.” And then the French musicians began advising me, then that
became even worse; I had all of them on top of me. And then finally I did a
remarkable, intuitive thing, which is I took the music I had written down and
I erased all the bar lines. And suddenly, I saw something which I hadn’t seen
before, which was that I saw the patterns. It went over bar lines. Because he
didn’t use bar lines. I was using bar lines because that’s what we had been
taught to do. But when I took the bar lines away, I saw the flow of the rhythm
that I hadn’t seen. And I looked at it. Todd, this was actually, a lot of it
was just luck, in a certain way. I saw it, I analyzed it very quickly, and I
saw also, that there was a cycle of 16 notes that kept coming up. Later, I found out that was called a taal. I learned a lot later on. Todd L. Burns You traveled to India a couple of years later. Philip Glass I went about 20 times after that. And I spent a lot of time with him and we
wrote music together later on. And he just died last year and I spoke with him
a few days before he died. I mean, I was in touch with him for the rest of his
life, and we wrote music together. But the point was is that what was so lucky
about it was that – and I don’t know why that was – I was given a very
difficult problem to solve, and I solved it very, very quickly, and I was able
to notate that music. That’s what you hear. You hear him playing, but all the
other stuff, the oboes and the horns and all this stuff, those are the string players. Those were the local musicians, who had never played Indian music before. And we ended up, “Gee, it sounded pretty good.” [laughs] Haven’t heard it in a long time, but it did sound good. Todd L. Burns How did it change your conception of writing your own music? Philip Glass Well, that was an interesting point. Because on the one hand I was learning
what we would call the basis of central European art music, which is basically
harmony, counterpoint, that kind of stuff. And I was learning it in a very
thorough way, from a woman who was a great teacher and was unrelenting. She
did not allow for mistakes. I couldn’t bring music in with any wrong notes in
it. She would throw me out of the [class]. I took lessons in her home, she
would just throw me out if there were any mistakes. And very quickly I learned
how to write that kind of music without making mistakes. So that was on the
one hand. On the other hand, by the second year I was now working with Ravi
Shankar in a tradition of music that was very, very different. But obviously,
of a very sophisticated nature, which had a history of its own, and its own
kinds of rules. There is no root movement or harmonic movement in the Indian
music. There’s a lot of ornamentation, and the rhythmic structure becomes the
overall structure of the piece. That doesn’t happen in our Western music. At
least it didn’t then. Immediately, almost, I began to experiment with the idea
of taking the training I had from Boulanger and mixing in with the work I had
been doing with Ravi Shankar. Almost immediately I began doing that. And I
began writing music for plays at that time. We were living in Paris. I was
working in a little theater company. And, you know, there were a lot of things
going on in Paris at that time. Besides Godard and Truffaut, who were making
new movies then, Jean Genet was still doing new plays, [Samuel] Beckett was
doing plays. Paris was a very interesting place in the ‘60s. All this other
stuff was going on. And I was writing music for new plays by Beckett. It was a
little, small company. And he liked us, for some reason. And he gave us plays
to work on. And I was the composer of the company, and he advised me where to
put the music, and I worked very closely with him for a number of years. So
that I began taking these ideas, and the first place they went to were into
theatrical works. Todd L. Burns Not classical composition, which was to be played, which I think... Philip Glass I never wrote classical composition ever again. [laughs] That’s not
completely true. Eventually, I wrote a bunch of symphonies and that, but it
was a long time later. It was a good 20 years later that I went back to
working... I started my own ensemble very quickly after that, which was an
electric keyboard ensemble, with winds. We were using the high technology,
which wasn’t very high. We used just amplified technology, just amplified
music. There weren’t any synthesizers yet, at that point. They were just
coming around then. There was a Yamaha keyboard that was getting to be close
to being a synthesizer at that time in the early 1970s. Todd L. Burns So, the organ that you were using when you came back to New York, the Farfisa? Philip Glass Well, they were these little Italian Farfisa organs that you could get. The
reason I used them was because they were all over the place. Usually, and I needed two or three of them, because I had three keyboardists and three wind
players and a singer, that’s how we did it. Basically, I got the keyboards
because they were... you know, my first band was mostly composers. Then, as a
matter of fact, I still play with the ensemble and everyone in the ensemble is
a composer. And they don’t write my music at all; they write their own music.
But I’ve always done well having composers play with me, because... Todd L. Burns Why do you think that is? Philip Glass I think they liked what I did. And some of them came just to pick up whatever
they could from me. And also, we were – this is an important point – I was
developing a performance practice. That is a way of playing, which really hadn’t existed before. And if you wanted to learn to play that music, you could learn it with me. It was very fast, it was very highly synchronized music. In fact, with my ensemble, it took us five or six years before we could even play it decently well. Todd L. Burns That’s the thing I think that’s kind of under-rated about your music is -
obviously, listening to it, it’s very beautiful and flowing - but to play it,
for these very fast amounts of time, it must be extraordinarily difficult. And
obviously you were playing it yourself. Philip Glass Well, it’s like anything else. It’s really difficult at first and after a
while it becomes a lot of fun. We’re playing very, very fast, a metronome marking it which would be easily 160 and 176. And fast, for a lot of people, is 120 or even 108. Orchestra music, this is quite a bit faster than that. And we’re playing often in unison or in parallel motion or in ways so that... if we’re not playing together, you can hear right away that someone is... it’s
like watching dancers who are supposed to be synchronising their movements.
These are synchronised musical movements, which, if they go out of synch,
sound terrible. So the standards are very high, and they have to be met pretty
accurately. At this point, the group that I work with, we’re very good at it.
But, you know, there are some other groups, especially the younger groups, who
are very good at it, too. In fact, they’re as good as we are, and it took us
years to do it. Now, this is an interesting thing, how a performance practice
that someone begins, 20 years later, becomes very common. That happens a lot
in music. It happens in jazz, too. It happens in popular music, too. Things
that seemed very hard at one time become [commonplace]. You don’t even know
how that happens, because it can happen three or four thousand miles away, in
another city. And you say, “Well, where did they hear that?” Well, they didn’t
hear it. There’s a kind of synchronicity that happens with, when we get into
the practice of music, that defies geography. Todd L. Burns Early on, it was hard to play, I imagine, and it was also, for a lot of
people, hard to listen to. There is a lot of people that were not exactly
happy about the compositions. Philip Glass There were complaints, there were complaints. And people threw things at us,
and we had fights. We went through the whole thing. That hasn’t happened in a
little while, but people would actually try to stop concerts. Which meant
that... Todd L. Burns Did it feel like you were doing something right at that point, almost? Philip Glass Of course! [laughs] We knew we were doing something right. At the same time,
what we also had was a big, immediate response to the music, from other
people, who really liked it. And that wasn’t just listeners, but that happened
with people in the popular music world and the jazz world, and they were
attracted to the music and they wanted to know what it was. And they would
come to concerts and I got to know them and we would play music together
sometimes. And that’s how I began working with people in popular music. Todd L. Burns There’s people like Brian Eno and David Bowie. Philip Glass Yeah, them, and also Aphex Twin and... there’s so many. We were talking, I did a record with Ray Manzarek years ago. I often made a record with people. Like, a group called The Rabies. A very good Irish band, Pierce Turner’s a wonderful Irish composer,
who’s living in New York now. I’ve done several records with him. I guess I
got involved in producing... we say “producing”; what I was really doing was I
was working, I was making arrangements and I was playing along with it. The
producer was somebody else, was the guy behind the glass, who was running the
machinery. I was actually on the other side of the glass, in the players’
department. And I was writing the music for them, but I was also playing parts
of it myself. Todd L. Burns Let’s listen to a track that you were involved in, production-wise. It’s by a
group called Polyrock, and it was made in 1980. Philip Glass Yeah, I think we did two records, if not three. (music: Polyrock – “Romantic
Me”) Todd L. Burns Why do you think the world of popular music, like pop musicians and other musicians outside of the classical world, have found so much to like in your work, as opposed to other composers? Philip Glass It was happening at the same time. We were living in the same place. Besides that, I was listening to that, thinking that reminded me... said, oh yeah, that was the days of Donna Summers and Blondie. That was all around us. That’s how we heard it. We were living in that world. The
difference was that I could actually write it down. Mostly I wrote it down and
then taught it to them, not Blondie and those, but with Polyrock I did, and
with some of the other people I did. Here’s another big part of it, I had
really come out of a world what we can say was global music. That was an
important part. I came from a place that was very geographically far away. And
culturally even further, in a certain way. At a certain point, and it was
about in this time in the ‘70s, I was aware we were really ahead of the curve
on this, because global music hadn’t even really happened yet. But I was
playing it. I ended up studying tabla with Alla Rakha, not because I wanted to
be a tabla player, I wanted to get a real feeling about how the rhythmic
structure of the music worked. And so I got very far into that music, and
working with Ravi also, really far into it. At a certain point, I had a kind
of a light bulb went off in my head in a big way, when I said to myself, “All
music is ethnic music.” Todd L. Burns What do you mean by that? Philip Glass We think of other music as being exotic, something that happens far away from
where we’ve lived. Ethnic music would be from Africa, or from India, or from
Australia. In fact, popular music is a form of ethnic music. It just depends
from which country you’re listening to it from. And I was traveling around
relentlessly. I always traveled a lot. And I was in India a lot, and I was in
Australia a lot. And I was starting to play in these places, too. Someone said
that all politics is local. Well, all music is local. And it just depends on
what your point of view is. And I began to approach popular music, the people
I work with, in the same way that I would work with someone that I had knew, a
didgeridoo player from Australia, or a tambura player from India. The
differences were not that great for me. Or Foday Suso from Africa. So that what became
interesting for me were that the nuances of world music all actually seemed...
that’s what I meant when I said all music is ethnic music. That includes Brian
Eno and David Bowie and... Todd L. Burns Two guys who are also extremely interested in world music. Philip Glass They were interested in the same things that I was. But not only that, but someone like Richard James, that would be of Aphex Twin. He didn’t have that kind of education but he had those kinds of instincts. I was very interested in what Richard James [was doing]. We did some things together, I think it was in the ‘80s, maybe we may have done three or four tracks together, that’s all
we did. But he would come over to [my house]. Do you all know who he is? He
would come over, he was about 22 or 23, very young guy. I was easily twice his
age, if not older. And we started doing a record together. What was
interesting about him, he had no formal training, but then again, a lot of
people don’t have formal training who come into music from a cultural
tradition, which doesn’t have a notated tradition of music. They have a
tradition of performance music. And Richard was kind of like one of those
guys. And I asked him what instruments did he play? He said, well, he didn’t
really play anything. I asked him where his ideas came from. He said, “Well, I
just go to junk stores and buy whatever electronic junk there was and I would
see what made sounds and I made music out of it.” That was his explanation. I
thought it was a pretty good explanation, when I listened to his music it
sounded like that. So one time with him, what I did, he gave me one of his
tracks. In those days there would be 16 tracks, maybe 24, but 16 would have
been a very normal amount then. And basically, I listened to a track and I
would replace that track with another track, which was based on the track that
he had done. And by the time I got done with it, I had replaced all the
tracks. So that it sounded both like him and like me. It was a very
interesting experiment. We did a couple experiments like that. So with someone
like Richard, he was willing to do anything. We didn’t have any rules about
what we were doing. We had a studio. At that point, I was down in SoHo, at a
place called the Big Apple Studio. It was in the basement at 120 Greene
Street. I still remember the address. And we had a studio there and when we weren’t there, there was some kind of dance band guy writing music for... there was some other thing going on. It didn’t sound that different from what
we were doing anyway, but we did a lot of work there. Michael Riesman, who was my
music director, he actually ran that studio for a while. He was a part-owner
of that studio and he finally gave it up. But we were working side-by-side,
and with the same technology. Todd L. Burns What struck you about Richard’s music? I mean, what did you hear in it that
was interesting to you? Philip Glass What I liked about it was that I liked it and I didn’t understand it. I’m
always attracted to things that I can’t understand. It’s a fundamental aspect
of curiosity. When I don’t understand something, I get curious about it. And I
liked his music, and I didn’t know what I liked about it. I wanted to hear
more of it. And I wanted to fool around with it. You know who else is very
much like that? David Byrne was like that. We did some things together, too. I remember
once, I was writing some songs and I asked David if he would write some lyrics
for me, because I couldn’t write lyrics but David could write lyrics. He was
very good at that. And so he came to my house and he had a couple notebooks
full of sentences, here and there. He said, “Well, here, what do you think of that?” And I said, “Well,” I said, “Let me take that sentence, and that sentence,” and I went through it and I made a song out of it. I said, “What do you think of that?” He said, “That’s what I thought you would do.” [laughs] Now, I had no idea what he thought, but, uh... Todd L. Burns Should we listen to maybe one of those songs? Philip Glass The ones I did with David? Yeah. Todd L. Burns Is it on [Songs From] Liquid Days? Philip Glass Boy, you really did your homework, didn’t you? Todd L. Burns You know... Philip Glass I just met this guy about 15 minutes ago, so I don’t know. We didn’t discuss
this conversation at all. Todd L. Burns Well, I’m not prepared as... Philip Glass Either that or you’ve got a big iTunes catalogue there. Todd L. Burns Yeah, too big, at the moment, unfortunately. Which songs did David write on that one? Philip Glass By the way, David has a show right at the Public Theater now, which is really
great. I saw it the other night. Todd L. Burns Is “Open The Kingdom” one of his? Philip Glass “Open The Kingdom” was done with David, yeah. Those are his lyrics. And it was
my music. (music: Philip Glass – “Open the Kingdom (Liquid Days, Part Two)”) Todd L. Burns So, David Byrne comes to you with these lyrics... Philip Glass No, I went to him. Todd L. Burns OK. Philip Glass ’Cause I knew he could write words, and I couldn’t. I asked him if he would
write some songs. Todd L. Burns Sorry, my question is, what was it about those specific lines that really
spoke to you? Philip Glass They’re mysterious, and they seemed meaningful but I didn’t know what they
meant. I knew they meant something, and they meant something to other people.
The funny thing, that particular piece, we actually ended up having to print it, and a lot of churches use it. It sounded like church music. I don’t know
what they thought it was. Todd L. Burns That was supposed to be your pop music album, though, in a way. Philip Glass It was supposed to be. I missed by a couple leagues, a few hundred leagues. I missed a little bit, but I wanted to write a record of songs, but I didn’t know where to get the words from, so I asked my friends who were songwriters if they would give me the words and I would write the music, and most of them
did. Todd L. Burns Laurie Anderson, Suzanne Vega... Philip Glass Laurie did it, Suzanne Vega did it. Paul Simon gave me a set of lyrics and
then he took them back, they became part of
Graceland. He took
‘em away from me. After I’d written the song and then he gave me some other
ones. It was okay. What were we going to do? But I think David’s were always
very... I liked Suzanne’s, too. I liked them all. What I understood was that
if I wanted to find lyrics to write songs with, the best lyricists would be
songwriters. So I didn’t go to poets. Most people would find poetry they
liked. I said, “No, no, that isn’t what I want.” Because poetry isn’t necessarily sung. It’s spoken. It can be spoken out loud. But it won’t conform to the passion and the rise and the fall of a musical line the way a songwriter will do it. So I asked the songwriters I knew, if they would, and
they all said yes. And then the funny part of the story - this was in, oh, I don’t know, the 1980s, I guess - and I went down to Folk City and Suzanne Vega was doing a show there. She hadn’t made her first record yet. So, I wanted to
find someone who was completely unknown, because I’d become very self-conscious about, everybody that records is very well-known, so I wanted to find someone who was unknown. So I asked Suzanne if she would give me some lyrics, and she did. And then her record came out before mine and she became much more famous than anybody else at that moment. And I called her up and I
said, “Suzanne, you really let me down. I really wanted an unknown writer and
now you’ve become very famous, and now you’re just like everybody else on the
record.” Which actually turned out to be the case, in that case. My instincts
were right about that. Later, the other two – I did three or four records of
songs – the other person who was very good to work with was Leonard Cohen.
Leonard was a real poet who could more or less sing. I say “more or less
sing.” I mean, he is a fantastic singer, actually. But in terms of, he came
into the world of pop music as a writer. And we did a record together called
The Book Of Longing,
which is his poetry, which he had actually... half of those songs he had set
to music on his own. And I asked him if he’d mind if I made new settings. He
said he didn’t care at all. Todd L. Burns How do you write differently when you write for voice? Like the vocals on this, I imagine, was a little bit of a different process for you. Philip Glass I got involved with writing for voice very early in the ‘70s. And the first
thing I did was when I wrote an opera. Like
Satyagraha, for example. And I didn’t know that much about singing at the time, so after we were begun rehearsing, I asked every one after, I asked the singers, how
the voice parts, how they liked them, what they thought about them. The thing
about singers, if you ask someone a question like that, they will definitely
tell you. You know, and they’d have no problem criticising, and saying, “You
have to understand that where the passaggio, where my voice has a place that
it has to pass through, and you can’t hang out there, and if you keep me up
too high, I’m not gonna be able to sing.” You know? They took me through the
whole routine of what good vocal writing is, which is that if you write well
for the voice... it took me 20 years of writing a lot of music, to learn how
to... so that a singer can sing for a whole evening without getting tired. If
you exercise the voice in a certain way, it’s just like anything. It’s like if
you do exercises. If you do push-ups all the time, in about 20 minutes, you’re
dead. But if you do different kinds of things, you can keep moving for a long
time. If you exercise the body in a different way, the voice is exactly the
same. If you stay up at the top all the time, there will be nothing left for
you. I also figured out that, also that when you’re writing an opera, for
example, the big arias come before the last act, not at the end. Because they
don’t have the juice left. So the big finales should come before the end. And
then the end is something different. But I learned a lot of that by doing it
and by working with singers. I didn’t really know much about singing when I
began. I sang in choirs and so forth. You had to do that at music school. And
I learned a lot about writing for chorus. Now, that’s a different matter. It’s
a completely different thing. By the time I finished music school, I knew how
choruses work and I could do that. So Satyagraha was my first big opera
after [Einstein [On The Beach]. Has a lot of choral music, which is very well-
written because I knew how to do that. I got away with a lot of things in
that, partly because of the naturalness of the music that I was running at
that time, conformed fairly easily with how the voice can work. But writing
for the voice is a real métier, it’s a real training that you have to do. Todd L. Burns You mentioned operas. I wanted to just play a brief clip from a documentary. Philip Glass What’d you dig up? (video: excerpt from Einstein On The Beach) Todd L. Burns So, when you premiered this opera, you lost an enormous amount of money. [laughs] Philip Glass Well, operas always lose money. The thing that... [Robert] Wilson and I didn’t know that. It was our first opera. We were
selling out houses all the time. At the end of the run, we had lost all our
money. But we didn’t realize we were losing money. We thought we were doing
pretty well. But that’s why opera companies are always raising money; it’s a very expensive thing to work on. It’s very labor-intensive, you need a lot of people, you need a lot of time to prepare. You can’t make the money at the box office. Todd L. Burns When you were putting it together, did you feel like you were doing something like that pretty amazing narration said it was doing? Philip Glass I don’t think we thought of it that way at all. At that point, in ‘76, I had
been in New York already for, well, not that long. I had gone to school in New
York, but I had been working as a professional composer for maybe 10 or 12
years by then. So it wasn’t the first thing. And then I had been writing
theater music since I was 20. So, I was 39 then, so I’d been writing theater
music for 20 years. And Bob had also been working in theater for a long time.
We got together and we understood that we both had the ability to work in very
long segments of time, very long time periods. People called it “extended
time.” But it didn’t seem extended to us; it just seemed like time. You know
what I mean? [laughs] We didn’t think it was particularly long. So, we set
out to write a piece that was four hours long and we missed by an hour; it
ended up being five hours long, but we just kind of got carried away a little
bit. But I don’t think that we thought that we were inventing anything. I had
been writing music for theater for a long time, Bob had been writing plays,
with music and without music, for a long time. What happened was that we came
together in this piece. You saw the main dancer there was Lucinda Childs, she
ended up doing a lot of choreography. So the three of us together made a piece... we had no particular plan. We had a rehearsal period that lasted for
about maybe 12 or 14 weeks, we were rehearsing on Spring Street, we had a
company together. They came every day. We spent a three-hour period in the
morning. I was teaching the music, to sing and there was another three-hour period for the dance. The singers were also dancers. And the last three-hour period was a staging rehearsal. So we did a morning, an afternoon, and an evening rehearsal. We did that for maybe 12, 14 weeks. We had begun with a book of drawings that Bob had made, and I had written the music to the
drawings, and then we staged everything to the music and the drawings. I have
no idea what we thought, we were just busy. Todd L. Burns You were just busy? Philip Glass We were just busy. We weren’t thinking what we were doing. Todd L. Burns An opera, though, seems like a statement, a major undertaking. And a move that you hadn’t done before. Philip Glass Well, Bob liked to call it opera, ‘cause he always said, “Well, ‘opera,’ for the Italians, means ‘a work.’” He didn’t really mean an opera in the same [sense], however, we would get into these conversations, with groups like this, and this is ‘76, and we’d do this piece and we’d have a meeting the next day with whoever wanted to talk, which was usually a lot of people, and they
would say, “But is it an opera?” And Bob and I always said, “Of course, it’s an opera!” We never thought it was at all, but it was a very provocative question. And I came to the conclusion, the following, said, “Look: to do Einstein On The Beach, you need a proscenium stage. You need an orchestra
pit, for the people playing. You need fly space, so the drops can come up and down. You need wing space so things can go off the sides. You need a lighting bridge, so that you can light it.” Todd L. Burns If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck. Philip Glass Exactly. I said, “You can call it whatever you want to, but the only place we
can do this is in an opera house.” So I came up with a very easy definition of
an opera. An opera’s what you do in opera houses. And that is a pretty good
definition, I think. Meanwhile, I’ve done maybe 28 or 30 of these theater
pieces. How many of them are operas? Well, the ones that get done in opera
houses are operas. And the others are different things. Maybe music theater
pieces, or experimental pieces, or a piece called 1000 Airplanes On The Roof, which was about eight UFO abductions. [laughs] Actually, talking about being taken away into a spaceship. That was a good piece. But we didn’t call that an opera, we called it a... it was a... Todd L. Burns Well, where was it held? Philip Glass We did that in an airport, actually. We did that in airports. I don’t know why. Because at that time, I think Eno had done a piece called Music For Airports, and I was jealous of him. He’d gotten into the airports before me. So we did this in an airport, too. But actually we’re old friends, and I think he knew that I was kind of quietly making a joke of his [album]. At the same time, my record company put out a new recording of... I like that piece of his
a lot, we re-recorded it and put it out on my own label, so I wasn’t mad at
him at all. And he didn’t seem to be mad at me. But airports was a good place
to do it. Todd L. Burns As I mentioned, you lost some money on this opera – we’ll just call it an opera
for now. You weren’t doing music, still, full-time as your main source of
income at this point, and I wanna just ask you, it took a long time before
you... Philip Glass Well, I didn’t think it was that long. I had a day job until I was 41. I thought that was not very long. That meant I had begun working kind of in school and in my teens, so 20, 25 years. I was ready to hold out for a lifetime. I never expected to make a living at music, to be truthful. Todd L. Burns Why? Philip Glass Well, when we started out, people were throwing things at me. I mean, you
know? [laughter] And they weren’t throwing money. They were throwing eggs and tomatoes. And people were really angry. It didn’t look like there was going to be an overnight success anytime soon. And there wasn’t. I was 41 when, at a certain point, I realized I could make more money out playing music than moving
furniture, or plumbing. Todd L. Burns What jobs did you hold? Philip Glass I did everything. I did everything that everyone does. I mean, in this city... I
didn’t wait on tables. I didn’t like that. I didn’t like that kind of work. In this city, it used to be that you drove cabs and worked in restaurants, you could always find dancers and singers and actors doing this kind of work. Todd L. Burns You were once doing a moving company with Steve Reich. Philip Glass No, no, no, no. I worked with my cousin, Jene Highstein, who was a sculptor.
Steve didn’t do that, didn’t like that kind of work. But we had a company called - now, here’s an interesting thing about - you only have to work about eight days a month. The last four days and the first four days of the month. The rest of the time you don’t have to work. But you have to work very hard
for those eight days. But the trick – this is for anyone who needs a day job
like this – the trick is the name of the company. Because the people who call
you have never met you. They just go by the name. In those days, you would put
an ad in the Village Voice, and we found the perfect name. And here we are in
Chelsea. We called it “Chelsea Light Moving.” There was more work than we
could do with that name. So we would go to the U-Haul and rent a van for
three days, four days. And we’d move furniture. And you’d start in the morning
and move as much as you can all day. And we always had more jobs than we could
do in a day. That’s why, by the way, you’re always waiting around for your
moving man to come. Because they’re doing what we did. You just fill up the
truck as many times as you can. We did all kinds of things then. When I was 41, I realized that I could make more money playing music and writing music
than doing a day job, and that was the end of that. Todd L. Burns One of the things that may have... Philip Glass I didn’t go into teaching, and that was an important decision for me, because
I was already a performer and I wanted to be out playing, and I didn’t see how
I could have an active performance life and have a teaching job. I didn’t see
how that could work, and so I didn’t do it. Todd L. Burns One of the things that was quite different from you and other composers around
that time was that you didn’t allow others to perform your music. Philip Glass Well, I didn’t, at that time. It’s become less strict about that. The idea
was, if somebody wanted to hear the music, they had to hire me to play it.
Basically, I wanted to be the only one that owned the music. That’s actually
how I began to make a living. Because if anyone wanted to hear my music played
live, they had to hire me to play it. So I got paid not for writing the music
but for playing it. Todd L. Burns Why did you make that decision? I mean, did you have it in mind that that
was... Philip Glass Because I wanted to get out of moving furniture. I was looking forward to the
time when I wouldn’t have to move furniture. And it eventually came. I was in
my forties when it came, but it did come. Todd L. Burns Why was it the other way? Why were classical composers open to allowing you to
play their music all the time? Philip Glass I didn’t play their music. I played my music. Todd L. Burns I’m saying, why did other composers do it the other way? What was the rationale behind that? Philip Glass ’Cause I think they were just dumb. [laughter] I explained to them what they should be doing. For example, I also started my
own publishing company, which none of them did. They all sold their music to
other people. I never did that. The younger ones began to do what I did, and
now it’s more common for young people. It’s always been true in popular music,
for the composers to keep the publishing. The publishing is where the money
is. That means that’s how you get paid. That’s no longer so true. Plus, the
radio play and what we call ancillary synchronisation rights, when people put
it with movies, or even if they do a fashion show and they have runway music
and they use your music, they have to pay for it. But if you own the music, then you get the money. If you don’t own the music, somebody else gets the
money. Todd L. Burns You just mentioned movies, and I think that’s a nice segue to playing a thing
from a soundtrack that you did, and we’ll talk a little bit about some of the
music that you’ve done over the years. (music: Philip Glass - excerpt from Koyaanisqatsi) So in the same way that I asked you earlier about writing for voices, writing for film, what were the challenges for you in the first ones that you were doing? Philip Glass Writing film music and writing opera music or theater music isn’t that different. Basically, you’re matching image to music, movement to music, text to music. The elements of image, [movement], text and music are the four elements. It’s the earth, air, fire, water. That’s all there really is, in the theater. Film is closest to opera, of all of them. Because all four elements are there. The text is there, the image is there, the movement is there, and
the music is there. So you get everything. You don’t get everything with plays, you don’t get everything with dance. You get everything with operas, and you get everything with film. The biggest challenge in working with film is it’s a collaborative art form, but it doesn’t work collaboratively. I was just in an opera in Austria with a choreographer, a designer, a writer, and music elements. And we were able to work very closely together, without
telling each other what to do. We had a director, who, actually was very good.
He helped make everything work together. Film, unfortunately, doesn’t work
that way. Usually it works from the top down. It’s usually the studio, then
the producer, then the director, then all the way at the end, then the actors,
and at the bottom, the very bottom is the writer, actually. The composer’s a
little bit above the writer, but not much. And this is the curious thing is
because, well, what is the most essential thing you would think about a film
might be, it might be the story? It might be the music? But it’s not treated
that way. So that the difficult thing with wording film music is that, first
of all, there are very talented people working in the film business, so I like
it. I like working in film. But the difficulty is finding producers who...
basically, they’re looking at the marketplace as the ultimate test of what
they’re looking for. And that isn’t usually the way we work. Todd L. Burns Koyaanisqatsi couldn’t have been if they were looking at the marketplace. Philip Glass Well, Godfrey Reggio wasn’t making Hollywood movies, either. We were in LA
when we did it, but Godfrey actually is from Louisiana, he works out of Santa
Fe. And his films, Koyaanisqatsi,
Powaqqatsi,Naqoyqatsi, and now a new movie, Visitors, which is gonna open in Toronto. He’s only made a movie once every 10 years. It takes him 10 years to get the money to make a movie. They’re not really documentaries, they’re images and music, and
there’s no text. There are no actors, except the millions of people that you
see in them. I don’t know if everybody here knows him or not, but we will
be... let’s see where are we playing it next? Well, we’re playing it next in
San Francisco, next week, but these movies of Godfrey, we play live with the
film. And we do eight or 10 concerts a year with just these kinds of movies.
They’re very good with live music, but they’re not what we call industry
films. At all. The industry films, they can be very interesting to work with,
and some can be very good. I thought that The Hours was really good, I thought
Mishima was really good. I’ve done some industry films which I thought were... the movie I did with Scorsese, Kundun,
about the Dalai Lama. These are really, these are really classic films for me.
Although I still had administrative problems with working at... I never won an
argument with Scorsese ever, about anything. Todd L. Burns I can imagine with certain directors, they have such a distinct aesthetic that
you’re never gonna win an argument. Philip Glass Well, the best ones, actually, were the ones that left me alone the most. Woody Allen left me alone almost completely to do a score for him. But then when they decided something, then you couldn’t argue with them. I mean, I was working with Woody Allen on a movie. We only worked on one movie. And he said, “Oh, just put the music in wherever you want.” ‘Cause I said, “Where do we put
the music?” He said, “Oh, you put it in.” And then we came to one place, when
he was listening to something, he said, “No, there’s no music there.” And I
said, “Woody, I’ll just write a different piece.” I thought he didn’t like the
piece. He said, “Oh, no, no, no. It’s not that. I don’t want any music there.”
And I said, “No, let me try something else.” He said, “No. I don’t want any
[music].” In the end, the director always wins. In the opera house, the composer always wins, by the way. In the dance house, the choreographer wins. In the theater wins, the director wins. I mean, I know all about this. The dynamic, the way the lines of authority are different in each of these fields. I write music in all of those, and I have a different relationship to each of
those mediums because of that. On the other hand, I would say that I like writing film music as much as I like anything. Todd L. Burns Is there a medium you prefer most? Philip Glass The one I like, really, is opera. Because it’s the live-performance medium,
and that makes it preferable to me. It involves dance, it involves orchestras,
it involves singing, it involves choruses. Todd L. Burns You also get the last word, as you said earlier. Philip Glass I get what? Todd L. Burns You, specifically, get the last word in that instance. Philip Glass Well, I do. The opera house is the composer’s house. Actually, when someone
commissions an opera, the head of the opera company and I, together, decide
who the director will be. He can’t decide by himself. Now, once we have the
director, he will decide on the designer, but he has to show us who the
designer is. After that, the designer just picks the lighting guy, and I have
no say in that. After that, then the costumer designer is picked by sometimes
the choreographer, but the first line of decisions in operas are made by the
composer. Todd L. Burns Over the years you’ve worked with so many different people. You’re very
collaboration-happy. Are there any ones that slipped away that didn’t come to
pass that you regret? Philip Glass That we didn’t get to do? There are people who died before we got to do more
work. I mean, I did two operas with Doris Lessing. She’s just simply not
working right now. And there’s the third opera I wanna do; I don’t know if
I’ll be able to do it. Now I’m gonna have to deal with her family, which is
different. Ornette Coleman and I always wanted to do a piece together; we’ve never done it. We’ve talked about it for 30 years. We’ve never done it. Todd L. Burns It’s funny, because he did the original soundtrack for that Ravi Shankar film. Philip Glass That’s right, he did. Todd L. Burns And it was rejected. Philip Glass Not by me. Todd L. Burns Not by you, but it was rejected and they brought in Ravi Shankar. Philip Glass The filmmaker – Conrad Rooks was the filmmaker. He wanted to replace us. I was
living in Paris. I had met him before. And he said he had this film, and
Ornette Coleman had written the music, he said, “I don’t wanna use the score.”
And he let me hear the score and I said, “You’re crazy. This is a fantastic
score.” He said, “No, no, I don’t wanna use it. I want to get Ravi Shankar to
write it.” And it was after that that I got hired, to work with Ravi. I think
that Ornette, he put that record out as a record. I think you can find [it].
It had a different name, he called it
Chappaqua, but it was his score. Todd L. Burns It’s on the Internet somewhere, I’m sure. Philip Glass Somewhere. But it was a beautiful score. And he and I got to know each other
around that time, and we were talking about doing a piece together. Todd L. Burns Both of your music is so wildly different. Philip Glass I know. [laughs] Todd L. Burns What kind of collaboration do you think that would be? Philip Glass And I said, “Ornette, our music is so wildly different. What are we gonna do?”
He said, “Oh,” he said, “Philip, there’s only one thing to do. You start
playing, and I’ll start playing, and that’s what we’re gonna do.” [laughs] He had it all figured out, but I didn’t have any idea how we were gonna do that. Todd L. Burns And you don’t do improvisation. Philip Glass Not really. I don’t know if we’re still thinking about it, but we talked about
it from time to time. He has various groups together, and what I would do is I
would start, as I did when I worked with Ravi Shankar, either he would start
or I would start, it didn’t matter who started. And with Foday it was the same
thing, he was a kora player from Africa. If he started, then I would add to
it. Or if I started, he would add to it. It almost didn’t matter who started.
Because what you ended up with was a kind of a dialogue, a musical dialogue.
He did something, then I’d do something. They can become very, very close. It
depended on how close you were to the person’s work. The reason of interest to me
about Ornette was I liked his music a lot but I had no idea what it would be
like to work with him. So, since I had no idea what to do, I thought there was
a chance we could do something interesting. Todd L. Burns I think that’s sort of been the defining, “I don’t know what that would be
like. I want to do it.” Philip Glass That’s right. Basically, that’s right. I like what I don’t know. And I don’t
know what I like. It’s just the opposite of “I know what I like.” I don’t know
what I like. It’s a more interesting way of going. I’ve had a lot of
collaborations that are unexpected because I waded way into deep water before I knew, and I just knew that the water would be deep; I didn’t know what we would do when we got there. Working with Richard James of Aphex Twin, we had no idea what to do. And I think the things we did together were very solid, in a way. When you work that way, there’s a kind of openness in the collaborative
process, and what’s most important is we didn’t approach it in a judgmental
way. You don’t say, “I don’t like that.” With Wilson and I, we never talked
about each other’s work. We just did pieces together. Almost never did he say
anything about the music, and I almost never said anything about what he did. Todd L. Burns I find it interesting, though, that your way of working seems to be quite different from a lot of your collaborators. I wonder if there wasn’t this natural sort of, like, “Oh well, there is kind of a hierarchy. He has all of this training and technique.” Philip Glass Yeah, that’s how I always think about it. I think, “Oh, he has all this training and technique, and I have so little.” That’s how I always look at it. But they look at it the same way, they make me to be the one that knows what he’s doing, and they think they don’t. So these are personal disfigurations of reality, we can say. But we talk a lot about collaboration. I think, today,
the work today is very collaborative I see that’s being done all around me. We
came out of groups like the Living Theater, who were the generation before us,
who were just making up pieces as they went along. They didn’t even know what
the subject was sometimes. It would come up later. They did a wonderful piece
called Frankenstein. I don’t think they even knew what it was until they
finished it. But one of the things, the most important element of collaboration is a true respect for the other person. Like, if it’s a dancer or a writer. I just did this piece with a writer who I didn’t know him at all.
It was in German and I had some high school German. I knew enough of it I
could work with him. His name was Peter Handke. We just did a piece which he
called - in German it was called Evidence Of Those That Have Disappeared. So
I was writing this music. That was it in German, it was Die Spuren... and it
goes along in German. And I took my music paper and on the top of it I wrote
“The Lost.” And he said, “Oh!” And I said to the people I was working with,
“Look, don’t tell Peter I changed the title.” Of course, they called him up
immediately and told him. And he said he liked the title. And I took the text,
what I liked about it is it was very abstract and very intimate at the same
time. It could be erotic and it could be distant at the same time. It could be
scary and kind of soothing at the same time. He was able to bring polarities
into the work that was completely interesting. So I began to write music for
these opposites. And later he was giving a press conference – and I didn’t
meet him until the first night, until the dress rehearsal, we never talked
about it – and he gave a press conference, and he said that he thought my
music had respected the words. And actually it was true. It’s not that I was
faithful to the words; I was bound to them, in a way. I had to make them work
somehow. And what I did was I just made them work in different ways. Todd L. Burns Obviously, you’ve had a very, very long career. What do you still have yet to
do? Philip Glass I have to finish a string quartet right now. It’s sitting on my piano. Which
I’m spending an hour with you. This is fine. I have an opera to do right after
that, which is The Trial by Kafka,
which is a very interesting piece. That’ll be for an opera company in Wales.
Do you know The Trial? Have you ever read The Trial by Kafka? You know
what The Trial is? And he didn’t want this piece published. And people
thought he didn’t want it published because it wasn’t finished, but I don’t
believe that’s true. I think he didn’t want it published because it was too
true. I’m sure The Trial was him, and The Trial was his whole life. I’m
sure of it. And when I’m staging it now, I’m not staging it, but the way I
work, I’m working with a writer, Christopher Hampton, and he wants me to do
the outline, which I will now do the outline, and what I’m gonna try to do is
do it in such a way so that the audience become not the spectators of the
opera but the spectators of the trial. If I can make that work, that would be
fantastic. And I think that’s why he freaked out. Before he died, he told his
friend, Max Brod, to burn this piece. And Brod didn’t do it; he published it.
He said, “Oh, he didn’t really mean it. He knew that I would publish it. So
when he said ‘burn it,’ he just gave me permission.” That’s what he said. But
I think he didn’t want it published because it revealed too much about himself. It’s a very interesting piece. So there’s that piece to do. Then there’s a new... I got a lot of things to do. [laughs] Todd L. Burns No, no, the point being that you still are working very, very hard all the time and it doesn’t stop, and that’s kind of amazing. There’s no sign of... Philip Glass Of mental decay yet? Well, I don’t know. I wonder. [laughter] Todd L. Burns I was not going there. Philip Glass I thought I was having mental decay in my twenties. I can have it in my seventies, there’s gonna be probably more extravagant. Well, you know, we worry about things like that, but I don’t worry about it that much. Todd L. Burns But you’ll never retire. Philip Glass No, I’m not planning on an early retirement. I’ve missed all the chances for
retirement, I might as well keep going. But what’s interesting now is that, I
think the work that’s being done today is among the most interesting work I’ve
seen in decades. Todd L. Burns In what, specifically, are you thinking about? Philip Glass I’m talking about the work being made by people in their twenties and thirties, which is bringing technology into an artistic collaborative form, which is inventive, and unexpected, and completely interesting. I’m very interested in what’s going on, and I get invited to do concerts with some of
them, and I get to hear a lot of this stuff. It’s a very interesting time, because it’s not commercial music, and yet no one’s afraid of commercial music. A lot of people write commercial music, because they make a living on it. It’s not intimidating to do it; they just do it. ‘Cause it’s just a way to make some money, but it doesn’t affect the art music. There are a lot of
people doing both things. And even people coming out of the world of very
successful popular music are doing very experimental work. So those kinds of
dichotomies are totally disappearing and I’m very interested in this. In one
way, when we look at the technology of music and the technology that’s
happening in the art world and the world of performance, it looks like there’s
a lot of careerism involved and a lot of success-oriented stuff. But at the
same time, there’s a lot of things that have nothing to do with that. There are people who are looking at things in a very fresh way. There’s another thing, too: the more repressive, politically, the society is going through, the more interesting the art is. I’ve lived long enough to see this happen. The ‘50s was a terrible time. That was the McCarthy years. It was also the
most creative time. That was the years of the beatniks and the early rock &
roll stuff, and even Stockhausen you can say, and that crazy stuff that was happening
in Europe. The ‘50s was, socially, a repressive time, and artistically the
most inventive time. And I think we’re in almost an identical period right
now. None of you are old enough to know that, but I am. And let me tell you,
it was just as bad in the ‘50s as it seems right now. And what I’m seeing is
an energy coming into the art world which I haven’t seen in 30, 40 years. It’s
actually terrific. Todd L. Burns Why don’t we open it up to a couple questions from the audience? Philip Glass Sure. Audience Member Thank you so much for being here. There’s about a dozen things that I’d like
to ask you, but actually a few days ago, I asked Giorgio Moroder a question, which I think is absolutely perfect for you. Except I’d like to give you a little bit of context. This year, I was asked to compose the music for a play and perform it as a one-woman orchestra, integrating technology. It’s the play Everyman, by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, at the Salzburg Festival in
Austria. The question is: So, if you were sucked into a portal, and you popped
out of that portal and you saw a 26-year-old version of yourself, what insights would you give yourself that would help you along your exploration in music? Philip Glass Well, you know, I was very fortunate, because when I was 26, I never expected
to make a living at what I did, and I actually didn’t care. And that was very
good. I was living that advice then. I had day jobs, I was ready to hold out
forever. I was talking to my son recently. This is maybe a good answer. He’s
in his forties. He writes songs, and he writes records. And he said, “How am I
doing, Dad?” And I said, “Well, you got two records and maybe if you work at
it, maybe you can make 12 records in your lifetime.” He said, “Yeah.” I said,
“That’s about 150 songs. And that’s gonna be your legacy. That’s what you’re gonna have. That’ll be it. Forget about the money, but that’s what you’ll have.” I said, “What do you think of that?” He said, “That sound great!” I
said, “You’re doing fine.” [laughs] And the thing is that that’s what I was
looking for, was for him to feel that what he was doing was authenticating
himself. It didn’t matter what it was. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters,
expect that the activity nourishes you, and inspires you, and gets you up in
the morning. What gets you up in the morning, you set the clock for 7, you
wake up at 5:30. That’s a good sign. If you don’t stay up too late, I can’t
help you with that. Todd L. Burns Anyone else? Audience Member Hi Mr. Glass. I’m a big fan of your music, and I really enjoyed the lecture.
Thanks very much. I was just wondering, I found your music is very emotionally
dense. Specifically one song stands out, it’s the opening to Glassworks. And I can’t imagine what it was like writing that and I’d really be interested to know, and perhaps you could talk a little bit about
that piece. Philip Glass Well, you’re raising an interesting question. Certainly, the act of writing
and the act of being the spectator, they’re very different. When Bob and I
were doing Einstein, we would go around and have talks with people, and people said, “What does it mean?” and we’d say, “What do you think it means?” and whatever they thought it meant, we would say, “Yeah, that’s it.” And that was actually accurate. When you say that it’s emotionally dense, I’m thinking, “Oh! This guy experiences the world in an emotionally dense way.” I’m thinking you! I don’t know you at all! But if you can hear Glassworks and hear it as
emotionally dense, that tells me more about you than about me. The music and
the artwork is an occasion for us to be moved by something. But the way we’re
moved has to do with ourselves. John Cage, that was his big thing, that the
audience completed the work. You know, he used to say that. You know all about
him, right? He’s been dead a long time, but he wrote some interesting things.
And his idea was, is that the piece doesn’t exist by itself. There is no piece
called Einstein On The Beach. There’s nothing like that. It doesn’t have an
independent existence. It only exists in relationship to other people. When we
say that art doesn’t have an independent existence any more than we do. So
when we talk about how we’re experiencing it, we’re talking about the actual
activity of music-making and experiencing music-making. John did very extreme
things. You know about his Four Minutes And Thirty-Three Seconds of Silence, you know? You all know. But that’s what that is. You just stop and listen; that’s all he wanted you to do. I mean, John was always an extremist. And it wasn’t just his idea alone. We’re not talking about meaning; we’re talking about what’s meaningful. We don’t have to describe what’s meaningful; we just have to say that it has a dimension of meaning to it. On the other hand, what we, as the makers of this – you’re all makers of some kind, whether you’re music-makers or movement-makers or image-makers, you’re all doing that; I guess that’s why you’re here
– it doesn’t mean that we don’t work at what we do. Beckett worked very hard
at his work, and it was very difficult to understand in one way, and yet in
another way, what we understand of it is the piece. Our understanding of the
piece is not different from the piece itself. There’s no way to separate, in
other words. So, I don’t know if this is the topic you meant to bring up or
I’m just dragging you into it. Anyway, but it’s a very worthwhile one to talk
about. Because when we use words like “postmodernism” or “modernism,” what it
really is is a real acknowledgment that our work doesn’t exist independently of the people that listen to it, or dance to it, or wear it, or buy it, for that matter. The first thing you said to me is, you said that Glassworks struck you as very emotionally dense. My immediate reaction was, “Oh! That’s this guy.” I wasn’t thinking about my music at all. You’re telling me about
you. And that’s important. It’s not unimportant. It’s not trivial. It’s
actually the most important part of the sentence. Audience Member Thank you. Todd L. Burns Any other questions? Audience Member You said you liked what you don’t know. I feel very related to that. I feel
like that all the time. But I was curious about, you said you don’t work
improvising. And so, when you write your music, how do you work with the
unknown? Philip Glass OK. This is another good question. I’m not gonna tell you the answer you want;
I’ll tell you a different answer, which is actually a better answer than the
one if I told you what you wanted to hear. I used to work for a sculptor. I did that for about three years. A very well-known sculptor, Richard Serra. And
he needed a studio assistant, I’d known him a long time and I needed the money
so he hired me, I used to work for him. And one day I said to him, “Richard, I
wish I could draw. I can’t even draw a cat.” He said, “Oh, I can teach you to
draw.” I said, “You can? How would you do that?” He said, “I’ll teach you to
see, and when you can see you’ll be able to draw.” And that, I was completely
- overwhelmed by that remark. By the way, I never did learn to draw. And I immediately thought, “Oh, then painting is about seeing, right? Dancing is about moving, right? Poetry is about speaking, interestingly enough.” I went through all of this. I’ve gone through this. You can make your own
interpretation of this. It doesn’t matter. Music is about listening. And I am
absolutely sure of that. Now, I’ve applied that to not just composing, I have
to apply it to performing. When I’m playing, the quality of my listening will
determine the quality of my playing. So if I become absorbed in the activity
of listening while I’m playing, the music becomes alive. If I don’t do that,
it isn’t happening. That doesn’t mean it happens all through a concert. To be
truthful, if it happens a couple times during a concert, I’m doing pretty
good, because it means I’m close enough. You know what I mean? Are some of you
players and play music? You do? Sometimes you’re playing a piece and you’ve
played it 30, 50 times. And you get to a certain place in the piece and you
discover that you’re not playing it the way you played it before. You say,
“Oh! The pedal’s here. I didn’t know the pedal was there.” Now, I’m not
thinking it in words; these thoughts are instant. I think, “Oh! Then, what
happens next?” And then suddenly I’m playing the piece in a way I never played
it before. Because I was listening. Same thing with writing. That’s why, in a
way, it doesn’t matter where you start. It matters how you listen to where you
are. I used to have a cat who would walk on the piano. I can’t tell you how
many pieces I started because the cat walked on the piano. [laughter] Good enough. It didn’t matter. But then sometimes, occasionally, once in a while, I’ll sit down and I’ll play a whole piece at the piano. I mean, this happened in my
lifetime only a handful of times, and I consider that’s just a gift. If you
work long enough and long enough, long enough and hard enough, eventually,
those moments will come to you. You can’t count on them, but they’re wonderful
moments when they happen, because the piece is like someone just whispered in
your ear. It’s a gift. It’s the gift that the muses of our arts will bestow on
us if we behave, and even if we don’t behave. Audience Member So you work with chance? Philip Glass Well, I wouldn’t say that. John Cage really did work with chance. He made
chance a methodology. I’m talking about where we start. I mean, I’ve known
painters to do the same thing. They’ll just put something on the canvas to start. Sometimes they’ll put something that they recognize and then they’ll just take it apart. And writers do the same things. Allen
Ginsberg, who I knew very well, he would take a poem and take a sentence, and he would test every word
in the sentence to see if it was really the right word. And he would go over
it and over it. He could write a poem in an hour, but he could spend three weeks finishing it. So the improvised part is a good way to jump into the deep end. After that, you have two or three things in your favor. One is your natural ability. We all have some of that. The other is your training, which is very helpful. And the third is a kind of a luck that just happens. It’s the luck of that day. I don’t know how else to describe it. So you’re not completely alone. You’re damn near alone, but not completely alone. That’s good enough. If you have a little bit of a talent, and a good deal of training, and you get lucky, you can have a good day. Todd L. Burns I think we have time for probably two more questions. Audience Member Hello. You interpreted two of Brian Eno and David Bowie’s most famous albums.
I wondered what the process was of you working with something so established
within the pop field? And then also whether you’d considered completing the
so-called Berlin Trilogy by doing the Lodger album as well? Philip Glass David and I are still talking about Lodger. It’s one of the unfinished
pieces. That’s supposed to be the third one. We just haven’t gotten around to
it. He’s always said it was a good idea, but I think I invent the problem. I
didn’t know how to do that one. I could still get around to it, but that would
be the Lodger symphony would be the third of those. My feeling was this,
that I began that because I was responding to the tradition that exists in the
music world of composers taking themes from other people and writing other
pieces with them. Stravinsky did it. Everyone does that, I mean, Strauss did
it. Every composer’s done that. Dvorak, everyone. You get someone else’s theme
and then you make a piece out of it. And what I liked about David and Brian’s
work was I thought they wrote beautiful melodies. And these were guys that
were painters, you know? They came out of the Royal College of Art. You knew
that, didn’t you? That’s where I met them, actually. I was playing at the
Royal College of Art in 1972. They don’t have a concert stage, so you have to
play in the lobby of the art school. That’s where you do concerts, in the art
school. And that’s where we did them. I was there in ‘72 or ‘73, and they were
there as students, I found that out later. They came to New York about two years later and I met them then. And it took a while before we actually got to know each other, but eventually, I suggested to David that I would like to take his trilogy, the Low, Heroes, and Lodger, and to do it as a trilogy of symphonies. They both thought that was a good idea. I did Low first, and then I did Heroes. And they said they liked Heroes better than Low because it was less like them. They thought it was
too close to them, with Low. And I think it’s the opposite. I think it was much closer to them in Heroes. In fact, someone later took the track I wrote that was a Heroes track and they were able to take his vocal line and put it
into the piece, and change the key of it. This was all kind of electronic
stuff, you know? And it actually worked. And I don’t know if David ever heard
that. What I liked was that my collaborators would be people who hadn’t been
to music school. When I said all music was ethnic, I really thought of these
guys. This is the quintessential ethnic musicians, David and Brian. To this
day, I don’t know how literate they are in music, whether they even read
music, I have no idea. I never asked them. You know, when people write music
like that, what can you ask them? And so anyway, that’s how I got involved
with that. And the Lodger piece is just not done yet. They haven’t kept me
at it, but they haven’t either encouraged or discouraged me. They’re like
that. You know, they’re just waiting to see what will happen. Todd L. Burns One last question. Anyone? Audience Member Hi. You talked before about the creative process and how you tend to get up
early and write maybe from 6 in the morning until 9 or 10 and how you make the
muse come to you. You know, a lot of artists and musicians work kind of
piecemeal and when it comes to them, it comes to them, but you’ve always
treated it very job-like, in that way. Is that still your working pattern, and
maybe you can discuss that? Philip Glass Well, I did that for a long time like that. I had times that I liked to work,
and I worked then, whether I was ready to or not. I just did it that way. And
what happened is after a while they became very productive work times, because
it’s the only time I had. Then lately, in the last five or six years, I find
that I’ll get up in the middle of the night and I’d do something I never would
do. I would go down in my studio and I would write music and say, “To hell
with that, I’m not gonna do that. I’m gonna sleep, and then I’ll get up in the
morning and I’ll write.” But sometimes I wake up and say, “Oh well, I’ll just
go down and see what this is all gonna sound like,” and I’ll end up spending
two or three hours there. So at this point in my life I’ve become much less
predictable about when I’m going to work. On the other hand, in certain ways,
it takes me more time to write music than it used to. Because the more music
I’ve written, the less I know about where to go with it. So it takes longer to
do it. I was writing a piece, I’m writing it right now, and I did a whole
couple pages of music, and I looked at it and I realized it didn’t sound good
at all. And I realized I had left out the sharps and the flats. I said, “Oh my
god, that’s stupid.” I went back and I re-wrote it, I put in the sharps and
the flats where they belonged, and it sounded fine. What the hell was I
thinking about? I have no idea. I still think like I’m what the Zen would call
a beginner’s mind. I still think I’m at the beginning, you know? I don’t know
what to do! I never know what I’m gonna do. I have no idea. Now, with the
Kafka piece, I already know something about it. I knew something about Kafka
from this book. And I don’t know what it sounds like yet, but I know,
theatrically, what it’s going to be. I don’t know what the music is yet. Todd L. Burns A lot to look forward to. Thank you so much, Mr. Philip Glass. Philip Glass You’re welcome. I’m happy to be here. [applause]