Philip Glass

Well, I don't really am looking back to them because I'm actively performing many of them. The operas are still being done.

The Akhnaten is being performed at the Los Angeles Opera next year and at the Met a few years later. I mean, you can look at the operas they're doing. At this point, I had only written maybe three operas, but there are another 24 since then, operas. And also, the other pieces are, if I remember correctly, most of the pieces are, it's not that old.

Of course.

So what I mean to say is that what's happened is that, interestingly, I didn't expect this to happen this way. I thought I would write pieces and just keep on going and then we would forget the old pieces and we'd only play the new pieces. That isn't what happened. What happened is that people became very attached to some of these pieces, like Koyaanisqatsi. Is that in here? Are the Qatsi movies here? They are. So those pieces are, I played in Holland twice last summer, Koyaanisqatsi, with huge audiences.

So what's happened is that the audiences continue to discover this music. So for them it's not old. You have to understand for someone who's 25 years old, they weren't even alive when we did this. But for them the music is new. So what I'm relating to it, I've had to learn to relate to it not as old music but as music that we still play. So this is a significant part of that library. It is a significant part of it. But there are 11 symphonies since then.

I mean, I don't mean to diminish the work. This is a tremendous amount of work. But there are 11 symphonies. There are 12 concertos. None of them are there.

There's a lot of music that isn't there.

But the point is that this music still is there. The interesting thing is that this repertoire is still tenaciously alive and is being discovered by young people who weren't even born when I did it. So I don't even think of it as old music. I can't because the audiences that embrace it are younger than the pieces. So this is a very, you know, the fact that this could happen, in a part I become aware of it because I'm out playing all the time.

I tend to play the new music, but what we're discovering is that people want to hear the old music. So now, I do retrospective concerts of the old music, and then I do the music, but the new music too. Now, some people, I know in the pop music world, people don't like their old songs. They only want to play the new songs. But we play the old songs all the time. [laughs] You know, I can do concerts of just music before 1990 easily. So this is, don't think of this as an archival thing.

Think of it as a living repertoire. It happens to be the earlier part of it. But it's not something from the past. It's very much in the present.

When you started with your music, No, no, no, no, no.

It was a struggle for survival. [laughs] It wasn't a rebellion! I was trying to make a living. [laughs] I wasn't rebelling against anybody. I was trying, except maybe the difficulties of being a creative artist in America is very difficult because we have, there's very little public money. It's not like in some European countries where there are arts councils that The arts councils in America don't give money to the artists. They give it to the institutions who are supposed to give it to the artists. But actually, if you give it to a museum, you're not giving money to the painters. If you give money to the Metropolitan Opera House, it's not going to the composers. So the actual people who are responsible for the creation of the repertoire are not supported. So what I did is I became a performer, which has turned out to be, it saved me from a lot of things.

The big problem is that I have to take airplanes all the time. That's the only problem I see in it, and that is actually a big problem.

You have a very near contact to the audience when you perform. You see the audience.

Yeah, well that's a very good point. You have to see music as a transaction. It's something that happens between people. It doesn't happen in a room by yourself. You can listen to this at home, that's true, but if you go to a concert like you're coming to tonight, there'll be 800 or 900 people. This summer we played Koyaanisqatsi for 6,000 people out in a big tent somewhere.

So the idea that music is a living language, that it's a transaction that happens between people, that's an extremely important part of this. This is not a question of being popular, it's a question of the actual nature of music itself. What we play music for, we play it for ourselves, but instinctively we play it for other people. When we finish a piece, we want our friends to hear it, first of all. At least your mother and father will hear it, or sister and brother will hear it. At the beginning, that's about what you get.

And then quite gradually, you find other people that want to play it, and other people come to hear it. But to be confined to a very narrow audience, it must be difficult. I think people like Webern, it was for him very difficult, because he didn't have a big audience. He had wonderful music, and there have been composers like that who became discovered later. Schubert never. He used to play his songs for his friends. You know, many of the symphonies were never played in his lifetime. That does happen, and not just to specialists and avant-garde people, but to very well-known composers today. So the point is that the audience plays a crucial role in the creation of work.

When you started, it was really hard, I think, because I know that you worked as a taxi driver writing music.

Oh, that's just only one of the jobs. I had many jobs. I was a furniture mover. We helped build apartments and houses, and we did plumbing. We did everything. And my fellow workers were painters and sculptors and musicians. We were able to work in very highly unionized professions because mostly we did it for other artists who couldn't afford professional plumbers or professional furniture movers. We would just rent a truck and spend the weekend moving furniture. You know, actually, it was a great way to do it, because this is, we call it freelance work, day work. We didn't have a regular job.

When I had enough music to do a tour, I would go on tour. And whatever work I had, I just didn't do it. I didn't book any work for three weeks. I would go out on the road. We would travel and play. We would come back, usually without any money. And I would go back to work again. The cycle of work was like that. But I wasn't a prisoner of an academic schedule, which would have meant that if I had done that, I could never have become a performer.

If I hadn't become a performer, I wouldn't have been able to have the conversation about the transaction of music, because I wouldn't have known that. Isn't that true? So if anything, I'd say this was a great liberation, this way of living. And it only lasted for 20 years. I mean, by the time I was 42, I was making a living. I mean, I thought, to be truthful, that that was very soon. I thought it would be much later than that.

You wrote so much, you know, incredibly much music. What is the motor, what is the energy [laughs] for you to write, always to go on?

I was trying to make a living, what are you talking about? [laughs] But of course, I had a lot of musical ideas, but I tried to come to Europe in those years with a new program every year. I had the idea that people wanted to hear something new, so every season I brought new music. So that meant I was constantly writing. That was originally for the ensemble, then as I began to work with dance companies and film companies and theater companies, then the requests didn't require my actual attendance. I was just writing music for them.

Now I'm mostly writing music. I just finished Symphony 11. I'm doing the third piano concerto now. And so there is a lot of music. You know, that's turned out to be a different kind of a problem. The problem with this amount of music is that keeping good editions, correct editions, is difficult because there's so many pages. And I have a music staff now, and all we do is check music pages.

And they have to be in charge of the copying and the preparation of the parts. But now we're going back to the early pieces and making sure that the scores are correct. So we have to get the original conductor's score and see what markings there are. I mean, if you think about it, where are you going to find out? The conductor will have made it in the pages, or if it's a film score, then it'll be in the music itself. So, it's an administrative problem right now.

Your first very big success was Einstein on the Beach, an opera. Is opera a good…

Well, Bob always liked that word because he pointed out to me that it meant work in Italian or something. I don't know if that's true or not. He said, well, that's what it means. But we never thought of it as something that belonged in an opera house. So, in fact, it used music. It had a small ensemble, my group. We needed singers, we needed a set, we needed a place for the paintings to go up and down and the things to go on and off. So the difficulty with Einstein was that the only place you could fit it into was an opera house. You had to have an opera house.

A symphony hall was not sufficient because it didn't have an orchestra pit. You needed a proscenium stage because Bob had designed it that way. So the reason it became an opera was because it was being played in opera houses. That was the only place we could do it. Even today, it's difficult to do it in any other way. You need an orchestra pit, you need lighting fixtures, you need to be able to remove the scenery to move things on and off.

You need singers, you need dancers. The original company was only 30 people, but this last tour we did it with 50 people, which meant that everyone had two jobs, which was right. So the singers had to dance and the dancers had to sing. And that became part of the problem of doing the piece, was finding enough people. But it wasn't that hard, because in New York, young people come to New York and they'd study dance. Many of them want to go on Broadway, so they have to sing and dance. So singing and dancing, many people have that training.

And we discovered that we could have auditions for people who could sing and dance, and quite a few people would come up. When the first auditions were for Einstein, we had 100 people showed up. And we picked the best ones. So you can find that. But in recent productions, you have more like a corps de ballet dancing ensemble than you have a singing ensemble, and you have a playing ensemble. But in the original one, everyone had to do everything.

In the beginning, they—

I think I'm giving you more information than you wanted. But at any rate.

They called your music minimal music, but you are against this.

No, it's not— I'm not against minimal music, because I wrote a lot of it. I'm against the description, because it only applies to music to a certain period. Now, for example, if you're a writer and I'm coming to— This wouldn't happen today, but if I were coming to Amsterdam in the 80s or 90s and you said, well, the minimalist composer is coming, but the minimalist composer isn't coming. The person who's coming is writing a different kind of music. Now, here's the problem. The audience comes and says, "Well, is that minimal music?" Then what does that mean? So the difficulty with the word is that it's confusing. It talks about a music that was written. In terms of the set, I would say a lot of it would be— Maybe half of it could be truly minimalist, but another half would not be.

The "Naqoyqatsi" certainly wouldn't be. It depends on the pieces you look at. The pieces that are being done today, all the eleven symphonies, none of them sound like that. So if you say, well, we're going to hear a symphony by the minimalist composer Philip Glass, and then you play symphony number 9 or number 5 or number 4, they say, "Well, what's that?" So basically, we have a confusion of information.

It's not that I dislike the word. I think the application— Now, it's not the fault of the writers to be truthful. It's the fault of the editors. They say to the editors, "OK, you have 500 words." And so what are you going to say? "Minimalist composer" is only two words. If you say that, you think you've discharged your— But actually, to go into this discussion would take 600 words already, and you haven't even talked about the music yet. So it's partly a question of how the publications arrange things for themselves.

And many of the writers will say, "Well, we know it isn't minimalism, but you see, my editor has given me this—" I come across it all the time. I said, "But you know that isn't true."They said,"Yes, we know that, but this is what we call it now." Now, the problem with you calling it that is that it creates a confusion for the audience. Now, that's not the job of the writer. The writer is to elucidate, is to clarify, not to confuse. So I think my objections are genuine.

In the 60s and 70s, there was the power—

See, now even all this that I told you, you will not be able to publish it. You'll have to take two or three sentences.

Yes.

So?

There was the power of the serial music, of the so-called avant-garde. What was your relationship to Stockhausen and the others?

You have to understand that I was living in Paris in the 60s, and Boulez had a series—had a series of concerts there, and we went to all the concerts. I heard the Stockhausen, I heard Nono, we heard everything. And it was wonderful music. We loved that music. The trouble was— It wasn't a problem, it's just that it wasn't the music we were writing. I mean, why would I want to write— Let's say, if I were a cabinetmaker, why would I want to make the cabinets that looked like the ones that my father made? Or not my father, my grandfather.

I mean, why would I want to sound like— If I was a poet, why would I want to sound like someone who was writing 100 years ago? Why would you do that? It wasn't that we didn't like the past, it's that we liked it too much. We liked it too much to, let's say, to do a weaker version of what they did. Why be a second-rate Stockhausen when you could be a first-rate La Monte Young or Steve Reich? I mean, what would you do? I mean, it's very clear.

In fact, when I look back on those concerts in Paris, I think the strongest work was Stockhausen. At the time, I didn't think so. At the time, I didn't like Stockhausen because he personally was so objectionable. He was a difficult person, and he said difficult things. Did you know him well? Not well. I didn't want to know him well. I met him with groups of people, and he was impossible.

And I confused the personality with the music. The music is wonderful. The personality was objectionable. So looking back on it now with the distance of the years and the time, there were some very good composers in those. The only Americans that were on one of those programs were people like John Cage. They accepted the extreme avant-garde of America. They didn't accept the Americans who wrote the music that they wrote, well, for obvious reasons.

And your music was the comeback of a forbidden thing, the melody. For the avant-garde, Stockhausen, there was no melody. Yeah, I know.

So obviously, you know, here's the thing: it's a very simple principle. If you look to see what are the taboos—the taboos are the things you're not supposed to do—look around and see— I didn't do it this way, but in reflection I thought, if I thought of what were the things I wasn't supposed to do, those were the very things I did do. And what that meant was it sounded fresh and no one had been writing it for years. The rules forbade it so that you weren't allowed to write melodies and harmonies and things of that kind.

And so if you began to do it, you were suddenly all by yourself. [laughs] It was wonderful. In some subconscious way, I think I was responding to the fact that that generation of composers—and it really comes from the music from the early 20th century, from the music of Webern and Schoenberg, it really comes from the Viennese school. And then it spread out, and then it became an institution, and then it became the future of music—all these things which are simply not true.

By themselves, the music was wonderful. When it became in the hands of musical historians, it became dangerous, because generations of composers were compelled to write music that they, frankly, many of them didn't even like it. I know that for a fact, because I knew the people. They wrote music that they— And then when I was beginning to write with "Einstein", you could actually hear it. [laughs] So, but what happened, because that particular school successfully dominated the music world for so long, they made it almost inevitable that it would be overturned. Now, for example, I began my first concert in New York in maybe 1970, '71. By 1976, I was at the Metropolitan Opera. That's six years for someone who didn't know anybody.

How could that happen? It happened because it needed to happen. Someone had to do that. If it wasn't me, it would have been someone else. And in fact, there were other people. There was Meredith Monk, there was Steve Reich, there were people whose names you don't even know. It was a much larger movement than people realize. It was a generation of people who rebelled against a music that was—where the principles of harmony and melody were dictated by people who were our grandfathers. I mean, why would you do that?

So when you look at it that way, it wasn't that we— It was more of an inevitable— When you think of the fact that something like within seven years, coming to New York from Paris, not knowing hardly—just a few friends from school— not knowing one person in any institution, without any money from any government source or any institutional source, the whole thing happened without that.

It must have been that it needed to happen.

I think Ravi Shankar is a very important person for your biography. Why? What kind of window?

Well, he, of course, that was the first contact with what we now call global music, that doesn't—is not based on European Western art music, basically. That's what we study. We study Bach and Beethoven, that's what it is. Ravi Shankar didn't ever say that. He knew it. He understood it very well. But the training that is done in India, in Africa, and there is very rigorous training just as we have in the West.

That was not known to us. And our libraries did not include records of African music or— I'm talking about Juilliard, a very well-known music school. If you went to that library and looked for global music, it was not there in the 1960s. You could not find the records. We did not even know it existed, and Ravi Shankar was the door that opened that door for me. That was very important. I have to get ready for a concert now. I'm going to leave you.

That was your last question.

One question again. A personal question. Reading your book, "Words Without Music"— Are they getting ready? Yeah, they're here, and Dan's hooking them up and—

They're taping down? Yeah, they're taping down.

Your grandparents were Jewish, Orthodox Jewish.

No, they were not Orthodox Jewish.

No?

That's a very small group of people. They never even went to the synagogue, as far as I know.

They were Jewish.

Well, yes, but when you say Orthodox Jewish, do you know what you're saying? Yes, I know what it means. They wore all these funny clothes and they, you know. No. These people were working people who— They were poor people who left Russia and Lithuania to find a better way of living, just like people are doing today.

My question is only: do you feel this tradition inside of you, the Jewish tradition, is there something—

Almost not at all. But I wasn't—

We have three generations of atheists in my family. What can I tell you? I mean, that doesn't mean you aren't Jewish, but you don't— I don't even know when the New Year is, the Jewish New Year. When someone said, "Happy New Year to you," I thought they were nuts. I said, "Oh, you mean that new year?" Well, many, many people are like that. Don't get confused. There are a lot of Jewish people in the world, but the number who are Orthodox people who actually follow that diet and all that stuff, it's not even a majority.

I may be wrong about that, but I do know people who follow the diets and I do know people who do that, but I don't know many of them. So you obviously don't know very many of them either.

OK, thank you. OK.