Recent Pasts 20/21 Words Series - Philip Glass, Page 10

MAGNUSSEN:	(to audience) Any other questions?
(audience)	Recently I heard Steve Reich give a talk and he mentioned you and he said that, if I'm not mistaken, you guys lived together in New York?
GLASS:	Yes. When I said my generation, that was one of the people I was talking about. Bruce is playing other people tonight – John Adams, a little bit younger, but Alvin Curran is also from our generation.
(audience)	Well, he mentioned you, and I was wondering if either of you guys had influences on each other?
GLASS:	Oh, sure. Not only that, like any composer when I first wanted to get my music played, I started with other composers, because that's the people who were interested in doing it. My first ensemble, basically – even today, most of my ensemble members are still composers – so we played each other's music, maybe from ‘68 to'70. At that point, oddly enough, we became too busy. We became interested in ourselves and less interested in each other and we kind of drifted apart, from that point of view, but we didn't play that much…but for a number of years the only people that I could talk to about what I considered my ideas were people like Steve or maybe Louis Andriessen. There were scarcely a handful of people in New York that knew what we were doing, so that was a very important support for each other, I think, at that time.
(audience)	(unintelligible)
GLASS:	One of the interesting things about that generation of people, and I would say it would be Terry Riley or Frederic Rzweski…
BRUBAKER:	Lamonte Young?
GLASS:	…Lamonte and Meredith Monk and Louis (Andriessen). One of the things that is interesting about these people is that they've ended up sounding so different from each other. They sound more different from each other now. And yet they all began in a similar place. It's very easy to spot the composers, very easy. You hear it right away. So, if it's a school, it's a school that manages to deny something essential about its identity. Maybe that's one of the things that is interesting about that group.
(audience)	I was wondering what your compositional method is like now and how it's changed from your earlier works?
GLASS:	You want to know my secrets? (laughter)
BRUBAKER:	Get up early.
GLASS:	Get up early, yes. Certain ideas have turned out to be fairly enduring. The idea of creating structure from rhythmic development is something that has played through a lot of different music. The idea that come up in the late ‘70s of combining harmonic structure and rhythmic structure into an overall kind of structure, that's how Einstein on the Beach began and that kept me going for a long time – seven, eight, ten years. I got interested after that in ideas of tonality where you could hear the same piece in different keys depending on which way you listened to it. It was never in two keys at once; it was in either one key or the other, kind of the way certain optical illusions work. And then I got interested later in going back to what I had learned with Boulanger many years before and seeing whether I could in fact use principles of voicing but with a very different harmonic function. And I found that I could, that what she taught me about voice leading worked no matter what the harmonic language was. So, at different times I've been involved with different ideas, and I've tended to continue with certain ideas and I'd rather add on to them. At this point, I have a very big range of stylistic choices that I can make, so that if I have to do something like theater music – I did music for The Elephant Man that was in New York last spring – and when I work in the theater, there are a lot of different ways I can make music sound. As I said before, the contingency of the theatrical situation necessitated my finding ways of making new ideas. Like this orchestration I am doing now, it is a very dark piece, and the orchestration began working in a very surprising way. It became much lighter than I thought it was; I thought it would be very heavy. It is heavy, in a certain way, but it turns out to be a very light kind of heaviness. It was a very thinly orchestrated heavy music.
MAGNUSSEN:	I'll remember that.
GLASS:	But, at any rate, when I say I don't work conceptually, in fact I've now betrayed myself. You can see, I have ideas all the time. It's almost impossible not to have ideas, because as musicians we begin at a very early age to learn about the language of music, and the sometimes very complicated matrix of ideas that develop. One of the reasons I like working with someone like Foday Suso was that I am suddenly working in a different world, and nothing I know works anymore. It's so liberating, in a way. I want to tell a story about Foday. He plays this Kora. I said one of the first things we had to learn to do is tune together. We were sitting in a studio together and we were tuning his instrument so it would match the piano. He played his lowest note – I think it was an A or a G – and I knew that's what he was going for and I played it on the piano. I said, “What's the name of that note?” He said, “Oh, that's the first note.” And so he played the B, and I said, “What's that note?” He said, “Oh, that's the note that comes after the first note.” And then I said, “What's the next note?” And he said, “Oh, that's the one that comes after…” And I suddenly realized – at that time I was probably in my forties, and I'd been a musician for more than 35 years – and suddenly, I realized that in his world notes did not have names! I almost fainted. I felt like the floor had opened up beneath me and I was freefalling. It was so astonishing to me! I had to stop, and then…
BRUBAKER:	A sound is a sound, Cage says.
GLASS:	…then later that same week, we were working on a piece and he said, “Now, we have to retune the instrument.” I said, “Why are we retuning?” He said, “Well, I was singing in the Mandingo language, but now I'm going to sing in Walaf, and that's a different language so I have a different tuning.” It was so obvious, and I had myself worked in French and Italian and English and I had noticed that I automatically – without thinking about it – I had always written somewhat differently depending on the language I was writing in. But I had never totally realized it until that moment. I said, “Oh yes, of course, that's what we do. The sound of a language will impact on the way we write music.” So apart from these conceptual things which we learn from and continue to learn, when I work with someone like Mark Atkins from Australia or Foday or Wu Man, suddenly I'm in a world that is new to me and I find it tremendously exhilarating.
MAGNUSSEN:	Well, I think we are out of time. That's a nice note to finish on. Thank you all for coming, and thank you, Philip Glass and Bruce Brubaker.