Recent Pasts 20/21 Words Series - Philip Glass, Page 2

BRUBAKER:	I think sometimes that very difficulty is part of what has defined American music -- that difficulty you mentioned of making a living somehow. From dealing with students, I know a lot of younger Europeans like coming to the United States because of that harshness you are describing. They feel in Europe things are too cushy. I worked with a kid who was Belgian and he said, “The trouble here is that there is no necessity for really doing anything.” Maybe that's a little bit of an overstatement, but I've been acquainted with several of these people.
GLASS:	It's very different. When I was a young guy, I remember being in Amsterdam in the 70s, and I met a number of very good composers – Louis Andriessen is one, but there were a lot… It's a government that really supported artists and composers. You could become certified as an artist, and then you were supported by the government. Kind of shocking, isn't it? What had happened was that a lot of these young people became very radical politically. They because Maoists and Communists. And, of course, being an American, at that point I wasn't very politicized at all and I wasn't interested in radical politics at all, and they were surprised that I wasn't and I was surprised that they were. I was talking to a bunch and I said, “Have you guys ever had a job? Have you ever been in a union?” And none of them had ever had a job, and they talked about the Workers' Movement, but they had never belonged to a union. And I said, “Well, I've been in four unions and every one of them was lousy.” I said, “I'm not particularly interested in the Workers' Movement.” They were very scandalized by this. But they were coming from such a rarified, from my point of view, atmosphere. And I think the environment in America was very harsh, and I think we've suffered a lot from that, in the sense that I think there were very talented people who fell by the wayside. Not everybody could survive the rigors of an artist's life in America. And people say, “Well, if it doesn't kill you, it makes you strong.” That's true, but there were some people that it did kill.
MAGNUSSEN:	Now, you made a very conscious decision not to be an academic composer, not to teach.
GLASS:	Yes, I did. I didn't think I would be a good teacher. I had a couple of good teachers and I had a number of teachers who weren't as good, and I understood that a good teacher was inspiring, and that a poor teacher – what's the opposite of “inspiring” – was depressing? I felt that I did not want to fall into that. I had studied with Nadia Boulanger and she was a fantastic teacher. She was also completely terrifying. I wouldn't say she was a nice person, but she was a wonderful teacher. She scared the hell out of you, but that was one of her ways of teaching you. I didn't think I had much to give as a teacher, so I decided to do something else. Also, I grew up in a home where my mother was a teacher, and these were people who – this is a curious part of this – these were people who had become teachers during the 30s, during the Depression years before the War, and none of them wanted to be teachers. They wanted to be engineers or doctors, and they couldn't get a job, and so they became teachers. So I grew up knowing people who were very disillusioned with their life and they had become teachers as a kind of, well, as a last resort, and so these were not people who had the vocation of teaching. So I had a very poor introduction to teaching at that point. Later, when I got to know really fine teachers, as I eventually did, I had a very different impression of the profession. So, I got involved with trying to figure out how to make a living as a composer, which I eventually did, but I was 41 before I made a living as a composer. I had a day job until I was 41. Which I always tell people – the young composers – it was not an overnight success. It took a long time. I began writing when I was fifteen, so that was some 25 years before I made a living at writing music.