Recent Pasts 20/21 Words Series - Philip Glass, Page 4

MAGNUSSEN:	This performance at the Olympics that took place in June (2004) – the piece that you wrote – could you tell us about it?
GLASS:	Well, I was asked to do a piece for the Olympics, and I thought well, I've worked with a lot of people from other musical cultures over the years, I had met so many people, so I thought maybe I would do a piece that would be from each continent, and that would be seven pieces. I started with someone from Australia, someone from China, after that was Canada, after that, Africa – The Gambia. So the first one was Mark Atkins, who was a didgeridoo player; the second was Wu Man from China; the third, Foday Suso ( http://www.fmsuso.com/ ) from Africa, and then Ashley MacIsaac ( http://ashley-macisaac.com/ ) from Canada, as well, and a group from Brazil. And Ravi Shankar, who I've worked with a lot, and he didn't come and play it, but we composed the piece together. The last piece was a Greek singer. And what I did, I had to work with each of them somewhat differently. Actually, a number of them, with Wu Man and with Foday and with Mark. They actually composed parts of the music, in sometimes very unexpected ways. For example, with Foday, he's a Kora player – it's a lot like a harp instrument – and he sent me a tape. I said, “Well, send me some music and I will see what I can do with it,” and he sent me a piece of music. It was a very beautiful piece of improvisation he did, so I wrote a piece of music to go with it. And then we learned our piece, and this is a good example of what happens: he came (and as a matter of fact he was living in Chicago) so he came and we played the piece, and he began playing with it. I said, “Foday, that's not what you sent me.” He said, “Oh, I forgot that. I don't remember what I….” So basically, he had to write a new piece to the piece that I had written to the piece that he had forgotten he had written. But, I said, “Well, if you listen to what I wrote, you'll hear the melodies that you played, because I've changed them, but they are in there.” But he wasn't even listening to that either, he just played with it. But with Wu Man it was different. Again, she…
BRUBAKER:	It strikes me as an example of just what I was talking about, though. I mean, the demise of that idea that “Oh, here's a fixity , here's my Work” with a capital “W.”
GLASS:	This was an idea – these were all collaborations. There were seven different ones, and they were somewhat different. For example, Ashley MacIssac from Cape Britain, Nova Scotia, he plays in the Celtic tradition of Scottish fiddle playing. Well, actually, he didn't write any of the music, it's all composed – it's all traditional songs – but, he had arranged a number of pieces and then he'd play them quite differently than they had been written. Then, I knew his playing very well and I knew the songs even that he did because I spent a lot of time up in Cape Britain, so I wrote the music, and I wrote an ensemble piece. The group they played with was my ensemble, so that would be a group of about ten players. When we got done we ended up with about a 90-minute piece, and I called the piece Orion because I had been in all of these places, and every place I was I could always see Orion. If I was in Australia, it would be in the northern part of the hemisphere; if I was in Canada, then it would be in the southern part of the hemisphere. So I said, “Let's call it Orion, ” and I made up some program notes about Orion. Well, it doesn't matter, just a bunch of nonsense, but anyway…
MAGNUSSEN:	I only asked about this because of your use of the word “interactive”, and I knew that there had been many collaborations…
GLASS:	On the other hand, my piece was all written, all composed. What we had to do…we rehearsed the piece in New York for several weeks with my ensemble. We did the final rehearsals in Athens, where all the players came. The reason we did it in Athens was because, thanks to the Patriot Act, we can't everyone into the country anymore. I can't get Visas for people from India. They said, “We'll get you the Visa eventually,” but they couldn't tell me a date, but I had a date…I had a rehearsal they had to do. Formerly, I could get a Visa for an Australian player in about two weeks, and they wouldn't promise any date at all. So we rehearsed in Athens. That's when we actually heard the piece together, and it was very interesting, because I had some idea of what they were doing because they sent me tapes, but I really didn't know what they were doing until we got together.
MAGNUSSEN:	And did you have a long rehearsal period?
GLASS:	We had another two weeks. The sitar player that Ravi had sent didn't have all the music, because Ravi kept composing music and sending it. He wrote several cadenzas which he sent to me but he forgot to send it to the player, so he got there and I said, “Gaurav, do you have the music that I sent…?” and he said, “ No, no, no. What is it?” So we had to transcribe the music for him. Actually, we transcribed it in Western notation; he then transcribed it into an Indian notation, and then he spent all of his spare time (that he wasn't rehearsing) learning the music in his hotel room. It was actually a fabulous piece; he played very, very well. All these composers were coming from the tradition of the composer-performer, which is generally what you will find outside of Western art music. You'll find that's what people do, whether they are from China or Africa or Brazil, the composer almost always is the performer of the work. And I happened to have extremely talented performers, so it made a huge difference. It was like having these seven extremely wonderful players contributing to this piece. We're playing it, I think, next June, at Ravinia in Chicago. We're playing it in New York just about a year from now, October 4th and 5th and 6th we're playing in New York City at Brooklyn Academy of Music. I had been kind of working up to this piece for about twenty years, because I began working with Ravi Shankar in 19… – well forty years, I worked with him in 1964 – and then I began working with Foday and with Mark Atkins. Well, over the years, one of the things that interested me was finding people from other traditions and trying to figure out how we could make music together. And you start off by tuning the instruments. It's very interesting, the whole process. After about 15 years, Foday Suso and I can really work very well together. It takes an effort to figure out how to do it. You have to find where that common ground is, and there's not really any model for this. In the 30s, people…Colin McPhee… there were people who began to work in this field…well, we would call it “world music” today, but there was no word for it at that time. Now it is called world music, but it's definitely one of the borders that have opened up in the music world. I would say that's one. I would say the border between popular music and concert music has dissolved, pretty much, and the impact of technology… just technology itself has become a border area. Then there's the traditional avant garde, which is still alive and functioning very well, as you probably know. So things that would be more traditionally considered avant garde are still people doing wonderful music in that, so that what we're really working in is in four distinct areas of new music now, at least.
MAGNUSSEN:	This disappearance of this high/low art differentiation, I think, is what you were addressing, Bruce.
BRUBAKER:	Yes, I'm wondering about that. It used to be quite common in the new music world to speak of “uptown” and “downtown." Didn't we used to say that? And I don't know if…
GLASS:	Now everyone moved downtown.
BRUBAKER:	Well that's right. Everybody wants to be a hipster, I guess.
GLASS:	Actually, Boulez began doing a series of concerts in the 1980s at the Public Theater.
BRUBAKER:	Right, and I suppose that represented a kind of physical geography that was convenient, because it represented some kind of aesthetic geography…
GLASS:	Well, he was looking for younger audiences, and he found that that's where he had to go, and I think he was quite correct to do that.
BRUBAKER:	It has occurred to me that may be coming to some kind of fruition now, because in the classical music business there's an awful lot of wringing of hands these days about the audience for traditional symphony concerts, for example -- all the woes of the traditional symphony orchestra in the United States. But, as dispiriting as that might be for people who are right in that world, it actually represents some kind of good thing, because it really means that music is being made in more places.
GLASS:	I think that's right Bruce. I think you're exactly right.
BRUBAKER:	Some people will suffer, of course, but in the end, it's a more open situation…
GLASS:	The segregation of the music world…
BRUBAKER:	It is. It is that.
GLASS:	And you'll find, especially for the younger generations, it's what is distinctive about the younger generation. They're born into a world in which that has already happened. It's very different from having to carve it out, in a way. And in a way, as I suggested before, it's actually more difficult, because the norms of contemporary music were absolutely known in the mid-60s, and now they are not known.
BRUBAKER:	Yes. I think that is probably even applicable to the careers of musicians. You didn't do this, because you really made a unique spot for yourself -- but a lot of people plugged themselves in to some pre-existing model. They got their training, they wrote a symphony…
GLASS:	And that still happens…
BRUBAKER:	It does still happen. But just to go back to Nico for a second, I laughed a lot because he had been on some kind of a panel and was asked, “Where are you going to do your doctoral degree?” And he said, “I don't have any intention of getting a doctoral degree.” And after that, other people there wouldn't speak to him anymore. It was this kind of shocking thought that you can be a composer and not have graduate degrees. What a lovely thing.