Recent Pasts 20/21 Words Series - Philip Glass, Page 5

MAGNUSSEN:	You mentioned that your ensemble is performing your Orion piece next June. There was a period there where you only allowed your ensemble to play your music. Is that still the case?
GLASS:	There still is a part of the library that I have which is only for the ensemble. In fact, it is the ensemble's library, and they are pieces written exclusively for them. I began doing that in the late 60s, because no one would play the music, anyway. So, I basically formed a group…
BRUBAKER:	If you don't want it, you can't have it.
GLASS:	Yes, if you don't want it, you can't have it. And besides, we ended up playing it better than anyone else could. That's no longer true.
MAGNUSSEN:	That's what I was going to ask…
GLASS:	What I found… There was a young group – it started in Italy – called “Alter Ego,” and they called me up and said they wanted to play some pieces I had written in 1967 and ‘68, and my first response was, I said, “Well, why do you want to do that?” They were pieces that we don't play anymore; why do they want to play it? And they persuaded me that they really wanted to play the music, and I gave them pieces that we no longer played. There were a number of pieces before ‘69 that we weren't playing anymore. There are pieces from '69 that we still play and I kept that pretty much for the group. And then I went to Rome – I happened to be in Rome (or perhaps they arranged the concert for when I would be there, but whatever), and I heard them play this music and they played it very well. They said, “How did we play it?” and I said, “Well, you actually played it better than we played it.” And they couldn't believe that was true, but it was true, because when we were performing that early music, we were creating a performance style. This is something, Bruce, that you would know a lot about. Every music has its own style of performance, and every new music has to have a new style of performance, otherwise it's not new. If you can play it the way you played another music, then it's obviously not new. So, one of the problems with the new music when our generation was creating it and playing it was that we didn't know how to play it. It took my group about seven or eight years to get very good at it, and now we are quite good at it. But young people now, to them it's music they're familiar with, it's not so difficult to play. This is the strange thing that happens in music. I was doing an opera in Holland in 1980, Satyagraha, and the string players complained so much that, at one point, the conductor said, “OK: anyone who doesn't want to play this, please, is excused,” and about a third of the people left. But they weren't doing us any good anyway; I was glad to get rid of them. So, we had our first performances. Then we came to New York, and eventually went to Seattle and San Francisco, and every time we played it with orchestras who had not heard it before, they all found it easier and easier to play. This is the damnedest thing. This happened with the Elliot Carter String Quartets, it happens with everything, that once someone has played something – you may never have heard it, but for some reason it becomes easier. You begin to think there is some kind of collective conscious hearing. I don't know what it is. It's the strangest thing, and yet if you've gone through it, you'll know that it's true. By the time we got to San Francisco in 1981, about two years later, the chorus and the orchestra were playing beautifully, and they had never heard it before. So, if we want to talk about… maybe we can talk about a performance style, I don't know how they would have learned it. But, getting back to that piece that the young people are playing now, the performance style – the performance practice – of this music is kind of known, and it's not so difficult to do, but it was very difficult when we began.
MAGNUSSEN:	Now, what happens, say, in 40 years or 60 years? I'm thinking of the performance style of a certain kind of music, say in 1940, and how, now, we approach it very differently. A pianist will…
BRUBAKER:	Well, we see this evolve all the time. I think a lot of things that passed for good performances of certain kinds of modern music in a certain time now seem to represent more about the period in which they were played than in which they were composed. I am thinking of Webern. In the ‘50s, people took Webern's music and used it like a political statement. They were using it to show just how austere they could be. Actually, as I understand it, that has very little to do with Webern's own aesthetic – Webern was really a romantic.
GLASS:	What's happened with me, in my lifetime, other people are starting to play the music – Bruce plays it and a few other people in this group – and…
MAGNUSSEN:	Your piano music?
GLASS:	The piano music. But apart from the ensemble music, there is a lot of music other people play. But especially the piano music, I am sensitive about that, because I wrote that for myself, and for a long while I wouldn't let anyone play it because that's how I made my living, and why should I let Bruce come here and play it when they could hire me to come and play it? But somehow he got that piece out of me and a few other pieces. He's a very persuasive guy…
BRUBAKER:	I think you asked me to give some of it back once.
GLASS:	I did, but you wouldn't do it.
BRUBAKER:	I wouldn't do it. I'd already recorded it or something. It was too late.
GLASS:	I remember Dennis Russell Davis. I had actually written some pieces for him, but I played them for myself, and he's a very good piano player and he came to play them for me. He played a piece and of course he played it beautifully. He played it better than I did. Of course, he didn't play it the way I did, but he played it better than I did in a certain way, and he said, “What do you think?” And I said, “Dennis, never, never do that to me again.” I was kidding with him, of course, but then again, I would say this in defense of my own piano playing. Not too long ago I got hold of the piano rolls of Gershwin playing Gershwin – or Rachmaninoff, there are recordings of him playing the 2 nd Piano Concerto – and there's something about the way he played it – Gershwin played his own piano music. No one else could play it that way.
BRUBAKER:	Absolutely true. And that's why we don't want you to stop playing the piano. Really there is something about it that's very hard to explain, but…
GLASS:	But no one – I mean, Gershwin is now played in a lot of different ways, and none of them are the way he played.
BRUBAKER:	Well, that's one of the things I was thinking about when you were talking about evolving a performance practice for a new type of music. Does that really only happen when many people start to try to play it?
GLASS:	I don't know.
BRUBAKER:	I was thinking that as long as only your own ensemble plays a particular piece, then it hasn't really taken on its life yet.
GLASS:	That may be true, however I have to tell you that those early years we were the only people who could physically play it. Not only because no one else had the music, but because no one had spent the hours learning it the way we had. That was a very exciting time. In fact I read a review recently that someone had reviewed a recording we did of Einstein on the Beach that was made in 1978 and another recording that was made about 1992, about 15 years later, and they said that they liked the first one better because it had more of the raw energy. Now the same people recorded the piece 15 years later – the same ensemble, Michael Riesman, and all the same people were there – and we all liked the second recording better, so I don't know.
BRUBAKER:	Don't you think that's probably true of any performance that evolves over a very long time? It changes. Sometimes, I imagine, if you listened to the old recording yourself, it would seem shocking to you in some ways. You wouldn't quite remember everything about it.
GLASS:	Well, it's all notated music…
BRUBAKER:	I know…
GLASS:	…but it does sound different.
BRUBAKER:	I don't really remember my own performances – even of canonic repertoire. If I hear a recording I made of Chopin's music or something from ten years ago, I don't recognize the playing.
GLASS:	One of the things I've done in this library of music which I've written for the ensemble, because we still play music as early as ‘69 and we play that music, in the course of the year, we'll play at least one concert every year – a kind of a retrospective concert – and some of the pieces from Music in Twelve Parts, which was written between '71 and '74, we may only play that completely every two or three years, but we still go back and play that music. We do it, first of all, because people want to hear it, but it's also (as a composer it's) a very interesting exercise for me to look at a mirror of myself as I was at 40, 45, at 50, 55, and that's what I'm doing. And what's happened is that I've become… it's become less easy to recognize myself as I get older. I no longer know who the person was who wrote that piece. I don't know why I made the decisions I made. I can play it – I can play it probably better because I've played it so many times – but there's something…there's a tactile relationship to the music which I no longer have even though I've played it very often.
BRUBAKER:	Do you ever have any desire to revisit those scores and change them somehow?
GLASS:	For that reason I don't. I remember not even very long ago someone asked me about some symphony and they said, “There's a note here; is this a B-flat or a B?” And I said, “I don't really know. Look, the composer's around here somewhere; if I run into him I will ask him.” I often have the feeling that the person who wrote the music is simply not there. I can make a decision now, but it won't be the same one that I would have made then.
BRUBAKER:	I think that's a wise course, to not change it.
GLASS:	I wasn't foolish enough to write something I didn't understand.
BRUBAKER:	But there do seem to have been, or are still, composers who can't resist…
GLASS:	Hindemith was famous for that, and by all accounts he did not improve the pieces.
BRUBAKER:	That's the generally accepted view. It's interesting to be able to recognize that you are not quite the same person…
GLASS:	What I've taken to doing now, since I write with pencil and paper – though I know you can do this electronically, too – with every piece I write, I keep the original sketch, and I number the page, and I number the measure so I can find…
MAGNUSSEN:	So, the scholars are thanking you from the future.
GLASS:	No, no, no – I thank me. If someone calls and says, “Is that a B-flat or B natural?,” I say, “Wait a second, I'll take a look.” And I'll go back to the original and see what I wrote, because that's the only way I really know.