Recent Pasts 20/21 Words Series - Philip Glass, Page 7

MAGNUSSEN:	How do you work?
GLASS:	Oh, I get up early in the morning and I work all day. That's probably what everyone does.
BRUBAKER:	I don't think it's what (everybody does). That early in the morning part, you should talk about that, because you do , right?
GLASS:	I get up quite early but I also have two little kids, and I try to get started before they get started, and that means I get up quite early – about 4:30, 5 o'clock. The kids are recent, but before they were around I would start working at 7 in the morning. I was fortunate that I had the physical and perhaps mental stamina to work ten hours. That's hard to do, and I can't always do it. I can start with six, and I would have to work up to ten, and then I could keep it going for about five or six weeks and then it would start going down again, and it's a cycle. But that kind of a concentrated work – it's the only way that I can work. So it's not that complicated; it's mostly just writing down music, isn't it? You know, I spent a lot of time with Alan Ginsberg in the last ten years of his life – he was a great friend of mine – and Alan would say, “Oh I wish I had the discipline you do, now.” I would say, “Alan, the amount of poetry you've written…you've done just fine.” He would wake up in the middle of the night and write poetry, and in the end I became very influenced by him. I asked him what he did, and he said, “First thought is best thought.” But, if you'd look at the work, he re-wrote like crazy. So, first thought is best thought, but then rewrite an awful lot. I began to do what Alan did. I'd look at the music, I'd look at the image and what did I think about? That was one way to do it, but often that would start me off in a direction to go in. But, you know, my years of training are so long ago, at this point – that's forty years ago since I completed that part of my life – and in many ways, I've never really stopped. Either that, or I never really began. That may be more truthful.
BRUBAKER:	That's a kind of a wonderful thought, I think. You mention Ravi Shankar, and so much has been said about the effect that Shankar had on you…
GLASS:	Mostly I said it…
BRUBAKER:	I know… and how you really found your own voice at that point, because you had already written a lot of music before then, but I'm wondering… How much was it in your mind that you needed to do something else?
GLASS:	Well, I was in Paris living on very little money, on a Fulbright, and I was offered a job. That's what I was thinking. I was his assistant for a film score he was writing, and…
BRUBAKER:	But when did it start to cross over into your own work? Was it immediately?
GLASS:	Almost immediately, because I had come to the end of a period of my work, and I wanted to start in a new direction. Paris in the mid-60s was dominated pretty much by Boulez and the Domaine Musicale and that whole business, and they were wonderful composers and I went to the concerts, but I was not inclined at all to become a little Boulez or a little Stockhausen. It just didn't seem worth the effort. First of all, they did very, very well what they did, and I didn't imagine that I could beat Boulez at his own game. I knew that I wasn't going to do that, so I wanted to start someplace else. And I wasn't really sure where to go with that, and I was working with a theater company, writing music for a Beckett play when I began to work with Ravi, and I began almost immediately to transfer ideas of rhythmic structure into that theater music. So it was these two things happening. I was studying with Boulanger, I was writing for a theater company, and I was working for Ravi Shankar, and the three things together…
BRUBAKER:	Thrilling, or frightening, to do that?
GLASS:	Both, really, in a way. Boulanger was truly frightening, but everything else was fun. And I stayed with her over two and a half years. I must have liked getting frightened.
BRUBAKER:	It seems like such an interesting moment, a kind of intersection of two cultures – maybe three, actually.
GLASS:	Three, really. I mean, Boulanger definitely considered Americans a different culture. She would say to me things like, “I feel so sorry for you, because you have no sense of history.” Of course, I did not have the courage to say to her, “Yes, Mademoiselle, and that's what I like about it.” We both saw the same thing. For her it was a problem, for me it was the only way that Americans would be able to work. So she considered the American culture – any American that came to study with her – she considered that we would never – and it was true – we would never have that instinctive feeling for our own culture and history the way a French composer would. A young French composer, a young German composer, a young Italian composer. And I knew that because I knew these people. They were in the class, and I met them all through my life. In fact, they have a respect for the past which Americans generally do not have, at least artistically. Unfortunately, we apply that sometimes to other parts of our life with not such good effect. Then there was Ravi, and then there was… Beckett was a strange one. He had a very big influence on me at that time, too, and I don't know what to say about him. He was an Irishman who lived in Paris and wrote in French and translated his own work back into English. It was a strange… and I ended up writing about ten scores for his plays.
BRUBAKER:	So we're describing the onset of a kind of world culture. Is that what we've seen in that last 30 years? Is that how it seems?
GLASS:	It didn't at the time. At the time that I was working in Paris with those people, it all seemed extremely marginal. No one was paying attention to it or seemed to care about it very much. The theater company I was working with and my encounters with Ravi, those were very important to me. It never occurred to me that it would lead to a language of music that would support me for the rest of my life. I had no idea. I thought I had made choices that would guarantee poverty, because that's what I was experiencing at the time. No one was interested at all. I just did it because I liked it. I didn't have any other thing to do anyway. It just began to develop. I don't know how that happens, but it did.
MAGNUSSEN:	Do you have hopes for the kind of music that you write? Do you see it changing or do you feel…
GLASS:	No. It seems to me if I look at recordings over the last 30 years, you can group music into three- or four- or five-year periods, but music that is 20 years apart sounds very different. Music that Bruce is playing which was written in 1989 about, it sounds very different from Einstein on the Beach. You wouldn't even hardly recognize it as the same. Or the Etudes , which were written ten years later, sound also very different. But that's true of every composer. We struggle with change, and we barely are able to do it. However, if we do it over a period of 40 years, you will actually see something. But in the course of any one or two or three or four years, it's a very difficult thing. One of things I've said to young composers – and you're not so old that I can't say this to you, too, Jon – is that when we're young we think that the big problem for a composer is finding a voice, and we struggle with that. In fact, that turns out to be the easy part. By the time you are 30, you have it anyway, almost everyone has it. The real problem is getting rid of it. You spend the rest of your life trying to get rid of the damn thing. That becomes the monumental struggle of your work, and it's a very worthwhile and ennobling struggle, because it takes all of your resources and all of your energy to address it, and it takes also a certain amount of musical introspection to do that, to be able to see what you've done and to see what it is. It's like looking at yourself in a mirror. It's very difficult to do. So change becomes the… you know, we were talking about Cage – well, Cage devised numerous strategies to effect change in his work.
BRUBAKER:	And to erase himself from the process.
GLASS:	Of course, the more he did, the more he sounded like Cage, and this is the...
BRUBAKER:	Right. That's the conundrum of it.
GLASS:	It drives you crazy. So, I'm writing a piece now. (This opera I'm doing right now.) I'm looking at the orchestration, and it's different. I say, “That sounds different.” I'm combining instruments in a different way, and I don't know why I'm doing it that way but I'm hearing it differently now than I did before (in the symphony I wrote last summer). So to me I'm making enormous steps in this piece, but a year from now I may look back and think I only moved a tiny little ways. But over a lifetime… you know, it's funny. I was listening to Schubert this morning. If I had died when Schubert had died, I would have left nothing. Or if I had died when Mozart had died…not much. I mean, I can't imagine how did they do that? We spend our whole life trying to develop a body of work, and there are people like Mendelssohn, Schubert, Mozart. I guess in every field you have that.