Recent Pasts 20/21 Words Series - Philip Glass, Page 8

MAGNUSSEN:	Do you often have that feeling of growth when you write a new piece? I mean, these two pieces that you were just talking about are quite close together in time, and yet different.
GLASS:	The interesting thing that happens between a symphony and an opera… Working on an opera, I was creating a musical landscape for a very strange story, and in order to do it I had to adopt or invent an orchestration to make that sound world happen. With the symphony, I didn't have to do that. I was doing something else. The other thing you have to remember in the opera I am writing: you have two hours. You have two hours to tell the whole story. You have two hours to create the characters, to create the ambience, to create whatever it is that you are trying to say. It's very, very little time. So you learn. You don't waste. Every stroke of the pencil, every stroke of the pen has to say something. It requires a kind of tremendous discipline to make every moment of the opera to count, because that's the only time you have. After that two hours, it's over. So, one of the things about theater… it's very demanding in that way. You have to make that whole thing happen. For some reason, the symphonies I write tend to be fairly long. They tend to be 45 or 50 minutes long. I guess because I started out writing operas and symphonies came later. With symphonies I feel I have lots of time. There's nothing on stage, there's nothing to look at, and…
MAGNUSSEN:	Do they give you specific time constraints when the commissions come in?
GLASS:	Well, implicitly they do.
BRUBAKER:	Yeah, here's my five-hour-long symphony…
GLASS:	Well, I find out ahead of time. I want to know how much rehearsal time there will be and what else there's going to be on the program. That tells me how long the piece is. But I also can do it the other way and say, “Look, this is going to be a 45-minute piece.” And that can become a different kind of conversation. They may not want a 45-minute piece. That happened recently with another piece I want to do based on the life of Ramakrishna, the great Bengali saint, called The Passion of Ramakrishna . I am working with Carl St. Clair at the Pacific Orchestra in Orange County, and I said, “This is going to be an hour and a half work.” And he said, “Well, we don't really want an hour and a half work.” I said, “OK, I'm going to write it in two parts. You can commission part one and someone else can commission part two.” And I think they're going to go for it. And then I suggested, “You know, you can also play part two later if you want to.” So, basically, you know, I have to figure out how to get what I want. With Slatkin's symphony (Symphony No. 7) probably there'll be a piece before it and then that piece and then an intermission and another piece, so that piece probably shouldn't be longer that 35 minutes. So, as I say, they're implicit. Once the premiere has happened, then it just becomes a piece in your catalog and people can take it or leave it, depending upon how big a piece they want to do. Surprisingly enough, the big, long pieces do not go unplayed. I did a piece, a symphony that was about an hour and 40 minutes long, and I thought no one would ever play it again. It gets played all the time. I call it “The Everest Complex.” If it's big enough and hard enough, someone will want to do it. I wrote it for (Gerard) Mortier at the Salzburg Festival for the commemoration of the 2000th year and of the centennial. I figured, well it will be done once, but I'll get to hear it. And then it got done a second time, a third time, a fourth time. It gets done almost every other year now. That surprised me, but there's a psychology to programming which I wasn't really aware of, that if you make it hard enough…of course, if I had thought about… Look what happened with (Alban Berg's) Lulu . That gets done a lot and it's a very difficult piece. The Elliott Carter String Quartets when they were new were very, very difficult and they were played quite a lot, and very well, too.