Recent Pasts 20/21 Words Series - Philip Glass, Page 9

MAGNUSSEN:	I'd like to invite some questions from the audience before we finish. Are there any questions? Yes…
(audience)	I was struck by what you were saying about playing your own music, that it was so difficult to learn how to play, and I was wondering why that was so…
GLASS:	That's a rather interesting question about why I didn't know. How could I write music and not know what the performance style would be, to put it simply and in other words. But the thing is that when I was writing it, I didn't know what it was. It wasn't as if I had a complete musical vision. I was struggling with ideas of language in a certain way, musical ideas, and I really wasn't sure how far they could go. I found they could go much further than I had anticipated, and as they went further I found that I had to develop the physical strength and mental stamina to go along with it. Bruce can tell you, even if the pieces you are playing that aren't that long, just to play them – even the short pieces – they are difficult to play. They tend to be very tricky in that way. The other thing that we began to do is we, for some reason… I memorized all that early music. I don't know why I did that. I didn't like turning pages. But that also became a problem, because some of these pieces could be an hour, an hour and a half long. Well, I can do a piano recital now that's an hour and a half long, and my fingers may make a mistake but my mind rarely makes a mistake. But, I think the real answer is that when I was writing that music, in the early days of the music, I didn't really know what it was. I didn't know what the implications of it were in terms of length, in terms of attention, in terms of stamina, not only for myself but for the audience. It was quite new at that time, I mean the idea of sitting down and playing a piece that lasted two hours, which we did all the time in those days.
(audience)	(question unintelligible)
GLASS:	We learned it by playing it. We found that having a very light touch made it possible to play for longer periods. We stayed away from acoustic pianos because the touch was too heavy. It also accorded with the kinds of sounds we were working with. We were working with synthesizers and electronic instruments. That facilitated the playing, as well. Occasionally, we did a concert called an “unplugged concert” where we would play the same music on a piano, which we can do now, but it is quite a bit more difficult.
BRUBAKER:	But also, you are getting at this idea that it wasn't really something willful. You wrote the music and, in the process of doing all this, you discovered what it really was or how it worked.
GLASS:	I'm still discovering what it was. I think the point is, and this is something that everyone, I think, struggles with to a certain degree, that the music for us exists, in one way, conceptually. That's how we're trained. We study harmony, counterpoint. We do years of that so you can juggle things around in your head and you can do all that stuff. So we end up as composers with a very strong conceptual idea about music. At the same time, if you enter the world of a performer, which I did very early – I began as a performer when I was ten years old, so I played music long before I was really writing it – but when we play music, other emotional centers are involved. There's memory involved, but you don't have to be conceptually clear when you are playing. You have to have a good memory, but you may not be thinking about the structure when you are playing it. You might be thinking about something else. I find when I am playing, in the middle of a performance of a piece I've played dozens of times, I'll start using the pedals differently. I'll start to hear the piece differently while I'm playing it. That still happens. That is one of the exciting things about playing music which I've learned – it took me a long time to realize this – the re-creator, the performer, brings a tremendous amount to music. When I was much younger I didn't realize that. I thought, “Well, there's the composer who is up here in the heavens somewhere, and then there are these people who play the music. They're not like the composer.” But after a lifetime of playing music, I've come to see that the performer brings out – I'm not saying this because you are sitting here Bruce…
BRUBAKER:	Yes, you are.
GLASS:	What the performer brings to the work is… he brings a very creative element to the work, as well. And it may not come from the conceptual side, but may come from another part of our being.
BRUBAKER:	When you were answering this question, I was thinking that you were not exactly – or perhaps not at all – the same person when you were writing the pieces as you were when you were playing them in your ensemble. In a sense, that's two different Philip Glass.
GLASS:	That's what I was saying in the beginning when I said, “The composer is around here somewhere. If I ever run into him I will ask him what he meant.” And the reason we don't know – (to questioner in audience) Are you a composer, by the way? Are there composers here? There are a couple of you – I just lost that thought… It was about how we conceptualize pieces. I'm not sure that composing is what we're doing when we write music. We say we're composing music. I think that's a rather optimistic point. I often think… Does this ever happen to you, Jon, that you sit down and you just play a piece? This happens to me, not often in my life but it has happened to me, that I'll sit down and play a piece and it was right the first time. It happens a few times in your lifetime, but when you do that, you're not actually composing, in a sense you're playing but you're also hearing music…
MAGNUSSEN:	Receiving…
GLASS:	Yes, something like that.
BRUBAKER:	It's a funny thing. I think Busoni said that when you write down music it's a transcription.
GLASS:	I think many people have come around to that idea. Have we fumbled around with that question long enough?
(audience)	(question partially unintelligible) Yes, I wanted to turn back to the opening “theme” of the session… certainly something that I'm aware of (I'm a musicologist) regarding the new movement in musicology, which calls itself the “New Musicology.” And I'm just wondering if that, too, isn't a piece of this equation…
GLASS:	Would you tell us more about it?
(audience)	One of the things that's characteristic about it… it tries both to be very, very sensitive to aspects of musical language at the same time that it tries to be very thoughtful about social, historical and political contexts of both the producer and the consumer of music...
BRUBAKER:	Yes, I think that's a pretty generally accepted term at this point, I mean, people who are interested in making a social context for art…
(audience)	But not at the expense of paying attention to how something is made…”
BRUBAKER:	But I suppose in the view of the “old regime” it is at the expense of that.
(audience)	You mentioned reading reviews and such of performances… but is there any sense that academic musicology and scholarship is an important interactive component to what's going on…
GLASS:	I don't know. I don't know enough about it.
BRUBAKER:	There are some interesting pieces. (to Glass) You know Susan McClary's article about your work, don't you?
GLASS:	No.
BRUBAKER:	Well, there's a fascinating article by Susan McClary about Mr. Glass' piano piece Opening . (to Glass) You really don't know that? I'll send it to you.
GLASS:	You know, I get pieces about me and I can rarely get through the first paragraph. I think, “That's interesting,” but I don't…
BRUBAKER:	But one of the things that people like Susan have done is to do away with all that jargon. So it's actually a kind of layman's piece, in a way. What she says is that Philip appropriates - or could be seen to have appropriated – elements from 19th-century music in some of his piano works so that, if you just looked at one measure of Opening it could be a work by Schumann. The first measure could really, literally, come out of a 19th-century piano piece, and so then she asks the question, “Why isn't it a piece by Schumann?" And, of course, the answer is, because that measure is repeated many, many, many times. And in the process of being repeated, the connection to any -- let's just use that terrible word –“meaning” becomes changed and altered in such a way that one is left with much more of a centering in the work itself than in some external place, as one might have been if it were a work by Schumann. So it's a process of removing any kind of goal from the musical language. After I read that, it actually did clarify some of my own thoughts about what I had already experienced in playing some of Philip's music. I don't know how much practicing musicians really participate in that scholarly interaction; I think it's pretty rare.
GLASS:	They may not, and I would say that that's our loss and our fault for not doing it. My only excuse is that I don't have time to do it. Someone wrote a whole book about Akhnaten, the opera I wrote, and I just never read it. It seemed I did my part…
BRUBAKER:	Yeah. (laughter) I think so…
GLASS:	But I also have to say: I'm a little embarrassed that I don't know more about it. It's just one of the things I haven't had time to do. I think that I would maybe understand myself better if I read it. And, you know, I'm happy that people can find something to do it if they can make a living and interest each other…it's good. I encourage it. (to audience) Why are you laughing? What did I say that's so funny?