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‘I felt I had no choice but to be a performer’: Philip Glass.
‘I felt I had no choice but to be a performer’: Philip Glass.
‘I felt I had no choice but to be a performer’: Philip Glass.

Philip Glass: ‘My problem is people don’t believe I write symphonies’

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About to turn 80, the composer talks about his slow, taxi-driving road to success, and why he is anything but a minimalist…

The American composer Philip Glass, 80 this month, has been one of the dominant, boundary-crossing influences of the past half century. He first won a worldwide following in the 1970s with Koyaanisqatsi, Einstein on the Beach and Satyagraha, and has collaborated with Allen Ginsberg, Robert Wilson, Doris Lessing, Martin Scorsese, Ravi Shankar, David Bowie, Paul Simon and many more. Glass’s birthday will be marked with a production by Scottish Opera of his opera The Trial and a Philip Glass at 80 weekend at the Barbican.

It seems that no one – not you, or Steve Reich, or John Adams – likes being called a minimalist. What do we call you if not that?
Let’s talk about this. The problem is no one is doing minimalism now. It’s music we wrote in the 1970s. It’s over 30 years out of date. It’s a crazy idea to use a description made up by journalists and editors to cover all kinds of music. It’s more confusing than descriptive. What do I really do? Listen to me. I’ve written 26 operas, 20 ballets, I don’t know how many film scores. I write theatre music. I write concert and symphonies too. I’m working on a new film score right now. Then I’ll start a new stage piece. My problem is people don’t believe I write symphonies. But I’m premiering Symphony No 11 in a couple of weeks. These are all different forms of music. Maybe I do too many things.

But it’s the description that sticks: Philip Glass, the great American minimalist…
If people called me an American opera composer it would have the virtue of being what I actually do. This is reality. God forbid we should be accurate. I’m not making this stuff up. Would it be easier to say I’m an Icelandic composer who writes serial music? Would that be helpful? [Silence, then laughter.] I’m a theatre composer.

Philip Glass in Linz, Austria earlier this month for rehearsals of his Symphony No 11. Photograph: Werner Kerschbaummayr/ AFP/ Getty Images

A lot of people want to hear my music of the 1970s and 1980s. And do you know what I do? I play it. I talk to Paul Simon or anyone like that and it’s the same. I say, “what do you play live, Paul?” and he says “I play my new songs and I play my hits”. And it’s true. If you go to hear Paul Simon, you want to hear Bridge Over Troubled Water. The new work, by the way, is beautiful, but it’s not why you buy the ticket. You want to hear the old ones. It’s the same for me when I play with my ensemble [the Philip Glass Ensemble]. We’ve been together 40 years. We play the familiar stuff, the highlights.

So you’re saying, then, you play… minimalism!
Well, yes, I admit I am part of the confusion. We’ve reworked a piece from 1971. And, guess what, it’s minimalist! OK OK OK, I’m just as bad as the journalists [more laughs].

Growing up in Baltimore, Maryland, you stoked your own musical curiosity by listening to unsold stock in your father’s record store. Was there one really striking discovery?
Not one, though I listened to everything – what we called “hillbilly” and Buddy Holly and R&B, as well as Beethoven quartets and things that were quite modern then – Shostakovich and Bartók. But as far as records in the shop were concerned, there was always lots of contemporary music – Charles Ives, the great American composer. And the Second Viennese school – Berg, Webern and, to a lesser extent, Schoenberg. I sent off for his book on basic harmony – couldn’t find it in the Baltimore bookstores – and followed it to the letter. It was very traditional!

But look, I was devouring a whole range of repertoire at that stage. I was studying music at the Peabody Institute. As a nine- or 10-year-old I was taking part in Bach masses in church performances. At high school they wanted to put on shows, so what did they do? Gilbert and Sullivan! I played flute in the orchestra. I got to understand how theatre works: the musicians in the pit, the timing, the getting singers on and off stage. It’s not a bad way to learn your craft. It gave me a good solid background. When, years later, I came to write opera, I felt comfortable about all that.

You went off to the University of Chicago, prodigiously early at 15, then to the Juilliard school in New York. But the big break was when you went to Europe. You’ve said you had two angels sitting on your shoulder, your two great teachers, Nadia Boulanger and Ravi Shankar.
I’ve always said one taught through fear, one through love. Nadia Boulanger was the great guru in Paris. She was tremendously fierce. She taught me Bach, Beethoven, Mozart – every tool of western art music – with an iron rod. It was, in essence, about understanding technique. Then there was Ravi Shankar, a master of Indian concert music. I met him in 1964. So I had two of the greatest exponents of different traditions at the same time. I was about 25 and Ravi was almost 20 years older. I was like a student. I stayed close to him for a long time. We collaborated. I spoke with him just days before he died.

Your long immersion in Indian music and philosophy, trying to go beyond cultural tourism, has shaped your outlook, practical and aesthetic…
That time in India, which included long stays as well as many shorter ones, visiting frequently from the late 60s until 2001, opened a door to the world of global music. Until then I’d been immersed in European art music. In Kerala I encountered kathakali, the classical Indian dance theatre which had an influence on my own operas, such as Satyagraha. Back then, hearing anything beyond western music wasn’t easy. You couldn’t find records, except a few specialist discs of music collected by anthropologists. If you wanted to hear Balinese music you pretty much had to go to Bali. It’s hard to believe that now.

Do you feel you have done what you set out to achieve as a young man? Or does it only make sense now, looking back?
I decided early on I wouldn’t be a music teacher or an academic. So as soon as I got back from my studies in Europe in 1967 I formed my ensemble – seven musicians playing keyboards and a variety of woodwinds, amplified and fed through a mixer… I felt I had no choice but to be a performer. By then my flute playing had dropped off but I’d sharpened up my keyboard skills. The point of the ensemble was to play the music I’d written. We rehearsed in my house, we played my music! That was the deal. (We did make exceptions and play other stuff, when we rehearsed elsewhere.) And I could sense the response of the audience. Those audiences were tiny at first of course. Sometimes just 20 or so people. And then we got more successful, but it was a long, long time before we made any money. That took another 10 or 15 years.

Einstein on the Beach was a massive hit in 1976 yet you still had to drive a taxi and work as a plumber.
Yes, after Einstein on the Beach I went back to driving a New York cab. I didn’t mind that. It was interesting work. I didn’t have an agent. I ran all the business side of it and the box office myself. I enjoyed it. I grew up in the music business. I was happy to do it. But it took at lot of time and work. In 1979 when we did our first Carnegie Hall concert we had to pay for it, and sell the tickets! Eventually I formed a publishing company and had people doing it for me. I didn’t do it for them!

Have the old divisions between musical styles – a source of surprisingly bitter contention in the last decades of the 20th century – now healed? Do people now accept your chosen path of tonal harmony, melody, repetitive structures?
No no no no no. Those divisions never healed. Those people just died! The people who don’t want you don’t change their minds. You outlive them, if you’re lucky. They’re all dead now, the older guys. The battle was never won or lost. The army just went away. What can I tell you? Isn’t that the truth? It’s biology. Nothing more than that. They’ve just gone away… and we carry on playing.

  • Philip Glass’s The Trial is at the Theatre Royal, Glasgow (24-28 Jan) and King’s theatre, Edinburgh (3-4 Feb).
  • Philip Glass at 80 at the Barbican, London, 27-29 Jan, will feature UK premieres of his Concerto for Two Pianos for the Labèque sisters (part of the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s Total Immersion day, 28 Jan) and Glass’s score for the film Visitors (29 Jan).
  • Radio 3 will broadcast a Glass all-nighter, 29 Jan, 1am-7am, featuring a complete broadcast of his Music in Twelve Parts.

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