Seasons of Glass

The controversial composer's new work tackles pretty and pop

by Ted Drozdowski

Philip Glass's music came down like hellfire -- or like heavenly fairydust -- when his Ensemble burst into the composed-new-music scene of the late '60s and early '70s. How you heard it depended on your aesthetic compass: whether you considered the Juilliard-trained composer's variations on serial and Eastern musics, his then very new-sounding minimalism (as it was branded), the work of a jester or a genius.

Even with 30 years of career behind him, Glass can still quip, as he did when we spoke by phone from his New York City home last week, that "there are a few people who like all of my albums." But it would take a very hard case -- or a hard head -- to try to deny his influence or contributions at this point. He's written symphonies, operas, ballets, song cycles, film scores; he pioneered the use of synthesizers in formal music; he's recorded more than 30 albums; and more recently he's started writing pop songs for the likes of Mick Jagger, Natalie Merchant, and Suzanne Vega. And his music has become a touchstone for artists from the jazz, pop, and classical arena. Indeed, if the classical world has a composer who is himself a pop star -- whose recognizability cuts through all strata of popular culture -- it's Philip Glass.

His most recent efforts find Glass in a far-removed place from his early landmarks, works like the minimalist manifesto Music in Twelve Parts or his first multimedia collaboration with avant-garde stage master Robert Wilson, Einstein on the Beach. His latest symphony, Heroes (Point Music), establishes a beachhead for his new record label. Drawing on melodic and harmonic themes from the '70s collaborations of David Bowie and Brian Eno on the Bowie albums Low and Heroes, the symphony has a beauty that in some ways is comparable to the labors of the European Romantics of two centuries past. Glass's current interest in melody is even more richly displayed in his soundtrack to the 1996 film The Secret Agent. These new works became the point of embarkation for our conversation.

Q: To my ears, the work you're doing now is rich in melody, there are lots of interesting themes that keep resurfacing in the compositions, and on The Secret Agent and Heroes you're working with a very lush sonic palette. Where do you feel you're at creatively right now, and what's exciting you in your music?

A: It's hard to say. I've done 30-odd CDs over the past 25 years. And they are a kind of portrait of where I am at any of those times. What I notice is that there is usually some kind of consistency within three or four CDs. But if you move beyond that you start to hear changes.

Just before Heroes, I did the score for The Secret Agent. It has the qualities you're mentioning, so I think I have grown very much into this place where I am at right now. But I seem to go through four- or five-year cycles. This is one that people like so . . . it is nice when that happens. It doesn't always happen that way. My early music could be very confrontational and demanding.

We still play that music, by the way. I'm doing a concert in London in May that will be a retrospective from 1969 to almost 25 more years. I don't mind going back and playing those old pieces, but I am really not thinking that way anymore. What you are hearing on Heroes and on The Secret Agent is pretty much what I am thinking right now.

It has a lot to do with writing for the voice. I think the main thing that's happened in what I have done in the last 20 years has been working directly with singers, in operas. I am working now on a new vocal work with Bob Wilson that is 10 songs. I have been writing a lot of songs lately. And not only on these projects, but I have done individual song projects. I wrote a song with Natalie Merchant two weeks ago. It was great -- I really began to think what one should do is give up this symphony and opera business and become a songwriter. I like it a lot. So it comes out in the music you are hearing in terms of the melodic profile of the work. It's much clearer now than it was before.

Q: How did it feel to be making such aggressive, controversial music in the '60s and '70s?

A: I had a great time. I enjoyed it tremendously, right up through 1976. By that time my Ensemble had been together for almost eight or nine years. And the Ensemble is still working together, so I have been very fortunate to have a group of regular musicians I play with. It's been like a family and they've grown with me. That's another reason change seems very organic for me. I have no idea where I will be five years from now. I don't think about it that way.

Q: I think of you as a very American composer, despite the way you've employed Eastern and serial techniques in your music. Maybe it was in the intensity. For me, the music that established you had very much the feel of modern American urban and industrial culture: the notes having similar values and density, the pacing and similarities of colors.

A: I think of myself in that way too. I've thought of myself as being very much an American composer, very comfortable with the vernacular of my own environment.

But, of course, that's a very American characteristic -- to incorporate and synthesize and ingest all these other cultures. We are a multiculture, so it's natural that it should come out in the art as well.

I wonder what you'll think of these songs I have been writing. A lot of things come up for people who want a title song for a film. So I did a song for Suzanne Vega for a Brazilian film, and for an English film I did a song for Mick Jagger. I wrote the whole song and he sang it. And Suzanne, I wrote her entire song as well. With Natalie Merchant, she wrote the lyrics. That was more of a collaboration. I am not really a word writer.

Q: What was working with Jagger like?

A: I like Mick Jagger. I went to over London. He is a very professional man in the studio. Of course, he's been doing it most of his life and one would expect that. Seeing him work, learning the song in a very methodical way and then doing different takes and trying different things -- the things he liked he could reproduce perfectly, and the things he discarded he replaced. Methodically, the songs achieved something that was very much like him but really was note for note what I had written.

Q: What's exciting about the songwriting process for you?

A: Maybe because I have done so much of the other stuff, it's new for me. I have done four six-hour operas, and 45-minute symphonies, and things like that. It's the change of the length almost. Or changing the problem. Whatever the problem might be. I suppose if I had spent my time writing shorter pieces, I'd be writing longer pieces right now. I think it is really like that. I had done a lot of the very extended time pieces, and now working in these very compact forms has piqued my interest.

Q: I understand you're undertaking a solo concert tour right now. How often do you perform alone?

A: I do about 20 concerts a year. I actually haven't done one in Boston in quite a while. They're easy to do because it's just myself. There is no equipment involved. I just hop on a plane and I play the piano. It does require a certain amount of practice, which -- as anyone will tell you -- is a big pain in the neck, but that comes with the territory.

I have been writing piano music. At the beginning I did a lot of arrangements of things apart from my own, but in the last four or five years I have been writing piano pieces. Ten years ago I really had to scratch around to get a program together. Now I have more than enough for one program and I'm working toward a whole evening, which I hope I can complete in the next year.

Q: What else are you working on?

A: There are so many interesting things to do. There are so many interesting collaborators. People like Bob Wilson or Allen Ginsberg. I had the opportunity to work with Bowie. His stuff is brilliant. I knew it in the late '70s; I was impressed with it then and I always thought I would one day do something with it. I am working with Martin Scorsese on a movie right now. The Dalai Lama movie, the one that the Chinese are so upset about -- I am about half through that score. It's a beautiful film. I have been watching him edit and have been doing the music right alongside him. It is a very interesting project. I think people will be very taken with it.

Q: When I first started hearing your music, I was taken by your group's name: the Philip Glass Ensemble. To me it had more of a rock-and-roll resonance than anything in the classical realm -- kind of like the Jimi Hendrix Experience or the Jeff Beck Group. When you named the Ensemble, were you trying to subvert the norm of the classical world?

A: It was the only name I could think of. I didn't really spend a lot of time thinking about it. It had the virtue of being who and what we are. We were making a distinction between ourselves and the group for new music at Princeton or the ensemble for new music at Columbia. And we were clear that we were striking out in a new direction and that was reflected in the name. I didn't think of it as an exciting name; it seemed to me fairly straightforward.

By the way, we have this concert in London coming up. The PGE -- which is our shorthand for it -- have been doing these cocktail operas. This new Bob Wilson score will be with the PGE. Some of the people in the Ensemble, like Michael Riesman, who co-produced Heroes, I have worked with 15 to 20 years. Michael also worked on The Secret Agent and a song on Heroes. When he is not conducting, he works as a music director.

Q: You were among the first serious composers to use things like synthesizers not as an experiment but as an equal instrumental voice within your music. What led you to do that? What was the reaction from the academic and classical community?

A: I think we were the first. I was out touring, and I really needed to have an instrument that I could tour with and that could convey a world of sound. With La Belle et la Bête -- I don't know if you saw that when we performed it -- that was a total MIDI system. We were using digital technology in the sampling and the accessing of sounds. By myself I wouldn't have been able to do it. I really needed collaborators and companions who understood the technology and were eager to use it and who brought it right into the ensemble. I think the academics were horrified, as you can imagine.

The funny thing is that now it turns out you can for just three or four thousand dollars buy a sampler that can do the stuff that expensive equipment used to do. It's changed dramatically the way people make music today. When I was a kid, synthesized music was only at the universities and made by huge equipment that was completely not portable and you had to sign up for time to work on it. Now, it's completely available. My son is building a home studio. For $2500 he bought an eight-track recorder, a sampler; he's setting up in the basement. Ten or 15 years ago that was unimaginable.

What that means is that this technology is available for young people. And it also means, talking about the academic world, they've had to completely retool. A lot of these places have had to find people who can teach; the younger voices want to know about sampling, they want to know about MIDI systems. They want to know about the kind of software that makes this useful and available. It's kind of a wake-up call to the schools that they have to catch up with the rest of the world. The music world will of course develop without them. I've noticed that some of the universities where they've had studios with electronic music are completely outdated now.

But you know, places like Berklee catch on right away. That particular place makes a point of being current. Because they have to. The people that are coming out of there are going right into music; they're not graduating music teachers, they are graduating people to go into the music world in one way or other. It's a very practical approach and it has its virtues. As a practical musician myself, that is something I am sympathetic to. Of course, an academic background has its qualities too. I realize that to have a deep training in traditional music is viable, so I don't think we can set that aside so easily.

Q: As a young, rogue composer you bucked the establishment. Was there a point in your career when you realized that you'd become part of the establishment yourself?

A: There are several generations of composers who have come along after me, so I can hardly be an upstart anymore. But take Heroes, for example. Very few orchestras will play the piece, because they consider . . . What I heard from the orchestra managers is, "We don't play rock and roll."

Q: But it isn't rock and roll.

A: They never looked at the music. They simply saw the name David Bowie and turned against it. There are a lot of places that will play other works of mine but will not play anything that seems to have that kind of influence. But in terms of the mainstream, I am not worried about finding places to play. I am not worried about having projects to do. I can be supported now within the world of music and by my music. That has given me a tremendous independence from the academic world.

Q: Meeting Ravi Shankar in the '60s really changed your life and the way you thought about music, didn't it?

A: It did. I met him at a special time. I was young enough and still impressionable enough so that could happen.

Q: Are you still in touch with him?

A: Yes, I am. I did a record with him not too many years ago called Passages, on a small label called Private Music. And we were talking about performing it live. We've been invited to do that in Mexico City next year. Ravi is playing beautifully, but he is getting older. I think if you have a chance to hear him you better hear him now.

Q: Heroes is on a label you're running, I understand, under the aegis of the major label PolyGram.

A: I was looking for a record to start off with that would say something about what Point Music was going to be about. One of the things we do is present experimental music and kind of classical avant-garde music, like Gavin Bryars. And world-music projects like Foday Susso. But I am also interested in this funny in-between world of popular music and experimental music that David Bowie and Brian Eno have been very active in. So I thought this was a way of announcing what the character of Point was going to be. It was important to define for PolyGram what we were trying to do, because I announced that this was kind of a new classical music. That was my intention. Good music can appear anywhere. It can appear in techno, it can appear in classical, it can appear in popular music. My point is that quality is not a monopoly by any particular group of people.

Q: You seem to be stimulated by having a lot of contexts for your music.

A: Well, Heroes, for example . . . It is important to note that Heroes has been a ballet with Twyla Tharp. She was touring last year with it. Heroes is kind of half-symphony, half-ballet.

I like the collaborative aspect of theater; you can bring in literature and image and movement. And with that comes these creators: writers and designers and choreographers and actors and singers. I like the community that develops around theater work -- the community of people and the community of ideas.

I try to work with young people on Point Music. I was just in Europe and came across the whole generation of techno-pop people in England that are interesting. I still listen a lot to Indian music. And of course my own tradition is classical and so I listen to that as well. I listen to everything, really. For me . . . the Grammys were last night; I knew all the music that was on at the Grammys. That's all interesting to me. I don't draw a line around myself that I won't cross. It doesn't mean I like everything, but I hear it.

Q: What do you have on the front burner right now?

A: There is a new opera that is opening in Germany in the spring. There's the film with Martin Scorsese that I mentioned. There's the new piece with Bob Wilson; that's completed. I would like to finish my cycle for piano. That's enough for now.

Q: You turned 60 last month. Did any revelations or imperatives comes with that birthday?

A: One thing I realized is that we think of age very differently today. Sixty is not the end of a career anymore, as it might have been some years ago. People expect to be very active for a long time. I think of myself still at the beginning of certain things I want to complete. But I'm also still thinking of inventing new language and new ideas.

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Philip Glass discography

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