Composer / Performer  Philip  Glass

Two conversations with Bruce Duffie

Born on January 31, 1937 in Baltimore, Maryland, Philip Glass worked in his father's radio store and discovered music listening to the offbeat Western classical records customers didn't seem to want. He studied the violin and flute, and obtained early admission to the University of Chicago. After graduating in mathematics and philosophy, he went to New York's Julliard school, drove a cab, and studied composition with Darius Milhaud and others. At 23, he moved to Paris to study under the legendary Nadia Boulanger, who taught almost all of the major Western classical composers of the 20th century. While there, he discovered Indian classical music while transcribing the works of Ravi Shankar into Western musical notation for a French filmmaker. A creative turning point, Glass researched non-Western music in India and parts of Africa, and applied the techniques to his own composition. Back in the United States, Glass spent the late 1960s and early 1970s driving a taxi cab in New York and creating a major collection of new music. In 1976, his landmark opera "Einstein on the Beach" was staged by Robert Wilson to a baffling variety of reviews. His compositions were so avant-garde that he had to form the Philip Glass Ensemble [shown in photo below] to give them a venue for performance. Although called a minimalist by the Western classical mainstream, he denies this categorization. His major works include opera, theater pieces, dance, and song. His work in film, beginning with Koyaanisqatsi (1982), gave filmmakers such as Godfrey Reggio and Errol Morris a new venue of expression through the documentary form. His many recordings have also widened his audience. He was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera to compose "The Voyage" for the Columbus quinquacentennial in 1992. In 1996, he composed original music for the Atlanta Olympic Games, which, perhaps, made Glass almost mainstream. Glass remains one of the most important American composers. His music is distinctive, haunting, and evocative. Either performed by itself or in collaboration with other media, his compositions move the listener to unexplored places. More recently, a major reexamination of Glass's oeuvre has led him to be labeled the Last Romantic by the musical press. -- IMDb Mini Biography by Jim Sadur [text only - photo from another source]  --  Throughout this page, names which are links refer to my Interviews elsewhere on this website.  BD

Bruce Duffie:    You’ve been called a minimalist.  Do you like that label, or no?

Philip Glass:    I never liked those labels, but it’s a way for media people and journalists to conveniently talk about a large group of work which has certain superficial similarities.  In my opinion it’s not a very good description, but it’s the one that’s been bandied around a bit.

BD:    Would you rather think of yourself as getting the maximum use out of each fragment?

PG:    I think so.  That’s one way to look at it, but I don’t think composers think of themselves as labels, anyway.  You don’t think of yourself as a guy with a beard.  Any descriptions of that kind are limiting.  On the other hand, I understand that there is some need for people to relate groups of musicians in some way or another.  I just don’t think that’s a good label, and I don’t have a better one, but nevertheless, that’s the one we got stuck with.

BD:    Your most recent opera is Satyagraha?

PG:    Yes.

BD:    Let

Pavarotti has agreed to do it.

PG:    I don’t see why he can’t do it.  He’s a little big for the part, but I see your point.  That’s the problem with historical persons.  With Einstein on the Beach we could dress up a person to look like Einstein with the flowing white hair, the violin, the glasses.  It’s almost a caricature image of Einstein.  It’s easy to picture him.  Gandhi, too, was a man we can recognize rather easily.  I think we would have trouble with a real large tenor.  I don’t think we could cast someone who is quite that large.  Doug Perry, who does the part, is not a skinny guy, but he was able to communicate it partly because of his acting style and his singing style, and the conviction that he had in the part.  That does count for a lot.  [Laughs]  Usually it’s about the large sopranos that have to sing the parts of very dainty young women, but it can be done.

BD:    I was wondering about dropping typical opera singers into your works.

PG:    Meaning is the problem the physical casting or is it the mental problem?  With the physical casting you just look at a lot of people and you get the best voice who can approximate the role.  In this case we preferred a skinny, small Indian tenor, but there was not one available, so we settled for a medium-sized American tenor, who was excellent.  There may be mental problems apart from these physical problems, but those are questions of adjustment.  With the company that did the opening performances of Satyagraha in Holland, we had people who had done a lot of opera singing.  Dick Gill was the bass, Claudia Cummings was soprano, Doug Perry — all these people are itinerant opera singers.  The first week or so was a period of adjustment for them, adjusting to the kind of parts they were doing, and trying to figure out how they would be that person on the stage.  It was a problem that ultimately most of our company solved extremely well.  Bruce Hall was our baritone.  Iris Hiskey and Beverly Morgan were two other singers, but Iris, of course, had worked with me before with the ensemble, so she was very attuned to the music.

BD:    Are you coming to more traditional kinds of settings, or are we coming to more Philip Glass?

PG:    It depends what you look at.  This does not look like La Bohème and it never will.  I don’t take plays and set them to music, and I probably never will.  It’s a difficult question for me to answer, because I have no problem with this music or this kind of setting.  I’m aware that people coming out of a more traditional opera background find them a little unusual, and I can sympathize with the problems that they may have.  For some people, it violates their belief system so totally that they can’t accept it at all.  For other people, they see that it’s not that different and it’s just a question of adjustment.

BD:    It’s something new?

PG:    It’s something new, but it’s still part of the same tradition.

BD:    Is it really something new, or is it just something old that’s grown?

PG:    It’s hard to say.  There is something radically different, which I hinted at when I said that I don’t take plays and set them to music.  My experience in the theater comes out of a contemporary theater, starting with people like the Living Theater, or the Performance Group, or Meredith Monk, or Bob Wilson.  This is a theater that doesn’t have literary roots.  This is a theater that was created by dancers, by painters, by actors, by directors.

BD:    I understand with Einstein the music was set down first before the text?

PG:    Yes.  That often happens with the way I work.  But these were the people that I worked with as a young composer when I wrote a lot of music for the theater.  I mostly worked with a group called The Novel Minds.  When I began to do operas, it never occurred to me to find a playwright.  I didn’t look for a librettist.  I started again with an idea, the way I’d always worked, and I built around the image or the person or the idea of the opera.  That’s how Wilson and I worked on Einstein, and that’s how I worked on Satyagraha with Israel and DeJong and Riedel, the collaborators on that piece.  The new opera, Ahknaten, which is the eighteenth Dynasty of Pharaoh, was commissioned by the Stuttgart Opera, by the way.

BD:    Is Davies going to conduct it?

PG:    Yes.  That’ll be in ‘84 in Stuttgart, and I think it’ll be at the Houston Grand Opera in this country.  We’re talking about it.  They’re very interested in doing it, and we’re interested in them doing it.  The point about these operas is that I began with personages, with characters, and I built around those characters, taking events from their lives.  So I didn’t really work in a conventional way.  There are plenty of people interested in this kind of opera.  The two operas that I’ve written

.  In science, you experiment to find an answer.  In theater, what are you experimenting for?

PG:    Experimental in that sense, simply means it was non-narrative.  We use theater as a narrative story, and it simply wasn’t approached that way.  These companies that I work with rarely took a play and set it on the stage, and yet they’re a theater company.  So how do they do it?  Well, they sometimes began with the title, an image.  Einstein on the Beach began as a title.  We had no story.  We ended up with a libretto, but the libretto was the result of our work and not the origin of our work.  We are talking about people that consider the process of making the work, and the making of the work, identical.

BD:    Are you very concerned with the process, or are you more concerned with the end product, the way it looks on the stage?

PG:    Even though I’m not doing music like Einstein or Satyagraha right now, I am very tuned in to the actual process of making a piece.  Here’s another difference between music theater and traditional opera.  These kinds of works tend to be composite works that usually involve joint authorship.  Now, Verdi, Puccini, Mozart or whoever, no one stated that they hired a librettist or engaged a writer.  Nevertheless, those were the visions of those particular people.  No so true of Da Ponte, perhaps.  It’s arguable, but when we think of a Verdi opera, it’s the vision of that man.  When Bob Wilson and I did Einstein on the Beach, it was a shared work.  I just finished a work with Doris Lessing called Making the Representative for Planet 8, based on one of her books.  We worked with a designer, Eiko Ishioka.  We worked through the process of making the work.  When I did Satyagraha, I worked with Bob Israel, whose designs we’re seeing here in Chicago.  David Pountney was involved in those early stages in the work, and the creation of the work — we use that word — was really result of our working together.  In a way, I became rather like the leader of a creative team with associated authors.  That’s really the way it works, and this is a very different way of working.

BD:    Whose name should go on top, or should they all be in a line?

PG:    Sometimes it’s different.  It depends and those things you have to decide.  In the case of Einstein on the Beach, Bob Wilson and I have our names together.  That’s because we conceived the work together.  In the case of Satyagraha, my name goes on top because I had the idea to do an opera about Gandhi.  I asked some people to help me work on it, but it was always acknowledged that I had principal authorship, and they had a secondary authorship, though their names appear in the work.

BD:    You’re the chairman of the board on that?

PG:    In that case, yes.  One of the interesting things about the way we work in theater today is that these rules can change, and depending on the nature of the working relationship of the authors, we find the authorship will be different.  There are even works in which I’ve done pieces for collaborators whose names I don’t know.  For example, I did a piece called A Madrigal Opera.  I got the idea of writing a piece of music that could be staged dramatically in different ways, very much the way a dance choreographer would create a dance work on a piece of music.  So I wrote a dramatic theater work in which the subject was not specified, and so far three different directors have supplied stories and scenery.  This piece has had several other names.  It’s sometimes called The Panther, but the original person I worked with

BD:    You get commissions all the time.  How do you decide which commissions you’ll accept and which commissions you’ll turn down?

PG:    That’s a problem because the real problem is the time.  I’m interested in so many things.  I’m kind of a pushover in a certain way.  I can be talked into doing anything, really, but I don’t really have the time to do it.  For example, I got a letter just the other day from London.  There is group there that has a steel band and they wanted to know if I would write a piece for them.  What a wonderful idea!  The person said in the letter that, “We’ve been thinking about your music.  We think that your music would be extremely appropriate for our instrumentation.  Would you consider doing it?”  So I put the letter aside and I’ve got to answer it, and I’m thinking, what a nice thing to do!   What I’d like to do is little pieces between these large works.  It’s refreshing in a way, and the change of scale from large piece to small piece in itself is kind of refreshing.

BD:    Do you get ideas when you’re doing a large piece that you know you can maybe use in a small piece?

PG:    No, I don’t usually work that way.  Ideas do turn up all over the place, so you work on one piece and like something it stays with you.  For days I was playing through The Representative recently because I was about to have the piano-vocal score reproduced, and I wanted to check and make sure I had all the words right.  During that time I realized that there were elements in it that were in Songs From Liquid Days.  I said to myself, “Oh, my goodness!  I took that and I put it there.”  Either I had forgotten or hadn’t noticed

BD:    Are you at all surprised by the immense popularity of your music?

PG:    You know, in a way, I’m a little bit [mumbles a bit of wordless exasperation] about it in a certain way, though that may sound surprising.  I do a lot of concerts and I talk to a lot of people, but I don’t see myself the way the world sees me.  I see much more of a continuity between myself and the person that began with an ensemble in 1968 doing six or eight concerts a year for a handful of people.  I experience my life as a continuity in that way, so it creeps up on you, in a way.  For example, on my schedule this year I can’t help but notice that I’m in a lot of different countries, going to a lot of different openings of a lot of different operas.  Obviously, something has happened.  I don’t have as much time as I used to.

BD:    Does that please you?

PG:    Of course.  It seems an odd way to put it, but I don’t take it personally.  For example, Satyagraha is being revived here in Chicago, and a few changes will be made.  David Bellamy has thought about it and has made some very interesting additions to the piece, but basically it’s the original piece.  But I’m very pleased to see this opera being done again.  I can almost say that I’m pleased for the opera, as if the opera had a life of its own.  Artists often talk about their work that way.  It had been in production somewhere almost continuously for five years from 1980 and 1984, either in Germany or Holland or America.  Then for a few years it wasn’t around, and now I see it starting again.  It goes here and we expect it to go to Seattle next year, then it’ll go back to the New York City Opera.  There is a company in Argentina that’s interested in it, and I’ve had a letter from the Moscow Art Theater.  I don’t know if they would want it.  Actually the Moscow Art Theater asked me if I had a piece for them, and I replied the only piece I wanted them to do was Satyagraha.  I thought that would be interesting.  Gandhi is the first refusenik of all time.  I thought if they could do that, that would be quite interesting.  Let’s see what happens...

BD:    You’d rather give them this piece than slip something else in to get a bigger audience?

PG:    Well, it’s the best piece for them!  Now in Rio and São Paolo in Brazil, there’s a company that wants to do a work, and I’m giving them Akhenaten, because I think that one is the right piece for that company.  I have enough pieces so I can kind of think of it that way.  That director would be the right person for that piece.

BD:    When you’re writing a new piece, are you conscious of whom you’re writing it for?

PG:    Oh, yes.

BD:    Are you writing the right piece for that time and place?

PG:    Well, you try to, and sometimes what happens is you miss the date by a year or two.  Sometimes you end up in the wrong city, which is exactly what happened with The Representative.  Originally, I wrote The Representative for Planet Eight with David Hockney to be the designer.  David was very ill that year.  He had trouble with his ears, actually.  He has recovered now and is fine, but at the time I was doing the piece, I lost my designer.  Fortunately, I was working with Eiko Ishioka, and I involved her in the project.  But in the meantime, the schedule got changed by a year or two.  The original company that was going to do it was no longer able to do it, so a piece that I’d originally written for the Dutch Opera is now turning out to be for the Houston Opera.  So our intentions are one thing, and the results may not always conform to that.  Twyla Tharp asked for music for her company.  I went to see her company dance.  I’ve seen it before, of course, but I went to a number of rehearsals and I talked with her.  She wasn’t specific about what she wanted, but...

BD:    When you go like that, are you looking with different eyes and listening with different ears?

PG:    Yes.  I was very much thinking about a piece for her company.  I have the feeling that if I were writing it for Molissa Fenley’s company or The American Ballet Theater, or another company, I would have written a different piece.  I don’t doubt that I would have written a different piece.

BD:    Then would you be offended if this other company takes over the piece that you wrote for Twyla Tharp?

PG:    No!  No, no.  It just becomes different.  There is the original conception of a work, and then there are these other things that happen.  After all, Satyagraha has had two productions and it’s been in five different opera houses.  This is the first American opera house, really.  Don’t forget, in Brooklyn, in New York, where it played in 1980, that’s not really an opera house.  That’s a presenting house.  To be in a real opera house is quite a different matter.  Another work I did, The Juniper Tree, is going into the third production, so it’s well beyond the original.  That work I did with another composer named Bob Moran, so I’ve even collaborated with composers.  That was a very interesting process, by the way.  At one point I wrote a theme and he wrote the variations.  Things like that have happened before, but it was very interesting to do it.  We originally wrote that piece for a children’s music school in New York.  They never did it; another company did it, and now it’s being done by a German opera house, and the opera company in Omaha.  It’s interesting when people come to a work and they bring something new to it.

BD:    I want to talk about the large gulf that is apparently separating the big concert public, with, say, the Saturday Night Live public.  You have feet planted in both sides.

PG:    Yes.

BD:    Are you going to try, then, to draw the audience from one to the other in both directions?

PG:    The differences aren’t as great as we imagine.  Most of my friends stayed up that night to watch me on Saturday Night Live, and that wasn’t the first night they had watched it.  Most of my friends watch it all the time, anyway.  So the difference between a high culture and a general public is sometimes the same people and how they feel at a different time of the day.  The differences are not that great.  I have friends who have a hard time if they have to choose between Twyla Tharp and going to a Mets baseball game.  They don’t know which one to go to, and they’ll somehow try to do them both.  So our loyalties are less defined.  We as a people experience our culture in a lot of different ways.  We define ourselves less rigidly than we used to.

BD:    Is this good?

PG:    Well, it’s good for the artist.  It means that it’s more challenging.  It’s more difficult for writers and analysts of culture, because the old formulas don’t work anymore, and you have to think of new ways of defining art.

BD:    But artists never really seem to be concerned with formulas and definitions.

PG:    Yes and no.  Yes and no.  How’s that for an answer?  [Both laugh]  When I played on that particular program, I played the same music on Saturday Night Live that I play at my concerts.  So what I do is I take my work and put it in different places.  The interesting thing is that we tend to experience it somewhat differently in those different places.  But has the work really changed?  I’m not sure.  Our perception of the work has changed, because we put it in those different arenas.  I began doing that years ago when I would go to Los Angeles, for example.  One year I would play at the Roxy, which is a nightclub on the Sunset Strip, and the next year I would play at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.  I just thought it was interesting because the people that came to the Roxy were the same people that went to the other place, but it was different for them.

BD:    Should the people who go to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion all the time come to see you?

PG:    I don’t get those people anyway.

BD:    Do you want to?

PG:    I want to get everybody!  [Both laugh]  I don’t exempt anyone as a possible follower of my work or anybody else’s work.  Why should I?  There’s no reason to do that.  I don’t know who those people might be.  You’d be surprised.  I was down in El Paso once doing a concert, and a lady came up to me after the concert.  She said, “I just love that music.”  I said, “Oh, really?  Where did you hear it?”  She said [in a southern drawl], “I was driving in my pick-up and I heard this come on the radio, and I said ‘that music’s for me.’”  She then said, “Tell me something.  What is it?”  I didn’t know what to say exactly, and I said, “It’s just music.”  But the point is that kind of thing happens to me a lot.  That’s a person who didn’t know I was a Soho artist or an underground composer, or an experimental composer, or a minimalist composer.

BD:    You were just the guy who wrote that piece.

PG:    Right.  There was someone driving around in her pick-up and heard it on the radio, and heard I was in town so she came to the concert.  I didn’t write the music for her, but I didn’t not write it for her either.  I think that’s real interesting.

BD:    The great big philosophical question, then.  What is the ultimate purpose of music today?

PG:    Of course that’s a complicated thing to talk about.  One of the things that’s interesting about the theater is that I’m getting around to answering the question.  I’ll do it in a backwards kind of way.  One of the things that interests me about the theater is that you can do a performance of a work, let’s say in Chicago, and you can do seven performances in a theater, and close to twenty thousand people will come.  But I come to Chicago, usually to perform with my ensemble, and I do one concert.  If I played in New York, I can do one or two concerts, but I can run a show for twenty performances.  It’s interesting that the theater and the concert audiences are so different.  Concert music doesn’t stretch that well, but theater music does.  You can stretch it over a much larger audience.  I began to see this by working this way, because after all this is what I do.  Some years, in the same year I’ll do fifty concerts, and at the same time there may be two operas and a couple of ballets going on.  So I’m seeing that all the time, and I see now that the theater is this very special place.  It’s a place where the world of art and the world of entertainment intersect.  It’s a very curious place, and when I look back I think about Verdi.  I’m not exactly comparing myself, but whatever you might think of the relative merits of the work, basically we’re in the same business.

BD:    [With a big smile]  I think he’d be happy with that.

PG:    [With a pleased look]  Thank you.  The theater is a public affair and the opera is that interesting place where art and entertainment come together.  That’s not so true in the concert hall.  There we’re talking about art in a more abstract way.  However, we have organizations and people now who are even challenging that.  I went to see the Kronos Quartet recently and I found that extremely entertaining.  They meant it to be.  They absolutely meant it to be.  You could say, “Are they selling out?”  Well, maybe they are, but I heard a concert of all twentieth century string quartet music, and it was marvelous!  There were pieces I never would have heard, and some pieces I knew.  They did it with a style and a show-biz savvy that any rock band would admire.  They knew what they’re doing.  They’re not doing this unconsciously.  They’re very clearly working that way, and what they’ve probably done more in a few years and probably played more pieces of twentieth century music than the Juilliard String Quartet has played in its whole career.  I don’t mean to knock them at all.  As an institution the Juilliard’s been a powerful force for contemporary music, but the Kronos players have committed themselves.

BD:    It’s a different approach to concert giving.

PG:    Exactly, and they’ve made a full commitment to this.  So, it’s interesting.  You say, “What is the purpose of music?  Where is it going?”  The parameters of music are very broad.  We have composers amongst us who write in a very abstract way and can write beautiful pieces, complex pieces, pieces that they would admit are not meant for the general public, and we would be misunderstanding them if we put them in an outdoor space and brought ten thousand people there.  It wouldn’t be fair to anybody, particularly.  I don’t think those pieces are meant to be heard that way.  You have pieces that are more abstract, and you have other composers who are willing or able for temperamental reasons to address themselves to a broader audience.  We can’t say that one is better than the other.  I’m afraid that the populist pieces of Rossini are going to be around forever.  I think that Mozart is one of our best theater composers and one of our best composers of any medium or any genre altogether.  There’s no one that wouldn’t agree that Don Giovanni or The Magic Flute or Così fan Tutte are works of supreme musical importance.

BD:    Do you feel you’re part of this line of composers?

PG:    [Laughs]  Which line, because I’m mentioning several.  Certainly I fall within the range from the abstract to the more accessible.  Clearly, for temperamental reasons and for personal reasons and for artistic reasons, I’m a person who, very frankly, spent my time writing for the broader public.  The curious thing is that for so many years I was considered an avant garde composer, an underground composer, because the personal style that I chose for almost fifteen or twenty years was considered very radical.  But in the perspective of 1987, it doesn’t seem radical at all.

BD:    Are you ever going to be old hat, or passé?

PG:    I don’t know.  [Both laugh]  The interesting thing is that in concerts I do now, I play pieces from 1969, and some of them sound very fresh still.  It’s interesting.  If you’ve written music that spans twenty-five years, you can go back to it.  You can look at a piece, and some pieces have survived better than others.  That’s true for everybody.  I have pieces from my thirties that I still can listen to, but pieces from my forties I’m not particularly interested in.

BD:    You don’t want to disown those pieces, do you?

PG:    One doesn’t have the choice.  I’m too public a person to be able to do that anyway at this point.  But I don’t know exactly what point is the best point to make about all this.  A lot of these things have to do with where our natural gifts lie and where our temperament is.  I always felt that my music was meant for a public of some sort.  The fact is that I began as a performing musician with my ensemble when I was barely thirty, and against all kinds of obstacles I continued to play in small houses and out of the way places for years and years until finally I got an audience.  But my conviction was that the music was for those kinds of places.  It was meant for public consumption in that way.  It took a while for everyone to agree with me, but now that people have, it shouldn’t be a surprise.  After all, that’s what I’ve been doing all along.  So it’s a complicated question, and

To read my Interview with Henry Brant, click HERE. To read my Interview with Iannis Xenakis, click HERE. To read my Interview with John Cage, click HERE.

© 1982 and 1987 Bruce Duffie

These conversations were recorded in Chicago.  The first at the University of Chicago on February 19, 1982, and the second at Lyric Opera of Chicago on July 29, 1987.  Portions were broadcast on WNIB twice in 1987 and again in 1997.  Copies of the unedited audio of both have been placed in the Archive of Contemporary Music at Northwestern University.  This transcription was made in 2015, and posted on this website at that time.

To see a full list (with links) of interviews which have been transcribed and posted on this website, click here.  To read my thoughts on editing these interviews for print, as well as a few other interesting observations, click here.

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Award - winning broadcaster Bruce Duffie was with WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago from 1975 until its final moment as a classical station in February of 2001.  His interviews have also appeared in various magazines and journals since 1980, and he now continues his broadcast series on WNUR-FM, as well as on Contemporary Classical Internet Radio.