Al Weisel

 

Working Glass Man: Philip Glass

By Al Weisel

The Bulletin, December 14, 1999, 96-97

 

An interview with Philip Glass is as exhausting as watching one of those sequences in Koyaanisqatsi, the Godfrey Reggio film he scored in 1983, where the people are speeded up. In the course of just a few minutes, he's changed position on the couch in his basement several times, removed his wire-rim glasses, folded them, unfolded them and put them back on his head, taken his wristwatch out of his pocket, placed it on the table, picked it up and put it in his pocket again, before repeating all of these movements over and over again in different sequences.

 

All the while words and ideas spill out of his mouth so rapidly he barely pauses to take a breath. Only the dark circles around his deep-set eyes and the way he wearily runs his fingers through his wavy, tousled black hair, singed with grey, give any hint that the 62-year-old composer might be a little fatigued. Considering his exhausting schedule (the night before, he had arrived back from Europe where he performed nine concerts in 10 days) he should be tired.

 

It's the day before Thanksgiving, and he is planning to relax a bit at the brownstone in New York's lower east side, where he's lived since 1984. Built in the 1830s, the brick structure lists ever so slightly to one side where it's sinking into a tunnel built for a never-completed subway. At the moment, he's working on a new opera based on Franz Kafka's The Penal Colony to be directed by his former wife JoAnne Akalaitis. "I try to keep the morning free until 1 pm for writing and then the afternoon gets filled," he says of his routine, which begins at about 8 am every day with a cup of coffee before he sits down at the piano.

 

After a few weeks in New York, he's off to India for two weeks, culminating in Christmas in Bombay—"The Indians really love Christmas," he says. "It's a nice time to be there." And then in January he'll begin the millennium with a three-week tour of Australia. He just laughs when asked if he couldn't slow down a bit.

 

"You have to understand, I really like what I do," he says, as if letting us in on a dirty little secret. This will be his fifth visit to Australia since 1987 but it will be the first time he's performed his scores to the films Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi, as well as two new works, a score of the 1931 Tod Browning version of Dracula and Symphony Number 5, a work commissioned by the Salzburg Festival, which includes texts from all the world's leading religions. He'll also be performing some solo piano pieces and a retrospective.

 

"Australia's an amazingly interesting place," he says. "There's a very curious mixture of western, eastern and Aboriginal cultures. These are the three great cultural traditions of the world. You only find that kind of heterogeneous mixture in America."

 

Dracula is his latest attempt to transform the way we view film. "I'm trying to explore the idea of live performance with film," he says. "With La Belle et la Bete, I turned it into an opera. Koyaanisqatsi is treated as a silent movie. Dracula has live speaking. I've taken film and made it part of the performance experience. I think of the event not really as film with music but as music with film, a music event in which film becomes a participant."

 

Recently, when he performed Dracula at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, he made a controversial choice, which he plans to repeat in Australia. The film was projected on an opaque scrim and Glass and the Kronos Quartet were lighted behind this so that they were visible like ghostly figures behind the film itself. Some critics found this to be an imposition. "Someone told me there was a very angry woman in Los Angeles who said, 'How dare he do this.' Well it didn't take much daring. It wasn't that hard to do," says Glass laughing.

 

Unlike theatre, where each production offers a new interpretation, film has become a static art form, according to Glass. He's trying to shake that up. "The point of this exercise is that it introduces the possibility of interpretation, which doesn't exist in conventional film viewing," he explains. "When you see a film, the projectionist does not interpret the film. He puts it in and turns on the machine. In theatre, interpretation is a fundamental dynamic. That's what you go to see. You go to see Jason Robards' interpretation of whatever role he might be playing."

 

Unlike many composers, Glass sees performing as an integral part of his work. "People who stay home and write music may not even be aware of the public response to it," he says, but after more than 50 years of performing—he played his first concert when he was 10—Glass has become aware of how an audience affects a performance.

 

"There's a kind of energy that comes from the audience," he says. "The whole atmosphere is different from what it used to be three or four years ago. The wall of separation is breaking

down. I start by announcing what I'm going to do just to acknowledge that there's no invisible wall between me and the audience. I feel the quality of attention and my performances are on a higher level when I allow that connection."

 

Recently, in Madrid, he walked through the audience before a performance and decided to lengthen the program from 80 to 90 minutes. "I knew that audience was ready to sit down and listen. I just knew from being in the hall. This kind of intuition I developed from a lifetime of performing."

 

As the most popular "classical" composer in the world, Glass has received his share of jealous sniping from colleagues who think he is too eager to please his audience. "That's their hang-up," he says impatiently. "There was an idea that high art couldn't have a popular appeal, therefore art that was popular couldn't be high art. The difficulty with that idea is that it's betrayed immediately as soon as you look at historical facts. Mozart, Verdi, Bach, Stravinsky were all popular. It's not a viable idea so it's not worth talking about."

 

Most people have been introduced to Glass through his film scores. Last year, he was nominated for an Oscar for his emotionally wrenching score of Martin Scorsese's Dalai Lama biopic Kundun and this year won a Golden Globe for Peter Weir's The Truman Show.

 

Both directors were very different to work with. "Martin Scorsese was more open to what I wanted to do," says Glass. "Peter had very specific ideas. He was willing to listen to anything I did and he picked the pieces he liked and the pieces he didn't like he didn't use." Moreover, Weir took the unusual step of taking pieces Glass had composed for other films and using them in The Truman Show. "His idea was that [the character of] Gristoff, the director, would have put in the music he liked and happened to like my music a lot. So there you go," Glass says, shrugging, as if he doesn't entirely accept this explanation, but knew that Weir would do whatever he wanted.

 

His most rewarding cinematic work, however, has been the three films he scored for Godfrey Reggio, Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi and Anima Mundi. (They are working on a fourth, Naqoyqatsi.)

 

"When Koyaanisqatsi was first made, they thought it was a hippie movie—you're supposed to light up and get into some altered state and look at the pictures and listen to the music," says Glass. "They missed the point. It was really a critique of society from the point of view of traditional culture. Godfrey introduced a very powerful visual language into film making that is all over now. It's on TV all the time; it's pathetic, in fact. Godfrey developed that language to fulfill a particular dramaturgical need, so when it got used for selling banks and cars, it loses its power, but when you go back to how it was done, the power returns completely."

 

Glass has never stopped playing the score, or that of its sequel Powaqqatsi, and estimates he's performed it with the film more than 200 times. He is still amazed by the breadth of people who know his work. Last year, he even found himself satirised by South Park as the composer in the famous "Mr Hanky" Christmas episode. "That was funny," he says. "I loved it. Things like that amuse me terrifically. I was opening a bank account and the teller said, 'Oh, are you the composer?' and last night when I was checking in at the airport, someone said, 'You're the composer.' Who are these guys? The guy at the bank, the airport and then South Park. So the audience is very broad." He smiles as if he's suddenly that 10-year-old kid again, hearing an audience applaud for the very first time.■

 

Al Weisel is the co-author, with Larry Frascella, of Live Fast, Die Young: The Wild Ride of Making Rebel Without a Cause, being published in October 2005.

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