American composer Philip Glass is in the process of curtailing his busy touring schedule, so that he can focus on what is already a prodigious rate of composition. Zachary Woolfe writes about this unrivalled master of musical minimalism.
A Joan Mitchell painting looms at the top of the grand staircase at the Anderson Collection, Stanford University’s modern art museum here. It’s a sweaty, emotive work, bright colours moodily smeared across a huge canvas.
On a recent Monday evening, Philip Glass sat at a piano placed between the painting and a few dozen potential donors to the Days and Nights Festival, his annual works-in-progress showcase south of Palo Alto. Glass, the master of musical minimalism, is known for the precision of his endlessly undulating arpeggios. When he plays his own pieces, though, they tend to blur and smear, like Mitchell’s brush strokes. Rhythms that in other hands are almost clinical in their regularity begin to smudge, the music newly volatile and feeling.
“This is called ‘Opening,’ ” he told the audience, by way of introducing a piece from his 1981 collection Glassworks.
“It’s sometimes called ‘Closing,’ if we do it at the end,” he added, a little sheepishly—to laughter that was perhaps inspired by Glass’ notorious willingness to repurpose his music.
There is another Glass opening upon us that is also a closing—of a circle in this composer’s 50-year career. His classic trilogy of the 1970s and ’80s has finally been surveyed at the Metropolitan Opera, his country’s preeminent opera house. Einstein on the Beach, Glass’ epochal epic, came to the Met in 1976, though it was a rental, and not produced by the company. A deliriously received Met production of Satyagraha opened in 2008, and his Akhnaten runs there through Dec. 7.
“I feel surprise,” he said a few weeks after the museum event, when asked whether he felt pride or even vindication at the belated milestone. “Really, truly surprise. I have a whole string of operas after that, some more successful, some less. I’ve certainly written a lot of them. I haven’t looked back that much. I’ve just kept going.”
At 82, Glass does remarkably little dwelling on the past. In fact, he is in the process of curtailing his busy touring schedule, so that he can focus on what is already a prodigious rate of composition—a level of productivity that has made him, depending on whom you ask, either the wonder or the punch line of modern music.
But the short-term result of announcing that you’re no longer concertising is that everyone wants to book you—so Glass is, for the moment, travelling nearly as much as ever.
“I think people are saying, ‘Oh, 82: Better get that in,’” said Richard Guérin, who as director of Glass’ record label, Orange Mountain Music, helps oversee the dissemination—and therefore the future—of the torrent of Glassism.
“It’s like a rocket, a creative rocket hurling out of control,” he said. “It’s this never-ending cyclone of creativity. We’re not trying to shape it; we’re trying to wrangle it.”
At Lincoln Center, the symbol of the musical establishment by which Glass was long snubbed, he is well represented this fall: In addition to the Akhnaten production, his new King Lear Overture opened the season at the New York Philharmonic, which had not played a note of his music on a subscription program until 2017. (He contributed a string quartet score for the Broadway production of Shakespeare’s King Lear earlier this year.)
But when it comes to talk of his legacy, and whether these prominent performances mean anything in terms of his acceptance into the canon, however that is defined, he demurs.
“I’m pragmatic,” Glass said. “I don’t know what’s going to happen in 10 years. We don’t even get to know what’s going to happen after someone dies. We need to wait until everyone who knew them is dead, too.”
But if the question is whether, a century from now, his operas will get new productions, his symphonies will circulate more frequently, or pianists will take on his études, Glass couldn’t care less.
“I won’t be around for all that,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.”
The bronzed character of the Akhnaten score emerged through necessity. The company in Stuttgart, Germany, that commissioned the work was renovating its theatre, so the performances took place in a space with a much smaller pit.
“So I said,” Glass recalled, “and it was a crazy thing to say, ‘Get rid of the first and second violins.’ And then we were fine. It wasn’t a masterpiece of orchestration. I just didn’t have any room.”
With the violas now taking the place of the violins, the sound shifted down an octave, its burnished sheen given body with brasses and punctuated by sometimes raucous percussion. As for the title character, the Egyptian pharaoh who is said to have pioneered monotheism—and to have had all traces of him erased for that blasphemy—Glass put him onstage from almost the beginning, but tantalisingly delayed his first musical entrance.
“How do I introduce him to the audience so that the first time they hear him, they understand he is a completely radical, unforgivable event in the Egyptians’ history, and they have to destroy him?” Glass recalled asking himself. “I’ll make him a countertenor, to sound not unnatural, but radical. Radical can be natural. He just was who he was.”
Glass, too, stayed what he was, though his style grew lusher, toggling between brooding melancholy and triumphal achievement for an overall impression of persevered-through struggle. His energetic rhythms made him a favourite of dance troupes; his scores for films like The Truman Show (1998), The Hours (2002) and Notes on a Scandal (2006) made him omnipresent.
His eventual reputation may well, in the end, be founded on his early works for his ensemble—their intensity an unlikely, still-bracing mixture of gaudy and spartan, bare yet glowing—and the early operas.
Nearly 30 operas followed the initial trilogy, depending on how you count. It’s a horde, naturally with ups and downs; the highlights—like the somber Kepler (2009) and the sardonic The Perfect American (2013), a vivisection of the Walt Disney legend—balance soggier efforts like Appomattox (2007). This year’s Days and Nights Festival, last month, brought the premiere of a darkly comic, slyly poignant short opera—for just three singers, keyboard and harp—to the text of an absurdist play by María Irene Fornés.
Glass’ solo piano music shows perhaps the most staying power, popping up on recitals and recordings. His first piano sonata, written for Maki Namekawa, premiered in July. “We have talked about it being in the tradition of Joseph Haydn’s monumental E-flat Major sonata,” Namekawa wrote in an email, “written late in his life, after he had abandoned the symphony.”
But Glass has hardly abandoned the symphony—with 12 and counting, starting in the early 1990s, including three based on David Bowie albums. Orchestras have been the most recalcitrant in embracing his music: Major ensembles have depressingly little room for living composers in general, and beyond conductor Dennis Russell Davies, who commissioned many of his large-scale works, Glass has lacked influential music-director champions.
Guérin and the rest of Glass’ team are focused on putting out as much of the music on record as possible, sending it into the cultural bloodstream. They are also trying to subtly influence its reception and programming. (If an orchestra is playing Beethoven’s Third Symphony—the Eroica—they might suggest pairing it with Glass’ Fourth, subtitled Heroes, after Bowie.)
The team gets more frustrated than the boss about the holdouts. “I get angry that these orchestras are stuck,” Guérin said. “But Philip says: ‘You can’t get upset about this stuff. You don’t defeat your enemies, you just wait until they die.’”
But surely a composer must care, or at least wonder, about the fate of his works? Even just a little?
Glass smiled.
“I’m not going to be here,” he said. © 2019 The New York Times