First he turned his back on the establishment . . . now he'spart of it. But for Philip Glass, success was on his terms

This interview first appeared in the October 1986 issue ofElectronic Musician.

The success of Philip Glass is a product of theAmerican work ethic and an attitude akin to punk rebellion. Like punksrejecting their rock heritage, Glass, nearly 20 years ago, rejected histraditional classical background. He had nothing to lose; orchestraswere never going to play his music anyway. So Glass hit the road withFarfisa organs in the late '60s and early '70s, an unprecedented movefor a classical composer (unless your taste for the classics runstoward ? Mark and the Mysterians).

Philip Glass is now, of course, regarded as one of the pioneers ofminimalism, a stylistic term that he only grudgingly acknowledges. Withhis ensemble of electronic keyboards, reeds, and voices, Glass createda music that has evolved from the hypnotically repetitive cycles ofMusic with Changing Parts, with its juggernaut eighth notepatterns, into expansive and dynamically wide-ranging operaorchestrations like Satyagraha.

Glass has become the best-known classical composer of our era. Hismusic is courted by international opera companies, film producers, andpop luminaries. His recent recording, Songs from Liquid Dayson CBS records, features pop figures like Paul Simon, Linda Ronstadt,Suzanne Vega, The Roches, and Laurie Anderson. It's not "Fifty Ways toLeave Your Lover," but it's actually on the pop charts, a virtuallyunprecedented feat for a contemporary classical composer and certainlya long way from his first LP, Music with Changing Parts,pressed on the small Chatham Square label in 1971.

While Glass was creating a new music audience coalition that hadnever existed before, he began to receive recognition from theestablishment music world in the form of several opera and theatercommissions. First came the avant-garde opera Einstein on theBeach (1976), scored for his ensemble. It was followed bySatyagraha (1980), a sweeping opera with full string and brasssections and choirs.

Much of his success can be traced to the electronic/rockinstrumentation he's employed. "It may be easier for a younger listenerto hear this instead of a string quartet," Glass admits. As Glass'spopularity has grown, the technology has become updated with digitalsynthesizers and Emulators. The interface between synthesizers andsymphony orchestras, new music and traditionalism, has generated abubbling crosscurrent that he's riding through the '80s.

Tuesdays are interview days for Philip Glass. For several years now,he has set aside that day to talk with the press--an act that is both ameans of self-promotion and a way to establish his unique aesthetic.Our interview, which occurred during a recording session for a newTwyla Tharp dance piece, was interspersed with calls from Time,Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times and a half dozen othermedia outlets, all trying to tap into a phenomenon that has not onlychanged the course of contemporary classical music but is also . . .popular.

EM: How does it feel to be part of themainstream?

PG: My God! I never thought of it that way. I suppose that'sgoing to happen . . . do you think it's already happened?

EM: I think so; you're definitely part of a certainestablishment.

PG: Oh, well, that's true. See, mainstream means to me massculture, and that hasn't quite happened. I'm told Liquid Days,the new record, has sold 150,000 copies. Now, that's not a million anda half. That's a lot of records, though, for someone who's spent hislife writing concert music and working in opera houses. But I wouldn'tcall it a mass audience. Mainstream might be closer to the truth insome ways; there are many people in the true music establishment--I'mtalking about the people that run the committees, give out the PulitzerPrizes, and give out the grants and so forth--to whom this music willnever be their cup of tea. And they will never acknowledge it as beingimportant or serious. So having said that, how does it feel to be partof the mainstream? It's terrific.

EM: In the beginning, up through at least Music inTwelve Parts, you were using singers more as another instrument. Itseems that you've gradually come around to a more traditional way ofvocal writing.

PG: You're talking about classically trained singers and Ithink that's true. It's important to note that I began working withreal opera singers in '78 and learned a lot about singing from them. Isolicited their advice on vocal writing; how, for example, the voicecan be used for long periods of time without straining it, withouttiring it, where the best parts of the voice were. During the firstyears I worked with a very talented singer and composer, Joan LaBarbara, who was interested in the voice as an instrument. What Joanprovided was very much that attitude.

EM: Another aspect of the voice is the way you've beenusing the Emulator, at least in concert.

PG: We use the Emulator as a chorus to back up DoraOhrenstein, a live singer. Since I can't really travel with a largevocal ensemble--I do about 50 concerts a year--I bring Dora and theEmulator, and if she has to have a vocal ensemble with her, she playsalong with herself singing. Using this approach with, for example,The Photographer, which we recorded with many voices, comesvery close to creating the effect of a larger vocal group.

EM: How did you arrive at the ensemble setup you havewhich is essentially electric keyboards, reeds, and voice?

PG: At the outset it was what was available to me. I wasworking with a number of other composers in my ensemble and since weall played keyboards, the only way to get three keyboards together wasto use electric ones. That meant we had to amplify the other players.So what became the sound of the ensemble was really happenstance.

EM: Do you feel that the new generation of instrumentshas helped expand your original concept, or have you altered yourconception because of new technology that has developed?

PG: As you probably suspect, both things have happened. Webegan to use (synthesizers) as they became polyphonic; we're alltwo-handed keyboard players. Before that I used electric organs and theYamaha double keyboard. The first synthesizer was maybe the Prophet 5and then came the Rolands, Oberheims, OBXs, and the DX series. Yamahahas been a big mainstay since that became available; then there's alsothe Emulator and Emulator II. That's all been within the last eight ornine years.

EM: What kind of effect has the new instrumentation hadon the music you make?

PG: Let me put it this way: it's given me more possibilities.I've written a lot of symphonic-type music for operas. It's allowed meto take large-scale symphonic works and adapt them for the ensemble sothat the ensemble now sounds symphonic.

Michael Riesman, the ensemble's music director (see sidebar), doesall the programs. Michael told me the other day that he estimated therewere something like 50 separate programs that we use in a concert. Nowthat we have seven synthesizers, I can take a work like the operaAkhnaten and adapt that work, which was scored originally forwinds, brass, strings, percussion--a symphonic type of orchestra--andproject that kind of sound from the ensemble. So we're not really doingarrangements; we're really doing transcriptions, where we take thesound of an orchestra and make the ensemble sound like theorchestra.

I tend not to use synthesizers for invented sounds, but either toextend or imitate acoustic instruments. Recently I did a work calledThe Descent into the Maelstrom which I wrote directly for theensemble using the programming possibilities of all the synthesizers,and there's no doubt that the way that the synthesizers have evolved sorapidly has extended to a great degree the way I can write for theensemble. The next stage for us is the MIDI system so we can linkseveral synthesizers together to make composite sounds.

EM: Oh, you haven't done that yet?

PG: Well, we do it in the studio and we do it live to alimited degree, but we're going to do more. (MIDI) will allow us tomake a much better string sound than we can currently get, and I thinkit will improve the vocal sounds a great deal. So in a certain way,people who really do electronic music would probably consider this notvery adventurous, because what we're doing is trying to perfect andmake a kind of neo-realism in terms of acoustic and symphonicinstruments.

But I have to remind you that all through the '50s, the '60s, and'70s, there was a whole development of pure electronic music where themain currency really was invented sounds rather than found sounds. Andfor the most part, by and large, it was not successful. I'm not surewhy. I suspect that our taste is very conservative in the sense of whatwe'll accept as real sounds, that largely, the invented sounds are alittle too strange for most people, and that we eventually can learnthem.

EM: If I'm not mistaken, one of the reasons that youformed the Philip Glass Ensemble was because it was the only way youcould get your music performed at that time.

PG: That was true and right up through 1979, I would say1980.

EM: But now, even though you have access to orchestrasand players, you still keep the ensemble.

PG: Well, the ensemble may not be the only group that canplay the music, but it happens to be the best. Remember that we've gota 12 year head start on everybody. I'm playing with people like MichaelRiesman, Richard Peck, and John Gibson; Jack Kripl has been with me for20 years practically, Michael Riesman for 12. Kurt Munkacsi's beendesigning the sound equipment and overseeing the making of the recordsas a producer since 1970. I'm talking about an ensemble that playsregularly all year long, 50 concerts a year.

It's not that a full orchestra can't do it justice. Last summerDennis Russell Davies played several programs with the PhiladelphiaOrchestra in Saratoga. They were wonderful, wonderful concerts. But Ican't go on tour with the Philadelphia Orchestra.

EM: You've often talked about your music being a reactionto the academic music and the serial, atonal music that was going on upuntil that point; I would say you were composing more modern orchestralmusic. Of all the reactions you could have had to that style, why thisparticular one?

PG: In 1964, '65, and '66, I certainly looked at the oldergenerations of composers as people that were my enemies. I had todisplace them. Everything they did was wrong, almost anything I coulddo would be right as long as it wasn't that. It was a very emphaticpoint of view that I had, and for a young man beginning in a highlycompetitive business as is composition, the music world, writingserious or concert music, it was a psychological boost to have anattitude like that, which was crucial. After all, there were somepretty heavy guys around at that time. Stockhausen, Boulez, Berio andCarter, they're still around and still important, but at that time theyseemed like they would be there forever and they were going to runthings as long as they wanted to.

Well, it turned out not to be that way, and it's not necessary forme to denounce them as strongly as I did then. I'm not saying that Ididn't believe that at the time. I did. From time to time I willresurrect that attitude in all its strength and glory whennecessary.

But I think you have to look at what it must have been like. Here Iwas 26, 27, and there were these guys who had the music world sewn up.And the only thing we could do, I mean we as a younger generation, wasto blow them out of the water one way or the other. We just denouncedthem and got on with our own work. It turns out now, 20 years later,that there seems to be room for everybody. In fact, we seem to havemore room than they do which I don't mind at all.

EM: Your exposure to Indian music seemed to affect thechange of styles from serialism to minimalism.

PG: I had the good fortune to meet Ravi Shankar at a veryimportant part of my life. I would say it wasn't a switch in stylebecause I had no style before. I wrote in the manner of music teachers.My first real voice came after this period I spent with Ravi Shankarand my travels in the east. I formed an amalgam of ideas about rhythmicstructure and my own ideas about pitch structure and that was thebeginning for me. Prior to that I had no voice of my own. I wrote a lotof music but it was not particularly interesting.

EM: You've done five full-fledged operas to date, is thatright?

PG: No, it's six now, Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha,Akhnaten, CIVIL warS, The Juniper Tree with Robert Moran, and thesixth one, The Making of the Representative for Planet Eight,is based on a novel of the same name by Doris Lessing.

EM: There's an incredibly pristine quality to your music.There's no grit, and I don't mean that in a negative sense at all.There's a perfection to the whole sound that you create.

PG: Partly, it has to do with the care with which the actualpitches are chosen. There are no extra notes in the music--only thenotes that you need. I don't clutter up a score with a lot of alteredchords or passing notes or things. It's fairly spare in that way, isn'tit? You might say "minimal." (laughter) But that's a use of the word ofquite a different kind. I think that kind of spare writing gives you alot of space and I think we all fill that space in ourselves. That'spart of the aesthetic of it in a way, isn't it?

EM: Concerning Songs from Liquid Days, I know alot of people are calling that your rock album which it obviously isnot. Musically it's not much of a departure from previous Philip Glassmusic.

PG: I think the reference is to the people on the record, notto the music on the record. I think you're right. There is no bass,guitar, or drums on the record. There is percussion but not a drum kit.There is hardly a song on the record under six minutes, and one of themis ten minutes. It's really a cycle of songs where each song means morein the group than by itself.

EM: Have you had friendships or musical relationshipswith most of the writers you used?

PG: Yes, I think, all of them. Suzanne Vega is the one I'vemet most recently and that was about a year ago. I met her just beforeshe did her first record for A&M. But Paul (Simon) and Laurie(Anderson) and David (Byrne), I've known them for years.

EM: It seems like on Mishima that you were writingin a few modes that were not typical Philip Glass styles.

PG: That was one of the most successful things I've done inrecent years, and maybe that's what I liked about it. I'm alwaysinterested in things that don't sound like me. There is more of that inMishima; Paul Shrader gave me the script about six monthsbefore he shot it and I wrote the music to the script, not to thepicture, and he also cut to the music--not the other way around. Wereyou talking about the guitar things, the Duane Eddy type things? You'dhave to see the film to appreciate that the guitar music goes with thatcharacter, which is from one of the novels called Kyoko'sHouse. It seems obvious, once you see the material, that it wouldhave to go there. I had not compunction about writing guitar music andI'm very pleased with it.

You know, films don't come my way very often. I've done three in mylife and I've mainly been writing music for a long time. Mainly I'm notinterested in industry films. There's no time to work on them. I insiston the collaborative mode and to be given a finished film and be toldthat a score is needed in six weeks is simply not interesting; it'slike digging ditches to me. And the money is not worth two months ofyour time when you could be doing a violin concerto or a scene from anopera or something else. But every once in a while a good film projectcomes along and another one has. Godfrey (Reggio) has come back with anew film project, a Koyaanisqatsi type film. It takes place inthe southern hemispheres. It's being shot in Africa, South America,India, Hong Kong, Nepal, a little bit in Northern Europe and NewYork.

EM: I spoke with a German composer named Peter MichelHamel, who performs a cyclical style music, and he said there was ahypnotic aspect to it for the performers in the same way that maybeknitting is hypnotic.

PG: No, quite the reverse. If you get spaced out you startmaking mistakes. It takes a state of alertness that I don't associatewith hypnosis or trance. The music doesn't repeat that much; it justappears to. If you talk to anyone in the group they'll talk about howattentive you have to be.

I used to do solo concerts. I've been playing the piano lately athome and I'm getting interested in that again. I'm thinking of writinga series of piano pieces next year that I could perform by myself.

EM: When you're composing, do you ever feel the need tothrow in a blaring atonal chord or something dissonant?

PG: You know, it's funny, I look for moments like that butthey don't come up as often as I would like them to. What I mean bythat is you're always trying to shake up your own language; the firstproblem that a composer has is to find his own voice and the secondproblem is to get rid of it. I'm at the point in my life where there'ssuch a body of work that I'm constantly looking for other ways of doingit.

EM: But couldn't you create those moments if you wantedto?

PG: You're getting into the subject of process, and finallymusic has to have an emotional truth to the person who's writing it.You don't want your music to be lies about what your real impulses are.If it doesn't have that emotional truth to you, then what's the pointof doing it?

Sidebar: Artists Under Glass

The sound of the Philip Glass Ensemble is the product of its membersas well as its composer. Kurt Munkacsi, who had previously worked as ajunior engineer for John Lennon, has been with Glass since 1970 as bothproducer and live/studio sound engineer. Like an ensemble member, hesits on stage with the musicians during performances, running hismixing console. In addition, he runs Philip Glass's 24-track recordingstudio and does many of his own productions, including Lucia Hwong'srecent House of Sleeping Beauties.

Michael Riesman came to the ensemble approximately 12 years ago. Atrained conductor, he now leads the Philip Glass Ensemble on record andin performance, as well as playing his increasingly complex keyboardparts. Riesman has worked on several of his own film and theater worksand has his first solo recording due out on the new Rizoli label. Heclaims that it will be much more improvisational than his work withPhilip Glass.

When I spoke with Munkacsi and Riesman, they were recording thevoice track for a Twyla Tharp theater piece with vocalist DoraOhrenstein. Riesman was not only conducting the singer, but wasoperating the tape machine with a remote control unit, executing whatturned out to be an almost bar by bar punch in of Ohrenstein's voicetrack. He didn't learn that at Harvard, where he obtained his MA andPhD.

Munkacsi and Riesman talked about how they've helped bring rockrecording and performance techniques to the classical music of PhilipGlass.

EM: How did it evolve that you ended up on stage with theEnsemble?

KM: First, we were making a statement about how we consideredthe technical aspects--the electronics, the amplification, and themixing console--to be part of the music. The other part was verypractical; we couldn't afford a separate monitor mixer and stagemonitors, so we found the easiest way to keep the sound together wasfor me to sit with the musicians and hear what they were hearing.

EM: What kinds of problems did you have to solve with thePhilip Glass Ensemble and the mix of instruments that theyuse?

KM: In the beginning it was mixing the acoustic saxophones,voice, and violins with the Farfisa organs. Basically what I did wasput together a sound system that was like a rock and roll sound system.I miked everything like you did a rock and roll band, at least in thosedays, which was to stuff the mics up the saxophone bells so everythingwas really bright and present.

EM: I understand you use a Macintosh now?

KM: Yes, we have a Macintosh and Southworth's Total Musicprogram. With this piece, Michael entered all the music into theMacintosh, then we set it up with all of the synthesizers and we didMacintosh-to-synthesizer--direct to 2-track tape--as a rehearsal tapefor Twyla. Now we've gone back and started adding real instruments.

MR: Total Music is the first program that I've worked withthat actually is usable for doing a complete piece of music. Beforethat I'd been working with the Commodore 64; its deficiencies wereaggravating to the point of making it useless.

But this software still has a lot of bugs in it and it's constantlybeing updated. Once I got used to the system and figured my way arounda few catastrophic bugs, though, it became quite a pleasure to workwith.

As far as adding the real instruments is concerned, since we'rerunning out of tracks, we're going to try linking up Total Music to theSMPTE time code on the tape while we're mixing it, and play a lot ofsynthesizers live while we're mixing.

MR: It seems to be possible. One of the latest updates isthat Total Music is completely slaved to the MIDI clocks, so it getsits own song pointer and follows the tape wherever you go.

KM: We're using a Roland SBX-80 to read SMPTE from the24-track tape; the MIDI output with the clock and song pointer datafeeds the Southworth, which follows the tape machine amazinglywell.

EM: Michael, you're a classically trained keyboardplayer. I assume you have a certain amount of technical expertise.What's it like playing this kind of music that depends so much onreally precise repetition of parts?

MR: That's the challenge of it really, the preciserepetition. It's demanding physically and mentally to keep the rhythmsteady and not lose your place. Since I've been doing it for such along time, I've managed to develop a light touch on the synthesizerkeyboard so that I can manage to sustain this for a whole performance.If I was playing this as a piano and pushing hard on all the keys I'dwear myself out.

EM: But you do use the touch-sensitive DX7 . . .

MR: That's the first of what will probably be a growing armyof touch-sensitive keyboards. We tend to sort of not jump in with thelatest technology. We let it settle down a little bit and then when itbecomes fairly standard we add it and work it into the liveperformance.

EM: Your recording methods for Satyagraha wereunusual for a large orchestra.

MR: Christopher Keene was the conductor of the New York CityOpera and he was the one we chose to do this performance ofSatyagraha since he'd conducted the work several times. Hecame with his rehearsal pianist and we recorded him conducting therehearsal pianist to get the tempos he liked, the vibratos, temposhifts, etc. Then I created a click and synthesizer guide track basedon that performance. That's what we used when we went into the studioto record the orchestra. Then after the orchestra was on the tape, Ireplaced that guide track, which was a very simple synthesizer sound,with the appropriate sounds, like strings, woodwinds, etc. Also theperformance of that guide track was done on a computer and it was verymechanical and uninteresting.

KM: When we recorded the orchestra, we broke the orchestra,the chorus, and the principal singers up into sections. We did thestrings, basses, winds, chorus, and principals, by themselves. That waywe could set the EQ for each section the way we wanted, and we also gotinto different types of reverb for each section.

EM: In fact, I noticed that the reverb on Douglas Perryis a little unusual sometimes. He's in one channel and the reverb,especially on hard consonants, is in the other.

KM: I like that actually. It was quite intentional. In popmusic this isn't very extraordinary, but in classical music--when wemake records, the records are the art. Our records are not a sonicphotograph of the performance. Our records are the performance and onlymeant to be heard on the record. We're not interested in reality.

MR: We have occasional arguments about just how far to go inthat direction; I like things that are not too extreme. I think we keepit reasonably close to what the real voices and instruments soundlike.

John Diliberto is the producer of Totally Wired: Artistsin Electronic Sound, a weekly program on electronic music producedfor Pennsylvania Public Radio Associates and broadcast on public radiostations across the United States.