PHILIP GLASS
November 10, 2000
ALVIN LUCIER
It seems like only yesterday that we would be in a downtown loft in New York. Philip Glass and his ensemble would be playing to a small audience. The music was different from anything we had ever heard. It was so loud as to obliterate any sense of being present in a real space. It was repetitive, the same phrase heard over and over, shifting downbeats and accents, abrupt shifts to another succeeding phrase so that there was no sense of time either. We knew the musicians, too. We weren’t receiving music from a symphony orchestra that was playing music from someplace else. We weren’t being told that what was great and wonderful came from another culture: Brahms, Mozart, and Beethoven. This was music made by our friends, and we didn’t know quite what it really meant at that time. We did know that something wonderful was happening.
And it seems like only yesterday that we were sitting up in the balcony of the Brooklyn Academy of Music listening and watching the Philip Glass–Robert Wilson opera, Einstein on the Beach. Five and half hours long, repetitious, long images, beautiful music. At the time, we thought to ourselves, “Could this be opera?” If you had asked me if there were a future for opera at that specific moment, I would have said no. Except for a few operas by Berg and Stravinsky and Benjamin Britten, the contemporary scene was barren. Then Einstein came along and changed opera forever.
Philip Glass has had an astonishing life as a composer, having made works in every genre—dance, film, opera, world music, solos, and symphonic works, you name it. The Philip Glass Ensemble is still very much in demand, playing his revolutionary repetitive pieces of the 1960s and ’70s, such as the three-and-a-half-hour-long Music in Twelve Parts. He has achieved a popularity unparalleled by a composer of experimental music.
It’s a great thrill for me to introduce Philip Glass.
PHILIP GLASS
We have about an hour. I thought I would speak for about forty minutes and then I’ll try to answer a few questions. To talk about music from the angle of theater—that’s what Alvin and I decided. We could have talked about a lot of different things. But this is a topic that I happen to know more about than anything, and I think this is a good thing for me too. Theater is something that you really can’t learn much about in school. You really learn through living your life in it. And so the kinds of information that I have are things that you might not be able to find so easily.
People have always asked me what kind of music I write—that’s always the question: what do you call your music. There have been different labels; you know how newspapers and academic people love to have a name for your music. I hated all those names; they were never the names that I called it. But now when people ask me what kind of music I write, I say I write theater music. That answer has the virtue of being absolutely and completely truthful. More than three quarters of my work has been theater work in some way.
When I began as a student, some of my first pieces were theater pieces. I wrote my first one when I was twenty and I started. All the years that I was in music school, I was writing music for dancers and film. When I was twenty-eight, I became a fellow member of the theater company Mabou Mines, and I stayed with them for about twenty years. A lot of the early music that I did was formulated in the context of that company.
In my generation, I was probably the one most committed to working in the theater. And there are a lot of interesting things that happened because of that, a lot of interesting ways of talking about contemporary music and modern music in terms of theater.
Let me go back a little bit and talk about what I actually mean when I say I’m a theater composer. I mean the word in a fairly specific way. For me, theater exists—and I don’t just mean theater on a stage; it can be film, it can be dance, it can be various kinds of combinations of film and opera. I look at it this way: I see the four elements that I work with as being text, movement, image, and music. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. It’s like earth, air, fire, and water. Those are the elements, and everything comes out of some combination of these.
Every one of these fields has an established hierarchy, a kind of structure of how those things get put together. After some time, you begin to figure out what that is. And it becomes very helpful to know what that is, because it makes it easier to work with people, and the expectations are specific for each one. For example, if you are writing music for a play, then the person who will work with you will be the director or the dramaturge. The director will tell you he or she wants music. Maybe you’ll write what you want to, but you can’t generally put it where you want it to go.
If you’re working with a dance company, you have a little more latitude because not many dancers can read music; that saves you a lot of trouble. Almost always, dancers want the music before the dance. Sometimes they’ll choreograph the dance before the music, but that’s rare. Mostly dancers are still putting steps on beats and they want to know where the beats are. You can do it the other way—it can be done, but it’s a little complicated. Even so, the choreographer will actually control how the resources are used. And the main resource in the theater is time.
I remember doing a ballet for Jerry Robbins in the New York City Ballet. He wouldn’t let me come to any of the rehearsals until the dress rehearsal. That was how he was. The orchestra sounded terrible. I told him that they couldn’t play the music and that we needed a separate music rehearsal. We had only an hour and a half left. He said there was no time for that; he needed to work on the choreography. And that was the end of it. Eventually the orchestra learned the piece. They’ve done it now for about fifteen years, and by the fifth or sixth year, they played it pretty well. If you go and hear it—it’s called Glass Pieces—it’s good! But the first year, it was just agony; it sounded terrible. But it was Jerry’s house—the dance house belonged to the choreographer.
Film is even worse! I’m going to give you all the sad stories; I’ll get to the good parts in a minute. With film, there’s no question that the film is run by the director. Anyone who’s worked in film can tell you endless stories. If you’re lucky, you can put the music where you want to, sometimes the director will let you. That’s called “spotting” the film. Occasionally the director will let you decide. I was working with Paul Schrader on a film called Mishima. He was doing it in Japan. I happened to be there doing some concerts, so we got to talking. We spent hours talking about the writer Yukio Mishima and why we were doing a film about him. Finally, I came to the critical crisis and asked Paul where the music should go. He did a wonderful thing. He took the script and threw it across the table and said, “You tell me where it goes.” But that almost never happens. I’ve done about fifteen or sixteen films. It happened one other time with Martin Scorsese. When we were working on Kundun, he let me put the music where I thought it should go.
Anyway, the only place in the theater world where the composer is in the composer’s house is in the opera house. Perhaps that’s why I’ve written so many operas! I’ve written about fifteen or sixteen of them. Still, the elements have to be harmonized in some way. I’m still working with a writer, someone with movement, and someone who’s creating images. That’s on the first level. And then there’s another level, including sound, costume, and lighting designers (which is part of the image and part of the sound, but they may not be the actual person that you’re working with). That comes into play in the creation of the work.
However, when I decide to write an opera, the first thing I do—and it’s important that you do this in the right order, believe me, it’ll lead to a lot of trouble—is find the director. If you find the designer before the director, the director will never be happy. You can get away with it a couple times—they’ll go along with it—but the director expects to be involved in choosing the designer. So you get the director first, then you get the designer. You may not have a writer. The writer might come in early or later. The work might be based on a story or on a piece of text, so the writer might not be there. When I did Orfée, Cocteau was long gone, so I had the scenario of the film. That was a given. But sometimes I’ve done operas with living writers, so they have to be brought in. This is a very interesting area where the composer actually gets to create the actual working relationship that goes into the piece. And if this is set up carefully, the chances of it working out are much better.
I’ve gone through collaborations where we’ve fought like cats and dogs the whole way through. One time the choreographer and I couldn’t talk to each other. It was one of the best pieces that we ever did! It doesn’t guarantee—it just means that life is a lot more pleasant when you’re working where you can talk to everybody. It doesn’t guarantee the work is going to be better. It doesn’t mean that you’ll be happier when you’re doing the work. And also, my feeling about collaborations is that I wanted to get the best I could out of every person I was working with. My way of working was to invite them in as cocreators and, very often, if you look at the credits of the operas I’ve written, I’ve listed them as coauthors.
The first thing I do is put together a team of people—the writer, the director, the designer, myself. I’ll get everyone together and tell him or her that I’ve got an idea for an opera. When we did the Allen Ginsberg opera, the Hydrogen Jukebox, I invited a number of people to be part of that. We spent about a year—that’s a luxury, to spend a year working—on the concept.
By the way, that’s not all we do. Usually, I’m working on three operas at the same time, but they’re all at different stages. One I’m thinking about, one I’m actually writing, and one we’re actually building. So I’m involved in different productions all the time, but each production has its own timeline. I find that the first year is very important.
I expect each person to bring his or her best work to the piece. I’ve found that the best way to let them do their best work is simply to invite them to the project and then let them contribute their own ideas too. I rarely have vetoed something; almost always it’s something I didn’t think of, and therefore I don’t have any idea what they’re driving at. I remember working with choreographer Susan Marshall on Les Enfants Terribles. It was a combination of dance and opera, based on a film. Since I had initiated the project, it was my project. I asked Susan to do the adaption with me. She would be the choreographer and the director, and we agreed on the costume designs. We did all that together.
The piece had only three characters in it. (Actually, there’s a fourth character that comes at the beginning and at the end.) We were talking about the rehearsal period, and she said that she would need eight performers. I reminded her that there were only three performers in the work. She said that she had another idea. And, of course, this meant the whole budget was completely different because we were thinking of travelling with seven or eight people and now it was going to be twelve or thirteen people. That determines how many performances you can have and where you can travel. I had no idea what she was doing. She worked for a couple weeks and invited me to her studio. What she had done was wonderful. Each character—a brother and sister and a friend—was also performed by two dancers. So there were three performers playing each major part.
It was wonderful! What she did sometimes was have the three singers in the front and the others behind. Sometimes they would be on opposite sides of the stage. If one of the actors said something, you could get three different reactions. And I realized that what she had done was most interesting. The kind of things you might hear, and in your head you might have several reactions: I would like to do it; I’m afraid to do it; I can’t wait to leave; I don’t want to be with you anymore. You might have all those reactions at the same time. Then your computer brain might say that that’s a good idea. You figure it out; you do it without even thinking. What Susan did was to portray dramatically everything that went on in the minds of the characters. It was the most wonderful thing. And I had no idea she was going to do that.
So my experience of being with people is that they think of something that I haven’t thought of. That’s why I’m doing it to begin with! If I could do the choreography and the design, I wouldn’t need any of those people. The fact is that I only know how to do one thing, which is to write the music. I don’t know how to write the words, how to do the designs or the movement, so I get involved with all these people. Once I invite them in, they become real partners in the work. That’s the dynamic that I try to set up in the way I’m working.
One other thing to talk about is the kind of situation where I have the most freedom. When I say I have control of the environment, I don’t actually control all the elements. I’m not interested in controlling all the elements. I discovered very early on that one of the ways that music can—and this is a problem for any composer, any writer, any painter—one of the problems that we have in our work is to create an environment for ourselves in which we’re constantly growing and changing. It’s the most difficult thing to do. When we’re young, we think that the big problem is to find our voice. That is a fairly simple problem. The first problem is to find the voice; the second problem is to get rid of it. And that takes the rest of your life. You never really do it. I’ve been trying to get rid of my particular way of working since I began, and I’ve never succeeded.
I’ve managed to make changes that may seem incremental but over twenty or thirty years have turned out to be big changes. That’s about the best you can do. But I’ve done that through tremendous effort. We learn techniques of working; we become good at certain things. And it becomes very easy for us to repeat what we do. It’s as if you were to say that today you are going to walk, talk differently, and write differently. You have to be able to see who you are and what you’re trying to do. You have to have an analytic grasp of your style. You may think you are doing something, but you are actually doing something quite different. So there’s an analytic perception of your own work that’s required.
You very often repeat things that are easy. You see this all the time. There are certain artists I know who have been able to work within one defined area. They go deeper and deeper until their ideas have been resolved in such a high level that you think there was no other way for them to do it.
These choices are based on the personality of the person involved. My particular personality is one to always be looking for new things. When I finished Einstein on the Beach, it never occurred to me to write The Son of Einstein. Half the people who heard my next opera, Satyagraha, were angry and disappointed because it didn’t sound like Einstein. The other people forgave me. I gave myself permission to do something different. After a while people got used to the fact that I wasn’t going to pay any attention to what they said anyway, and they left me alone. That’s pretty much the way it is. Now I can do whatever I want because people expect me to do it.
Working in the theater and working with collaborators became almost a guaranteed way for me to do new work: for example, working with Susan Marshall on Les Enfants Terribles or Allen Ginsberg on his poetry. When I work with someone I haven’t worked with before, they bring something to the table that I didn’t anticipate.
Now, let’s say that there are always at least four collaborators: a writer, a designer, a director, and a composer. I’ve often brought in other composers and done collaborative pieces, so that angle can also be changed. I’m doing a piece right now with Australian musicians; that throws a whole other element into the mix. I don’t even know what’s going to happen, but I will be sure that at least one of three be someone that I haven’t worked with before. I almost always include one person I know as my security blanket. It can be a designer I like or it can be the writer. If there’s one of the collaborators that I’ve worked with before, that’s enough. The other two, hopefully, will be different. I won’t be able to anticipate the dynamic between the working situation and the kind of ideas that are presented. And since I can’t anticipate them, I almost always have to do something I hadn’t done before. I’ll grab on to what I can to make it possible to work at all, and then I’ll combine it with some new ideas. So that’s how the music begins to change.
I’ve often said that I don’t mind repeating failures, but I will not repeat a success. I’m terrified of that. But the idea of working—with Bob Wilson, we did Einstein in 1976. It was a very famous piece and made it possible for the both of us to work in ways that we hadn’t before. We didn’t work together again until 1984. Then we didn’t work again after that until maybe 1991. We spent about eight years apart from each other.
We’ve developed a very interesting rhythm of working, every eight years we would come together and do a piece. And then I found I would be in touch with Bob’s work, and when we began to work together I would love to see, what are the commonalities that were still there? In what ways had he changed? Bob began very much thinking about visual, like paintings. His pieces were big pictures with music. He became more and more involved with movement. Now when he does pieces, he’s really a choreographer. So there’s been a big shift in his work. So that means that, even as we come to work together, we have a totally intimate working relationship where I know how he works, I know how he thinks. But at the same time, his work has changed.
And the same thing that happened with him has happened with me. When he began working with me, I was working with texts that were in foreign or dead languages, where the main event of the piece would not actually be the singing but would be the instruments. Eventually, I got involved with texts and words, and that led me to work with voices in a different way. Now the main event is the voice, not the instruments. That’s a big shift in what I’ve done.
Now Bob and I have a familiarity with each other. At the same time, there are new things that we bring to the work. In the early pieces, Bob didn’t really care about the text. By the time we did The White Raven in 1989, we found a writer together. But what we did in Monsters of Grace, in 1997—he sent me a text, and I totally disregarded it. I simply picked a different text. I sent it to him and told him that this is the text we were using. It was okay with him. My point was that, as the composer, I had to set the words to the music. And I, for sure, had the primary responsibility for picking the words. On that basis, Bob deferred to me. That’s how Bob and I work. There are areas I take for my own. There are those he takes for his own. But we had also had the experience of spending years together so that we knew how each other worked.
There is one thing I wanted to say at the beginning about how we develop—how do we get the training to do this work, and how do you learn to do music theater? With this audience, I think it’s worth talking about. It’s actually very simple. You spend lots of time in the theater. I decided from the very beginning to go to the rehearsals. For weeks I would sit in the theater with the director. I would watch the lighting designer work, the costumes being fitted. I would talk to the actors and the dramaturge. I wanted to know how many fittings it took to make the costumes, how the lighting worked. I visited the scene shops to see how everything is painted. I wanted to learn every part of the theater from top to bottom.
I also got involved in the producing aspects of it: for example, how much it costs to build a set, how big a truck I needed to move it around. Maybe we could design it differently so the pieces came apart so it could fit into a smaller truck, so the costs were less. All these things became very practical. I often said to people that the theater composer—anyone who works in theater—you end up being the most practical person because you never have enough money, you have to make everything work, everything has to fit in a certain space, into certain time, everything has to fit in a certain budget. If you don’t do that, you don’t get your piece done.
I was invited to do a piece for the Salzburg Festival, for their millennium, and I went to see the director of the festival. I asked him what I could do. He said that I could do whatever I liked and that this was the biggest festival in Europe. So I said I’d like to have an orchestra and a chorus. He said of course I could have that. Then I asked him if he had a children’s choir. He said yes, he did. Then I asked for four soloists. He said I could have five! I never would have been able to do such a large work unless someone had said that I could do whatever I liked. This was my Symphony Number 5.
It happened one other time. When I did The Voyage at the Met in 1992, I was talking to the designer, Bob Israel, with whom I had worked before. He was designing this amazing piece with spaceships flying around, appearing and disappearing. For the first eight minutes everyone’s flying in air! At one point I asked him what the budget was. And he answered that we didn’t have a budget. I almost fainted. That’s unheard of.
I was just in Boston—I’m talking about doing a piece with two singers. Well, that’s another thing you should know, another thing that’s very important to understand about theater. Not only do you learn it from being in the theater, but you also begin to understand that there’s a tremendous flexibility into how big and how small pieces can be. I’ve done pieces where there are three singers. I’m doing a ninety-minute, continuously sung opera right now based on Kafka’s In the Penal Colony. It is scored for two singers and string quintet. It can be done in small theater. I discovered that a theater company might mount a small opera if they can fit it into their normal budget. It was performed six or eight times in Seattle. They have put it away, and maybe they’ll schedule it again next year. They’re doing it right now in Chicago, for eight performances a week for five weeks. These theaters are about as big as this room. We’re talking about two or three hundred people at most, more often 180, 190. In June, it will be done in a little theater in New York. They’ll do forty performances, too. So here’s an opera that’s being performed 120 times in one year, which is completely astonishing. By the way, it’s not a good idea to call these works chamber operas because people tend not to want to perform them. I simply call them pocket operas.
In music theaters these days, the director often assumes a kind of authorship role where he or she puts together all the components. Peter Sellars, JoAnne Akalaitis, Peter Brook, and Bob Wilson do that. Meredith Monk of course does everything; writes, dances, choreographs, and composes the music. Most people are good at just one thing; then they organize everything around them. But as a composer—I’m talking to the composers here—the more you know about the mechanics of theater, the more flexibility you’ll have in what you can do. You’ll work more. My old pieces are still being done as I’m working on new ones. The question is, who can I get to build this piece? I spend a fair amount of time talking people into doing productions. It’s not that easy; everything costs money. People are interested, but actually getting them to make a budget is a problem. Budgets can go from $100,000 to $100,000,000. Sometime you may get away [with] as little as $40,000 or $50,000. But then you’re really getting down to really small budgets. Once you start paying people, money will disappear very quickly.
Another way to do it is what I did with the theater company that I started with, Mabou Mines. I was the composer, and there were two directors and three actors. Basically we built everything ourselves. We did that for years until we got other people to start building.
Well, I think that you can always do a piece. I think that everything’s expensive and no one wants to do it, but you can still do it. Things aren’t very different now than they were thirty years ago. In fact, they’re somewhat worse. We’re at a time now where the theater, opera, and film world has become oriented toward the idea of entertainment. Even opera companies want to do works that are entertainment pieces. Now, of course, opera is a place where entertainment and art always came together; that was the great power of the medium. You had something like Rigoletto, which was fun to watch. It was a fabulous piece of music. The Magic Flute was hugely popular.
There’s been a big shift more toward entertainment and head counting. In a way, it was easier when we had little places like La MaMa on East 4th Street in New York City. Ellen Stewart didn’t care if anybody came. Now almost no one has that attitude. Everyone wants to know how many people are coming. Theater companies have boards of directors who want to know … it’s a nightmare.
However, you can still do it! There’s still always some jackass that will let you into his place and let you do a piece. You can always find someplace to do your work. In some ways it’s more difficult, in some ways it’s easier. When I did Einstein on the Beach, I didn’t know anyone writing an opera but myself, and now I don’t know anyone who isn’t writing an opera. Alvin, are you writing an opera?
ALVIN LUCIER
What?
PHILIP GLASS
Yes, are you writing an opera?
ALVIN LUCIER
I’m not writing an opera.
He’s the only one!
ALVIN LUCIER
But if you gave me a good idea …
PHILIP GLASS
But he would! We’ve got about fifteen minutes, let’s do a few questions. I think I covered, quickly and roughly, how I’m working.
QUESTION
I had a question dealing with situations where, having to intertwine several disciplines, you seem to be talking about it in terms of different trajectories that come together, and you come to some kind of functional understanding. Then you go off, you continue on your way, maybe you meet up with someone for a second time. I know that you have collaborated with Richard Serra, and, in addition to the people you mentioned, the question would be, have you ever found working with these people—their work and their conceptual status—so powerful that it’s affected your work in a way that was not ephemeral?
PHILIP GLASS
There are two answers for that. You get together in the first year. In the second year, you go off and do your own work; in the third year, you put it back together. That’s roughly the way it works.
There is a moment when the composer sits down and writes the music. There’s a moment when the designer is alone. I try to make everyone do their work first, so I have all the texts and designs. Theater people have that kind of flexibility. I was working with Doris Lessing on an opera recently, and when I was setting the libretto to music, I called her every day to talk about changes in the texts that had to be made for reasons of singing. That went on for months. She was in London and I was in Nova Scotia, but we were in touch all the time.
When we were doing Orphée we had to create an underworld and the ordinary world at the same time, and the director had to see how that was going to work. We couldn’t even start conceptualizing or building anything until we had solved problems of that kind. We worked separately but were never out of touch. No one goes to Mars and the other to the moon, and then they get together. You can’t really work like that.
Working with other people has completely changed what I’ve done. It’s happened most in collaborations with musicians more than with sculptors or painters. The times I’ve worked with other musicians have been very striking. For example, I remember working with Foday Suso, a griot (storyteller) from the Gambia. We were composing music to go with Les Paravents (The Screens) by Genet. I knew Foday and his music, but I had no idea how we were going to work together. The first day, the director, JoAnne Akalaitis, she said, “We’re going to start with the first thing, and I’m going to need music here.” I knew right away that, working with Foday, I wouldn’t really be writing music. He would play his music, and I would play along with him, and we would arrive at something through playing together. We could notate it later.
Foday said that he would have to tune his instrument, a seventeen-stringed harp-like kora. He played a note—it was kind of like a D. Then he played the next note up the scale, and I asked him what he called that note. He said simply that that was the next note. Then he played another note. I asked him what he called that one. He replied that it was simply the note after that. It suddenly occurred to me that he didn’t have names for the notes. It was almost as if the ground disappeared beneath my feet.
As a young musician, I remember my very first flute lesson. I was maybe seven or eight years old. My teacher handed me the flute and showed me how to hold it. Then he showed me a note on the page. It was a B-natural. He told me to blow. Then he put it all together: the instrument, the note, the name of the note, the way it looked on the page, and the sound. That was my first lesson. And all my lessons were like that. So, for me, notes always had names. Suddenly I was in a world where they didn’t. I almost fainted. I was so shocked I didn’t know how to proceed.
The same thing—not so catastrophic—happened with Ravi Shankar, when I worked with him years before that. We were doing a piece together, and I was trying to notate something he was playing. We were doing this clapping thing. You’ve probably all done some of that, working with Indian rhythm, tala, and learning to do it by speaking it, but not writing it. And I wasn’t getting what he was saying, so he said, “Here Phil, hold the pencil—you’ll think better.” He was right! As I held the pencil, I could figure out what he was saying!
In situations with composers like that, I’ve been completely thrown into areas that changed the way I thought about music. I know that there’s a well-developed world music program here. I got involved with world music in the 1960s in India and Africa. I never had formal training; I simply worked with musicians.
I remember working with Ravi Shankar in 1965. Some other musicians there were playing some music, and I was trying to write it down. Alla Rakha kept saying that it was not right. I was still using bar lines. I had no idea how the music worked. But a couple hours later, I simply erased all the bar lines, and within two or three hours, I was notating their music in a way that the accents were in the right places. That was the day that Ravi threw me into the deep end of the pool. I swam to the top! It was a profoundly traumatic experience.
I’m interested to know how actors and singers fit into these collaborations, or do they?
PHILIP GLASS
I have the most contact with singers. When possible, I’ll write for a singer I know, although I’m not always able to do that. Sometimes I will audition singers, so even if I don’t know them personally, I’ve at least heard them.
I was already forty before I began learning how to write for the voice. I would ask each singer how her vocal part worked. Very quickly, singers will tell you things such as where the break in their voice is, that they can go up here but have to go down there. So by the mid-80s, I was writing very well for the voice. Several singers told me to look at Handel, how he moves the voice through the low, middle, and the high parts of their ranges. A singer can sing Handel for a long time and never get tired.
I began holding auditions, sometimes fifty-five singers in one afternoon. I would ask the singers [to sing] certain pieces of Handel’s or mine. Very rarely would I let them sing Verdi, whose vocal parts are often in the top of their range and accompanied by a large orchestra. If a singer has a big operatic voice, it’s not going to help me very much if I’m going to be in a little concert hall with four musicians. I often think of the voice in terms of where the singer is going to be singing.
It is not the same with actors. There’s usually a song in a Shakespeare play. And for sure, the director will ask one of the actresses to sing. And for sure, they can’t. The last time I did a Shakespeare play, I asked the director to let me audition the actors before she decided who’s going to sing the song. Then I could tell her who could and who couldn’t sing. I told her which ones could sing. And she picked one of the ones who couldn’t sing. I asked her why, after we had gone through all that, did she pick that particular actress. She won’t be able to sing what I write. She said that I may not have noticed, but the actress she chose only had one leg. She wanted to work with someone who had a prosthetic leg. She had to walk in a certain way, and the director wanted to make that part of the piece.
In the opera house it’s not quite like that. Recently I wrote a piece for Herb Perry, a bass baritone. We needed a cover for him, so we asked his identical twin brother, Eugene, also a baritone. However, the best notes for Eugene were a whole step higher than for Herb. I ended up having to transpose five of the scenes for Eugene. So when he sang, five of the scenes were in a different key. I hope the librarian gets it right when they put out the music.
QUESTION
Could you talk a little bit about the piece that you did at the ABT [American Ballet Theatre]?
PHILIP GLASS
What was the piece?
QUESTION
I don’t remember what it was called.
PHILIP GLASS
Well, what I can tell you is that sometimes people will choose five or six of my pieces and make a ballet out of them. That happens a lot. Often I don’t have very much to do with it. The best situation is when a choreographer and I collaborate on a piece. That has happened quite a few times, particularly with Lucinda Childs, Twyla Tharp, and Jerry Robbins. Strange things can still happen because the worlds of dance and music are so different. I remember going out on tour once with a dance company. I took class with them for the whole tour because I wanted to know what it was like for the body to move in that way. The dancers laughed at me, but they were happy to have me there. I took class every afternoon. I couldn’t do the combinations. I fell down a couple of times, but I wanted to be involved in the dance in some way, and this was one way of doing it. It was a lot of fun to work with dancers, but also frustrating at times because we look at the work in very different ways.
One little story: I was making a piece with Twyla Tharp. When I sent her the tape, she said that the piece was completely different. I listened to the tape, and it sounded the same to me. I asked her to tell me what was different. She said that it was twice as long between the first and second movement. She meant the space in between the two movements. It wasn’t hard to make the spaces identical. I had no idea that she was listening to the silences, and I was listening to the music. She was dancing through the silences. Well, anyway …
ALVIN LUCIER
Thank you very much, Phil.