A Glass Apart: Composer Philip Glass on his past

He’s been celebrating his 75th birthday for four months now, but Philip Glass says it’s still “exhilarating” revisiting his past

IF PHILIP Glass was one of those people whose idea of a perfect birthday celebration is a nice glass of wine with a couple of close friends, it’d be hard to conclude that 2012 has thus far been anything other than a bit of a nightmare.

Glass was 75 on 31 January. On that night, he was at Carnegie Hall for the US premiere of his Ninth Symphony. Since then there have been innumerable tributes and performances of his work all over the world. At those he attends or, as is often the case, performs, people are still, he says, wishing him happy birthday.

“The celebrations have been going on since January, my dear,” he says, sounding thoroughly chipper from a theatre in Paris, where he’s been performing his score for Dracula, the 1931 Bela Lugosi classic, with the Kronos Quartet. “And, you know, I’m ready to give it a rest but nobody else is ready yet.

“I didn’t know what this was going to be like. I’ve had older friends who’ve been through it and they told me it was exhausting. But you know at a certain point the only thing you can do is get with it. You don’t want to be the grumpy old guy who doesn’t like birthdays.” He chuckles.

And it’s just as well because tonight marks the beginning of the second part of Minimal: Glass at 75, which begins with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra performing Glass’s Sixth Symphony, followed tomorrow by a performance of Dracula, rounded off on Saturday with an evening of old and new work performed by Glass on piano with violinist Tim Fain.

“It’s very exhilarating to be playing music that I wrote 20 or 30 years ago,” Glass says. “It has energy and audiences respond to it. There’s nothing that I don’t enjoy about it. Dracula is one of my favourite pieces. With the Kronos Quartet and Michael Riesman conducting we’ve been playing it for a lot of years now but the film’s a classic and the music has now got attached to it and people enjoy it. Part of art is entertainment and it’s not a bad thing. People go because they want to see it and it’s very nice to see them enjoying it that much.”

If there’s a hint of unease, of justification, in his voice when he mentions enjoyment, perhaps it’s because there might once have been a tension between art as entertainment and Glass’s avant-garde ambitions. In 1967 he established the Philip Glass Ensemble. He created new musical forms both in terms of composition and performance, using the repetitive structures and amplification and in the process created, along with others including Steve Reich, what has become known as minimalism. By 1976, Glass, with Bob Wilson, had created his first, epic opera, Einstein on the Beach (five hours, no interval), described by Susan Sontag as one of the great theatrical pieces of the 20th Century. These works, and many others since, were radical and experimental, stretching musical and theatrical forms into previously unimagined shapes; entertainment wasn’t really the point.

But what was at the cutting edge is now, if not quite mainstream, well established. Glass has written ten symphonies and 11 concertos. He works across genres – opera, chamber music, film scores (three of which have been nominated for Academy Awards). He has an audience which spans the opera house and concert hall as well as film, theatre and dance. He’s collaborated with everyone from Ravi Shankar to Twyla Tharp, via David Bowie and Doris Lessing. “I wouldn’t say it’s been a quiet life,” he offers with deadpan modesty.

At the moment, as well as being on tour, he is working on a new film with Godfrey Reggio, with whom he made The Qatsi Trilogy (which was included in last year’s EIF), a commission for the new opera house in Linz, Austria to be performed in spring 2013, and his long-awaited opera about Walt Disney which will open soon after. He writes in hotel rooms and dressing rooms (a piano is “a luxury”). And yet performing remains a priority. He has said in the past: “The best thing I can do for an audience is play the music myself.” What did he mean?

“If a dancer creates choreography they put the dance on their own body and then they teach it to the other dancers. The other dancers’ bodies aren’t quite built the same way. I’ve seen the way that the dance captain or the choreographer moves and it won’t be quite the same. It’s the same for the music I write because it fits my hands in a certain way. The weight of my hands, the position, physical things are unique and that’s where you begin. And then there are all the encounters I’ve had with other musicians and other audiences, they are also there, they are also present. In a certain way I may be best suited to playing it but that isn’t to say I’m the best interpreter. I’ve heard other people interpret music of mine which I’ve thought is very, very interesting. But when it comes to playing my own piano music I will put that up against anybody even though I’m not the best piano player in the world because the music is written for me.”

After Juilliard, Glass went to Paris to study composition with Nadia Boulanger. It was a tough training, Boulanger was a taskmaster prone to tantrums, but it left an indelible mark on Glass as a composer. The way Glass explains his process of writing is that he doesn’t think about the music, he listens to it, a skill honed through rigorous training.

“Having musical thoughts, some people come to it much more easily than others,” he says. “For me it came through a lot of hard work and training and exercises. It took me a long time. It’s like an athlete having to practice, it’s very similar. The training is more important than the talent I’m sad to say. There are great talents that never come to fruition because the training isn’t there. For me being able to visualise music and hear it, it’s taken a lifetime.”

Before hanging up, I ask Glass if the fact that the Glasgow performance of his Sixth Symphony will be the piece’s UK premiere still excites him? “Is it?” he squeals. “That’s wonderful. Will I be there for that?”

He thinks through his schedule and I hear the rustling of paper. It sounds complicated. “If I’m not there it’s only because I’m playing somewhere else,” he says, giving up. “Sometimes it’s better not to look at these things too closely. I don’t actually know where I’m going to be in three days.” He laughs. “It’s going to happen anyway, why worry about it?”

• Minimal: Glass at 75 (Part II) takes place at a variety of venues from today until Saturday. {http://www.glasgowconcertalls.com|glasgowconcertalls.com|.