On the shelf next to the photograph of Tibetan lama Galen Rinpoche, next to the framed Dalai Lama picture, next to the family photographs and statuettes of violins and goddesses, is a bevy of ceramic frog figurines, suspending a jet-black shirt with purple lettering. It reads:
Well, while I’m here I’ll
do the work-
and what’s the work?
to ease the pain of living.
Everything else, drunken
dumbshow.
(from “Memory Gardens” –Allen Ginsberg)
The makeshift shrine appears twice in Scott Hicks’s 119 minute-long documentary, “Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts,” and gives as apt a snapshot of Philip Glass as any that can be distilled from the film. For hovering within the musician, the family man, the philosopher and the spiritual-seeker, is an artist who has devoted his life to his work. An artist who, at 71, has produced 21 operas, 9 ballets, 8 symphonies, 37 film scores and numerous other works in the following categories: theater, “world music,” songs, solo instrumental, keyboard, concerto, choral, chamber and non-symphonic orchestral. By the time this article is read, the compositional number will likely have increased.
Philip Glass is as prolific a composer as Honoré de Balzac was a novelist, as Frank Lloyd Wright was an architect, as Werner Herzog is a film maker. Indeed, with so much time allotted for composing, little time remains for anything else. “Vacations are hard,” confesses Holly (his fourth wife) toward the end of the film. “He works constantly.” For Glass, a family at the periphery of his compositional obsession seems as essential as a muse was for Pablo Picasso’s painting obsession: it must be there, but it must not be central. A telling scene features Holly, Glass and their two young children standing on a shoreline. Glass stands alone, while the children cling to their mother.
But just as Glass’s music can seem mechanical, cold, distant and, yes, obsessional, and simultaneously alive, haunting, humorous and poignantly expressive, so, too, does Glass as a person. In a prolonged early scene that seems to last an eternity, Glass is filmed in his Nova Scotia vacation home, soaking yeast, kneading pizza dough, puréeing tomatoes, sautéing Portobello mushrooms, chopping garlic (“Do you like big, chunky pieces of garlic–the kind that explode in your mouth?” he asks a guest.) The scene shows Glass as both family man (children running around the house) and methodologist (each pie crust is manipulated into perfect dimensions); conversationalist (he jokes and engages in small talk with his guests) and loner (he seems alone, even when in a group).
That dichotomy of ascetic and socialite pulses through “Glass: A Portrait”: Glass is shown toughing it out, alone, in the New Mexican wilderness (part of a nature therapy program); then he is filmed chatting leisurely with everyone from film makers Woody Allen, Errol Morris, Goddfrey Reggio and Martin Scorsese, to artist Chuck Close and musician Ravi Shankar. While they all heap praise on Glass, pontificating on what it was like working with the composer, Glass says little about working with them. Except for Close and Shankar, both of whom Glass displays open warm affection for, the relationships with Allen, Morris, Reggio and Scorsese come across as collegial business relationships, neither more nor less.
The true insights into Glass’s life and career come from family members, particularly from his older sister, Sheppie. While not always lucid–Sheppie cannot recall with precision the exact nature of her brother’s study at the Peabody Conservatory–her account is a refreshing breather from the pretentious statements from the Hollywood stars. Discussing their father’s refusal to talk to his son, following Glass’s marriage to JoAnne Akalaitis, of which he disapproved, Sheppie says, “Parents can be such jerks.”
Former children, a brother, even former wife Akalaitis give real, unscripted accounts of their memories of Glass, and it is their utterances that shed new light on the elusive composer, not the cameos by celebrities.
But the best statements on Glass’s compositional career come from the composer. He blends wit and wisdom with philosophical fluidity: “I had the opportunity to write music so radical that I could be mistaken for an idiot—I still am,” he nonchalantly says in one scene. “There’s a lot of music in the world. You don’t have to listen to mine,” he quips in another. In reference to his idiomatic musical language, he confidently proclaims, “If you don’t need a new technique, what you’re saying is probably not new.”
The final part of the film documents rehearsals for Glass’s latest (at the time) opera, Waiting for the Barbarians, based on J.M. Coetzee’s novel, with a libretto by Christopher Hampton. Focus is given to the last line of the opera, in which the protagonist sings, “I’m a man caught in a stupid and ugly dream . . . and still I keep walking.” That sentence, along with the Ginsburg poem, crystallizes the motivating force behind Philip Glass the composer and Philip Glass the man. Musing on the same sentence, Glass then poses the timeless artistic question, “Is it escape or is it liberation,” to which he answers, “I don’t know.”
by Patrick Durek
I’ll admit as an outsider looking in I don’t know much about the details, but I do know this: that history will be the true judge of all this, and all we’re doing here is placing bets on Glass and his comments. But even knowing that, my bets are on Glass (both the man and his ‘technique’).
Thanks Eric, David, … and, again, Patrick.
Eric, I would need more time to think about your extensive, thoughtful, and highly appreciated comment; and I hope that others might also comment here on this important, if uneven, American classical composer. (I did see the new film, but have not yet heard Sym #8, but only the Requiem, Bardo Sym (#5?), and the National Symphony commission (Symphony #7, the Toltec, I believe). I also heard the opening movement — I believe — of Marin Alsop’s recording of the Sym #4, which you mention, which opens the Naxos Sonic Rebellion compilation — which I found a bit too symmetrical for my taste.)
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“But I don’t think any of the early minimalists (for lack of a better name) had a unique, seminal technique a la the New Vienna School. …” (David T.)
Last night, I listened in the cool, darkness to Glass’s Music in Fifths, Two Pages; Reich’s Drumming and Tehillim, and Reily’s In C; all from my Cantalope Music samplers (and Adams’s Shaker Loops from the Naxos Sonic Rebellion sampler.) I would have to say that each of the first three seems, to me at least, “unique, seminal technique”, which led to interesting distinct paths over the next generation while influencing much orchestral and chamber classical music. [Also , I would not say that the extract from Adams’s choral, ‘Harmonium’, which I found on an old Tower Records sampler along with extracts from Glass’s melodramatic ‘Dracula’ score, exhibited a “unique, seminal technique.” The same might also be said of Ingram Marshall’s ‘Fog Tropes’ — but not his earlier more unique ‘Fragility Cycles’ ??]
zeno, I think Eric beat me to the punch and more or less made some of the points I was going to make. Sure, Glass had a fairly unusual, perhaps even unique background. But training isn’t equivalent to technique. His technique, at least in the late 60’s, 70’s and early 80’s, involved additive rhythms, which is a technique that is not his alone, but rather is based on Indian rhythmic structures, as they use an additive process. That’s not to diminish his accomplishments; indeed, his earlier works are what I really love of his, and they had a profound effect on my own composition, essentially changing its direction. But I don’t think any of the early minimalists (for lack of a better name) had a unique, seminal technique a la the New Vienna School. And stuff like this is of no real relevance to the music. WHat matters is the end result.
I’ll take the bait on Glass’s 8th Symphony, which is unquestionably his finest. Actually, his 3rd, for strings, has stronger material, but the 1st movement is your basic Glass-y throwaway, the 3rd has great material but goes on way too long, and the 4th is too short (!), failing to develop its good ideas; for a composer whose strength in his best 70s works was his structure, since those days he’s really neglected that most important element of his work. Maybe it’s that in his 70s compositions the material and the structure were indivisible, which is really the one thing he and Reich have in common in that period besides the obvious interest in harmonically static, consonant repetition, whereas after the three portrait operas, once he developed his signature style he allowed that style to triumph over substance, so that while his ideas are often superficially attractive, they are too often in the service of nothing more than themselves, just repeating and slightly varying without developing or changing or remaining interesting for the (usually overlong) length of the work. Where in the 70s the slow rate of change in, say Music in 12 Parts, married to amplification, made the smallest changes become almost monumental, when Glass turned to traditional symphonic and operatic forms such tiny shifts in detail were not enough to sustain interest when they became the sole focus of the works. To return to his 8th Symphony, in my mind its success is due to two factors: an unusual approach to symphonic form, in which an energetic 1st mov. gives way to a slow second and culminates in an even slower funereal conclusion; and the fact that he finally seems to have accepted that more needs to happen in less time–though based on a very few simple ideas, the 1st mov. is constantly changing, not only orchestrationally and harmonically but in the continuously varied deployment of his material.
I must however disagree with previous comments as to Glass’s technique. What do we mean by technique? Surely his work since the 80s is fairly traditional, partaking of the Western classical tradition in every way except that his basic material is neither particularly melodic nor harmonic, just the simplest of arpeggios or repeated phrases; his excellent Violin Concerto, for instance, is even unquestionably in the romantic tradition and to my ear has much more to do with Sibelius than, say, Unsuk Chin’s also excellent Violin Concerto, which comes more from the modernist tradition, specifically her teacher Ligeti (with Lindberg’s concerto falling somewhere between the two). It can be argued that Glass’s 70s “minimalist” works created a new technique in that he rejected the traditional opposition of melody and harmony, but I would suggest this is simply part of his modernist heritage; for me, serialism and minimalism are simply two historically- and stylistically-opposed sides of the same coin, both simply attempts to systematize a response to the modernism of the 2nd Viennese School by emphasizing the process by which the music is made, something that happened in every area of the arts, as for instance in the abstract expressionist’s revolt against early 20th century European still basically figural modernism. That serialism is squeaky and minimalism is pretty is irrelevant with regard to technique, and for that reason I am not convinced Glass has created a new technique, if that even means anything, because as I listen with my ears and not my eyes, I am much more interested in the question of style than technique, and in that regard Glass (and Reich, and Riley, etc.) did create a new style, the style which has become dominant in my generation of composers (in part because it has a lot to do with the popular music that is increasingly a shared heritage among us).
Thank you for this review.
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“How is Glass’s technique any different from any of a number of composers?” (Davaid Toub)
Well, none have had the _exact_ same French harmonic [and counterpoint] and Indian rythmic training and experience that Mr Glass has had. In addition, Mr Glass’s 1970s structuralist experimentation by the 1980s was mixed, it seems to me, with an interesting fascination with alternative theater melodrama and with lower-cost film musics which carried over into his major scores (that is, the ‘melancholic’ spinning of which Alex Ross spoke in his NY profile).
I generally admired much of ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ (though a revival of ‘Akhenaton’, I suppose, will probably preceed it to the MET (or the NYCO?)).
What are readers responses to Glass’s Symphony #8, which Mr Ross tentatively considers one of Glass’s finest masterpieces?
That’s nonsense. Or as Feldman once said “I am the system.” I think he’s confusing technique with style. How is Glass’s technique any different from any of a number of composers?
“If you don’t need a new technique, what you’re saying is probably not new.”
Amen brother !