Philip Glass: InterviewOkay, everybody, let's say the nasty word once, nice and loud, and get it out of our system. Ready? One, two, three... minimalist! There, feel better? Good. Now, let's move on.
As Keyboard sat down across from Philip Glass in his San
Francisco hotel suite, we vowed silently not to bring up that
characterization at all. We even trained ourselves to avoid
saying anything that sounded like it: If the room service menu
contained many lists
of specialties, Glass wasn't going to
hear about it from us.
Not that we expected any wild displays of indignation. Glass is, if anything, magnanimous in his tolerance of dumb interview questions. Should the M-word come up, he might only wince slightly, all the while freezing a cordial smile on his face and responding as if no one had ever thought to associate him with that particular school.
The fact is, the Glass is no more a minimalist that, say, Kraftwerk. As we suggested in our March '80 article on Glass, the techno-rock school drew extensively from his music. Wherever a rhythmic sequencer line ticks away around a drum machine pulse, his approach to rhythm has left at least a second- hand mark. Almost never do the imitators approach the levels of complexity attained by Glass, but the lesson is the same: propulsion through repetition of strictly limited resources. Or, more accurately in the case of Glass, propulsion through the illusion of repetition.
Those whose music defined minimalism were not as dedicated to rhythmic puzzlework as Philip Glass. Of course their influences were there, particularly in the case of Steve Reich, who played in Glass' original Ensemble. But so were crucial differences. La Monte Young's contribution to the Anthology Of Chance Operations in 1963 consisted of a single line drawn on one index card. As a visual representation, Young's drawing reflected the essence of proto-minimalism. But one listen to, for example, Glass' Songs From Liquid Days demonstrates how little Young's Zen symbolism has to do with the dynamic activity of Glass' work.
Constantly, without ceasing, there is motion in the music of Philip Glass. Even when built along simple harmonies and resolutions, it bustles like a community of bees, whose restless circular dances intersect and unify to create a single movement, the movement of the hive. Yet, from afar, the hive appears still, the myriad sounds emanating from it fused into a single hum. This same principle - movement and stillness, many elements locked into one - underlies Glass' work.
Since putting his Ensemble together in the late '60s, Glass has used keyboards as a rhythmic and textural building block. Beginning with electric organs and graduated now to digital synthesizers and samplers, he wove polyrhythmic tapestries - intricate, shimmering with activity, yet strangely still in the sense of not building, elaborating, climaxing, or resolving in the traditional European classical sense. His keyboardists had to develop a new set of performance skills to cope with the unfamiliar modes of teamwork the music required. No thundering crescendos, no spiraling runs up and down the keyboard, no shades of Liszt or Chopin. Instead, the player had to learn impeccable finger control, hand independence, concentration, and plain old endurance.
Whether Glass' solo keyboard pieces - Opening
from
Glassworks,
The Lightning Of The Torch
from The Olympains, and the
recently completed Mad Rush - or keyboard parts in such larger
works as the opera Satyagraha and the choral piece Requiem will
have a lingering impact on performance technique, his music as a
whole is making an impact on the public that grows from year to
year. It fills the Metropolitan Opera House as well as the
Peppermint Lounge. It draw culture vultures face to face with
mountains of speakers and stacks of synthesizers in high-voltage
Ensemble recitals. It wins Glass recognition from High Fidelity
as Musician Of The Year in 1985, as well as a guest spot on
Saturday Night Live.
This remarkable composer/performer was born 50 years ago in Baltimore. As a teenager he worked in his father's record store, and studied flute at Peabody Conservatory. Though he showed talent, there was little indication of the style he would create in years to come, unless one had the foresight to examine young Philip's interest in arithmetic. Now, however, Glass waves off any suggestion that he showed prodigious mathematical gifts.
After all
, he laughs, Einstein On The Beach has counting in
it, but it's only counting up to eight, so it doesn't take a lot
of higher math to figure out cyclic music. It takes arithmetic
to figure out how many measures of 5/8 will fit into how many
measures of 7/8. All you do is multiply 5 by 7. But I had a
great interest in science, and Einstein in particular. And I did
chess. I was a superficially kind of smart kid, in a way
.
Glass had enough superficial smarts to get into the University of Chicago at the age of 15. He earned his M.S. from the Juilliard School Of Music in 1962; 75 of his compositions were performed in concert before he had graduated. Subsequently he composed on a Ford Foundation grant in Pittsburgh, then studies in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, in India with Ravi Shankar and Alla Rakha, and in Morocco, where he absorbed North African rhythms and melodic repetition.
In 1967 Glass returned to New York and began trying to piece the jumble of musics he had heard into a workable symbiosis. It was at this time that the Philip Glass Ensemble was born, a collection of young players devoted to the music of its 30-year-old founder. From the start electric or electronic keyboards were the kernel of the group's sound. Even the woodwind parts conceived by Glass usually doubled the fluttering and drones laid down by the keyboard players.
For all the mechanistic discipline of the emerging Glass style,
the Ensemble's music could be - for those who were willing to
listen - overwhelmingly emotional. Animated by the power of Eastern
traditions, it opposed the academic aspect of the post-
Schoenberg avant-garde. We rejected the idea of non-tonal music,
of aleatoric music, the entire idea that music had to be an
intellectual enterprise
, Glass recalled in High Fidelity.
Over the next few years, Glass and his group built a reputation in New York's underground art world that eventually spilled out of the lofts and studios of lower Manhattan into the concert halls uptown. Along the way the Ensemble picked up several crucial members. Sound technician Kurt Munnkacsi joined in 1971, bringing with him an expertise that polished the group's stage sound to a dazzling sheen. And, in 1974, the year that Parts 1 and 2 of Glass' monumental Music In 12 Parts were released, Michael Riesman came aboard as an organist. Today he is Glass' first-call interpreter of keyboard works, as well as music director of the Ensemble, Riesman's unreleased performance of Glass' Dance 2, recorded on a Yamaha YC-45D organ, can be heard on this month's Soundpage.
Since the triumphant opening of the opera Einstein On The Beach in 1976, Philip Glass has been one of the most widely discussed composers of our time. Because of the marathon length of Einstein, which runs for five hours, and Music In 12 Parts, casual observers tended to stereotype him as a specialist in works of monumental dimensions (a monu-minimalist?). Many of his most acclaimed pieces are certainly large-scale, such as the operas Akhnaten, Satyagraha, and The Making Of The Representative Of Planet 8, based on a Doris Lessing novel and scheduled to be premiered by the Houston Grand Opera in January '88. But much of his work is fairly small in scale, though none of the latter has created as much of a stir as his 1986 release, Songs From Liquid Days.
One reason for the success of Songs is the abundance of pop talent on the album. Glass composed the music to lyrics written for the project by David Byrne of Talking Heads, Paul Simon, Laurie Anderson, and Suzanne Vega, while the singers recruited for the session included Linda Ronstadt, The Roches, and Janice Pendarvis. Add to these ingredients the high-voltage accompaniment of the Glass Ensemble and additional winds and strings, and you have a recipe for success, commercial as well as artistic.
Which brings us to San Francisco. The night before our interview,
Glass and company performed the dance piece A Descent Into The
Maelstrom, an excerpt from the opera the CIVIL warS, and the
complete Songs before a typically mixed audience at Louise
M. Davies Symphony Hall. One had the feeling that many of the
season subscribers hadn't really grasped what they were in for.
If there had been rafters at Davies, they would have been
ringing with the gale force of Maelstrom, the opening number.
As the last mighty synthesized strains died away, in the silence
before the applause began, one stunned voice called out a
facetious suggestion: Louder!
We began the following morning by asking Glass about the Songs, and what they represent in his evolving style as a composer and performer.
The second part of your songs concert was presented with a larger ensemble onstage than the first part. How does the size of the group affect your approach to playing and programming your keyboards?
Well, I knew I was working with acoustic instruments too - brass, strings, and so forth. One of the things I've been interested in doing has been to combine synthesizers and acoustic instruments - kind of reorchestration of the orchestra through synthesizers. It's something that's very specific to the way Michael Riesman and [producer] Kurt Munkacsi have put down the score. Even when I was very explicit, there was almost always a keyboard part, and that part is a specific programmed synthesizer part. We have about eight or nine synthesizers in the ensemble. There's what you see onstage, and a number of other things that are racked but that you don't see. I daresay that there are over a hundred programs in use at any one of our concerts. On my two keyboards I use about 30 or 40 in the course of a single concert.
You've written a number of operas, yet only one - Einstein On The Beach - included a part for your Ensemble. Why did you not include the Ensemble in Akhnaten, Satyagraha, The Juniper Tree, The Representative, or The CIVIL warS?
Well, I made transcriptions of the operas for the Ensemble, but I tend not to write parts for the Ensemble in the operas because that limits its availability for opera houses.
Yet in Satyagraha, for example, there were some passages that sounded as if they were being performed by your Ensemble.
Yes, that's right. That was the first piece I had written not for the Ensemble in many years. I was looking for, let's say, a model of orchestral writing to use, and I decided to use the Ensemble, since that's what I had been working with for so long. It was, in fact, my intention to make the orchestra sound like the Ensemble, which is actually rather curious. But it seemed to me that I couldn't do any better than to work with my own sound, and find an expression for it within the more or less traditional orchestra. By the way, that's one reason why there weren't any brass in that piece.
Perhaps the most obvious example of emulating your own Ensemble
in Satyagraha comes in The Vow
, Act I, Scene 3, where you have
a fast wind instrument pattern running separately from the
orchestral strings.
Yes, that's right. It's a hard piece to play for people who aren't Ensemble members. There's quite a bit of overdubbing there. When Michael Riesman, Kurt Munkacsi and I work together, I don't like to play any games requiring me to stay with the original instrumentation. See, the recording is an idealized situation. After all, you don't have the sets and the dramatic action to go by, so I feel free that to compensate for the loss of some of the elements, one can bring the recording itself to a very high level of performance. Or, put it the other way: if you were to see a live performance of the piece, the orchestra wouldn't play it as well, but you might not mind. You'd be attentive to a number of other factors, like the staging and the lighting and the costumes. You might not notice that the flutes are taking breaths and the oboes can't keep up with it and the basses are falling behind - the kind of things that are normal.
When you take a piece like this to an opera company, is it difficult to break in the resident keyboardist for the kind of parts you write?
I have written keyboard parts for a number of pieces, but
they're really synthesizer parts. Satyagraha is one.
The Juniper Tree is another, and Akhnaten uses keyboards.
So I've been in the situation of coming to orchestras, and I've
found that every time I've done this, the orchestra has
provided a keyboard player who says to me, Oh, by the way,
I play the synthesizer. Would you like me to do the programs?
Can you believe that? Now, these are all guys or women in their
30s. Lately I've been using the [Yamaha] DX7. I used to use
the [Sequential] Prophet. I usually call for a synthesizer that
you could find anywhere. But I find that these auxiliary keyboard
players that orchestras keep around are into synthesizer! The kind
of person who will be a keyboard player with an orchestra is
going to be a practical musician. We're not talking about
recitalists and concerto players; we're talking about people
who make their living playing all manner of music in all manner
of situations. And these people are anxious to equip themselves
for the world of contemporary music. By that I don't mean
the arcane world of serial music; I mean the contemporary
music we play and live with.
Is it difficult, though, to prepare these keyboardists for the particular demands of your kind of music?
It's not like it used to be. It's not so hard anymore. One
important factor in that is that if people haven't played
my music, they've still heard it. People don't say, How
it it supposed to sound?
Generally speaking, they know
how it's supposed to sound because they've heard the records
or they've heard us play. Maybe they've seen us on Saturday
Night Live, for God's sake. I don't mean to be immodest
about this, but it would be really hard to find a
professional musician who didn't know anything about it
at this point. So there's that familiarity, and there's
also a real willingness on the part of player to do it.
Now, that's a very important factor. It's not like, This is
a drag. I have to play this, and it's impossible. What do
I have to do this for?
The attitude I'm getting is,
Oh, I'm finally getting a chance to play this music
.
That's how I would characterize it.
Traditionally, young pianists aspire to be the next Horowitz. Do you find that today's keyboard players are not as universally fixed on building a concert recital career?
Well, I suspect you still have that aspiration. You still have a steady crop of people heading for the recital stage. It's a hard, hard business, and I don't envy anyone who sets their goal in that direction, because it's so competitive. Except for the handful of people who do succeed at it, it can't be so rewarding. What really happens, of course, is that people who stay on as practical musicians begin to play a lot of other music, because that's how you make a living. If your predilection is toward new music, you might begin playing with some of the new music ensembles, which is another way to function as a pianist. It's very demanding, and it takes a lot of technique. You have to really be a good musician to play Elliott Carter, or a piece of mine, or whoever. But those are the kind of players you're most likely to run into.
That reflects an important change in the business. Twenty years ago your choices were perhaps more limited; if you wanted to stay in music you were either a concert recitalist or a teacher.
I think that's true. There is another option now. My generation as a whole can probably take credit for that. We were the generation of composers who decided we wanted to play our own music. Whether it was the Sonic Arts Union, which was people like Gordon Mumma and David Birnbaum, or people like Richard Teitelbaum and Frederic Rzewski, or of course Terry Riley, Jon Gibson... I mean, there's a very big list of people, people about my age, who were not willing to wait for others to play our music, so we got involved with performance. What we're finding now, in the late '80s, is that there's a public for this music. In New York it centers around the Next Wave festival, and Merkin Hall, and the Kitchen, and Roulette; we all know where those places are. There's an active life in the new music world. It's not about sitting around in a school and sending your string quartet to somebody in another school and hoping they'll play it, and then you'll play their string quartet. It's more about playing your music and playing somebody else's music. It's attracted a new kind of performer and definitely a new kind of audience. We have a much more interesting music world now than when I was coming out of music school.
You mentioned that many of today's young orchestra keyboardists are familiar with synthesizers. When did this become apparent to you?
It's been a recent discovery. I'm talking about the last three years. The very first encounter I had with orchestral keyboard players was in Europe, but there it was not true. The European players were behind us in that sense. I don't mean to be a jingoist about this, but generally speaking American players are better trained and more on top of the scene than European ones are. I think that's because a lot of our players tend to work in a wide variety of styles, whether it's concert music, sessions of various kinds, or different kinds of commercial music.
You characterize the keyboard parts in these particular works as synthesizer parts specifically. Yet they are really pretty straightforward and keyboard-oriented, without a lot of electronic effects.
Oh, no, of course not. In a way that makes it simpler, but it also focuses a problem very clearly for us. I think that the people I work with and I are on the very forefront of people who combine electronic and acoustic instruments. This is, to me, the most interesting area. For example, we're recording the opera Akhnaten now, starting off with the Stuttgart Opera Orchestra, but by the time we get done there will be tons of overdubs on it. We're really learning how to extend and enhance the acoustic instruments with electronic means. But the function of the keyboard in these pieces is to fill out the wind playing. I've gotten into the habit of writing very difficult wind parts for my own players, who can do it - someone like [saxophonist] Jon Gibson, who practices circular breathing. Here's a guy who can sit and play for literally ten minutes without stopping. Now, with orchestras, that's simply not going to be true. I write for a lot of parts sharing: Flutes 1 and 2 share a part. But even so, I found in some of those pieces where I was still writing more similarly to the Ensemble writing that it was a good idea to back up the parts with a keyboard. In those cases I programmed the keyboards to sound like the woodwinds. It was just a synthetic way of covering very difficult playing. In the more recent music, that's not necessary. Since 1978, when I did Satyagraha, I've tended to write rather differently for the orchestra. It's not as much like the Ensemble as it used to be.
You're not interested in exploring electronic sounds too far beyond your present range, then?
I'm not interested in exotic and funny weird sounds. To me, that seems like an endless avenue; one you start on it, there's no telling where in the world it might lead. Maybe it's partly a generation thing too. I'm a pencil-and-paper composer. That's how I was taught to write music, and it's easier for me to conceptualize with a paper and pencil than it is with a machine.
Do you feel a piece of music is less than successful if listeners notice the sound of the instruments more than the music itself?
Well, I don't know. Varese was very much involved with sound, and so was Charles Ives in a way. I don't think we can roll that out. But there are cul-de-sacs in music, and that could be one. Writing good counterpoint is a cul-de-sac too, if you get too caught up with it.
But has your writing of keyboard parts specifically changed since the days you were using Farfisa organs instead of synthesizers? Your synthesizer parts seem functionally very similar to what you used to write for the organ.
That's true in those pieces, but there are a number of solo
keyboard pieces where that isn't true. I'm thinking of two
dance pieces for organ, Dance 2 [featured on this month's
Soundpage] and Dance 4. There's a piano piece called
Mad Rush. Then there's the Opening
to Glassworks, which
is a solo piano piece. The piano pieces tend to be polymetric.
You have to play one meter against another meter, two against
threes. something like that. That's quite different from the
Ensemble writing, where I'm playing with the wind players.
The main function [of the keyboards] in the Ensemble is to lay
down a very steady bass line, which Michael Riesman plays.
That left hand becomes the conductor of the orchestra;
that keeps us together. That's what we hear in our monitors.
That's an important element. It's always there in one way or
another in the Ensemble. But in solo playing I don't have
that requirement, so I don't do it. I'm about to do some
new piano pieces for the dancer/choreographer David Gordon.
I can't really tell you very much about what's going to
happen with it yet, because I haven't done it. But there's
some other piano writing you can hear in the Liquid Days,
which is not arpeggiated writing so much; it's more
polymetric writing.
Much of the pattern repetition in your older keyboard writing seems to anticipate the development of arpeggiators and sequencers. Have you ever considered using devices of this sort in lieu of playing such parts by hand?
Interesting, huh? But I've never really considered doing that. Of course, I'll use sequencers sometimes for programming percussion. It can be useful in the studio, but as a live technique, it isn't. Generally speaking, my approach to technology is as a performance medium. I'll give you a good example. One of the things I do when I write an opera for an opera company is to provide them with a work tape, so that they can do the designs and the staging. One of the problems with new operas is that you can't go out and buy a recording of it, and most designers can't read music, so we make a work tape - a synthesizer tape with voices. I usually have Michael Riesman play it. At one point we programmed the whole score of Act I of Akhnaten into a Roland MicroComposer, then did Act II with Michael Riesman playing all the parts. And Michael was twice as quick; it took half the time. I'll tell you another thing: Michael Riesman doesn't break down, but the machines always do. I find the machines are much for fallible than the players. That data-loading business is very interesting, but I'm not convinced that it's productive.
You've never considered using something like the MicroComposer as a compositional tool?
No, just because I think quicker with pencil and paper. I know composers who work on multi-track machines, but I can conceptualize faster by writing it down. It's a question of speed and clarity, and of training and what you're used to. I'm used to hearing things in my head that way. Not that we don't make corrections - who doesn't? - but what I write down pretty well stands. I mean, you should see my studio at home. What I have is a Baldwin piano and a Yamaha cassette player, although I'm going to get my first CD player. And that's it! All our other stuff is downtown in our studio.
Were you ever intimidated by new music technology?
Absolutely not. I always thought the technology was there for me to use. In that way, maybe I'm mentally younger than others of my generation.
But aren't there styles of writing that these machines could open up for you that aren't otherwise available?
I don't know if that's true. That may very well be. It may be that I've missed opportunities because I haven't gone into that as well as I might. But there's a limit to what you can do. Maybe my life is full of missed opportunities. Maybe I've only realized a few of the things that I could have. But in terms of that particular thing, if you actually look closely at my music, you'll see that it doesn't actually repeat that much. The kind of programs it would be necessary to write to produce that music would be so complicated that it's actually easier to play it. Now, sometimes in a recording studio, some things can be sequenced, though they're usually fairly simple parts, like percussion things. But if my music were really repeated as much as some people think, it would be unlistenable.
You do create the illusion of repetition, though.
And to do that, you have to change all the time.
Do you compose at the piano or away from it?
I do both. I need the piano for real-time playing. I have a lot of trouble conceptualizing music in real time; it always comes out about 30 percent faster [laughs]. So the only way to hear a piece unfoldin real time for me is to play it. Also, I go through periods where I like to work a lot with the piano. For some of my orchestral pieces I do that. But for something like an opera, you can't play all the parts, unless it's something really simple. So even when you're playing it at the piano, you're only playing part of the piece.
What exactly do your keyboard scores look like? Do you often have repetition indications over certain bars, for example?
Sometimes, but I tend not to. My repeats rarely get above three, so most of my stuff can be written out in standard notation. I used to use what I called multipliers, which were brackets with numbers, but I've found that it's not a wise idea to have a multiplier outside of my Ensemble. Most people are just confused by it, so we just write it out... No, that's not quite true. In some of the polymetric things, it's easier to write things out by having a group in the left hand repeating four times, and in the right and repeating three times, then having the overal thing repeat maybe four times. So in polymetric music, I will use the shorthand.
Given the illusion of repetition you often create, a player could easily get lost when reading this sort of passagework
That certainly can happen. One of the Ensemble problems is to stay together. I've been playing with some of these people for 18 or 20 years, so we've been able to get beyond many of the problems of simply falling apart. We occasionally have what we call train wrecks. Not very often, but it happens. But when you play together for as long as this Ensemble has, you achieve a level of performance that you simply cannot achieve with other players.
Are you still playing solo recitals?
There are two or three piano pieces I play in a recital situation, but I don't do a lot of solo playing anymore. There was a time when I had a three-part career, which was Ensemble, operas, and solo playing. I eventually gave up the solo playing because it required too much practicing. The thing is, if you don't practice all the time, a good performance is only a question of luck. It's simply too harrowing an experience to go into a recital wondering whether you're going to be lucky that night. Who the hell wants to do that? On the other hand, I didn't really have the two or three hours a day that really consistent good playing requires. So I gave it up. But I kept in my repertory two or three pieces which I use for benefit concerts, some solo appearances, and things of that kind.
Which pieces are those?
One is Mad Rush. There's an arrangement of Knee 4
from
Einstein On The Beach that I do as a solo piano piece. Also, I play
the Cadenza
and The Bed Music
from Einstein as a solo
piano piece. That, plus the Opening
from Glassworks, are
pieces I still can sit down and play, and I tend to do that half a dozen
times a year.
What about your parts in Ensemble performances? As a player, are you challanged by the keyboard parts you write for yourself?
Well, it's funny. When Martin Goldray came in as our third keyboard player three or four years ago, it was actually to pick up my parts. We needed someone who could play them better than I. It was the whole problem about practicing, because I don't practice as much as Michael would want me to. The second parts are Martin's. Then I've written a whole series of other parts for myself, and mine are the easiest, because I have to spend my time writing.
Do you have a pianist in mind for the solo pieces you're working on now?
In a sense I'm writing them for myself, but Michael Riesman will probably do the recording. We're going to start off by doing a recording for David [Gordon], then he can do the choreography. I had actually wanted to have a live pianist, but David prefers to work with tape. For dancers tape is more dependable. It's also less expensive. Well, that's the way that goes. But I'm sure I'll also hold onto a few of those pieces for myself to play from time to time.
Does your style of writing stem to a certain degree from your capabilities on the keyboard?
In a sense it did. That developed before I knew Michael. It really stems from the fact that I began working with electronic instruments. I began with a multiple keyboard ensemble very simply because most of my friends were keyboard players, and the original members of my group were essentially my friends. The reason we did electric keyboards was, where are you going to find three pianos together? You don't, so you put together electric organs. My first ones were Farfisas. It seemed at that time, in the late '60s, that every basement in Queens had a Farfisa tucked away under the stairwell. I don't know why the hell that was. But you could pick up a Farfisa Mini-Compact for $150. And besides being cheap, the Farfisa was a very dependable keyboard, and very portable. I didn't get involved with synthesizers until they became polyphonic. I did not use the Mini-moog because I really needed a two-handed instrument.
You didn't consider getting two of them?
Too expensive. Also, the difficulty with those monophonic keyboards was that if your technique wasn't absolutely sure, you could bleep out notes. You have to release before you attack, and if you attack too soon, the playing becomes very irragular. So the monophonic ones were not good. The one we were able to use was an ARP Explorer, which we used for bass lines, but Michael was the only person who could play it at our tempos with the sureness of technique that allowed it to sound steady. If anyone else tried it, it sounded rather ragged.
Your first polyphonic synth was a Prophet-5.
That's right. I got that in 1978.
Interestingly, some of the most characteristic Prophet timbres are not dissimilar from the Farfisa sound.
As a matter of fact, at about that point my Farfisas were all crapping out. They weren't really built to last. By '75, we were literally Band-Aiding them together. So the first thing we did when we got the Prophet was we made a program that sounded like the Farfisa; it's still there, in Bank 1, No. 8. Then, when we got the DXs, we did the same thing. We have Farfisa programs for all our synthesizers, since it's part of our sound. But what amused me at the time was that as my original instruments were becoming antiques, I got a $3,000 instrument to do what a $150 keyboard had done [laughs]. This is a kind of progress, in a way. Even now, the Farfisa program is always in our music. I don't know, maybe it's just sentiment.
What led you to include the DX7s that your Ensemble uses now?
One of the problems everyone has been having, including us, is getting a good string sound. In the process of transcribing the operas and theatre works for the Ensemble, we've begun including string and brass and percussion sounds; this is one way we've evolved since the old Farfisa days. So the main thing was to get these keyboard sounds, but also the DX7 really did replace the Prophet for us. According to Michael, who does all the programming in the Ensemble, it's a little difficult to program, but it does seem to be more flexible. I also like the cartridge system. Of course you can load things into the Prophet, but the DX's cartridge is very easy.
When the group travels, do you carry your own DXs with you, or do you just take the cartridges and rent instruments where you go?
Oh, no, we carry everything. I can't depend on local sources. We have over two tons of stuff. It's not only the keyboards. We take our front-of-the-house P.A., our monitor P.A. ... It's a big deal. We also carry MIDIed rack-mounted TX units. We've been approaching live MIDI playing rather cautiously.
What about your Emulators?
They're very useful for other reasons. I use the Emulator principally as a live performance instrument with the voice in some works. For example, The Photographer is actually a choral piece with my Ensemble, so we use a voice sample. Dora Ohrenstein, our singer, plays it with one hand and sings along with it. With her one voice and everything else, we can very effectively simulate the feeling of a complete choral track.
Have you sampled a lot of voices for the Emulator?
A lot of voices, and certainly hers. So that's our principal live use of the Emulator, but we have lots of other samples too. We use brass samples and organ samples, for example, in recording too.
Why did you add the Emulator II after working with the Emulator I for a while?
I think the main reason was that the keyboard split on the II was better for us. We don't just buy the latest model because it's the latest model, but generally speaking, the latest model are improvements. We've become very popular with some of the instrument manufacturers; they like to talk to the people who are using their stuff, right? When Michael was out in California, he spent an afternoon at E-mu, talking about samples and the things we needed.
In your dialogs with manufacturers, what technological changes are you looking for now?
We're mainly trying to simplify and consolidate. Right now my three keyboard players and I each play from two or three manuals; we could eventually get down to one or two. So we want to simplify, while getting still more flexible. It's always a process. We're much further along with it than ten years ago, but I still think we're at the beginning.
In what sense is Michael the ideal keyboard player for your work, if indeed he is?
Well, actually, he would be the ideal keyboard player for the Ensemble, but I would hesitate to say that there is an ideal player for the keyboard music in that I don't want t deny the possibility that someone else may come along and be able to play the music better than Michael and I. On the other hand, I've never found a keyboard player who can equal Michael for my music. At the moment, he is the ideal. On one occasion, Michael couldn't make a concert, and Martin had to fill on on his parts. Now, Martin is an extremely accomplished player, and he was able to do it, but he said that he was in sweat through the whole performance. It's very demanding music.
Then, if we may speak of a hypothetical ideal player for your keyboard repertoire, what kind of player would he or she be?
Well, what you need is very steady playing in terms of tempi. You need
real independence of right and left hand. I'm interested in the
columns you run in Keyboard on that kind of thing. That is axiomatic
in my music; you have to be able to play twos against threes, sometimes
fours against fives, in my music, and that's not so easy to do.
Einstein is full of that. And, you know, synthesizer playing really
is different from piano playing. If you haven't developed that technique,
you play much too hard on the synthesizer, as I'm sure your readers know.
Someone who is just a piano player will have great difficulty playing this
music on the synthesizer. Michael has both techniques. He has probably the
finest synthesizer technique I've ever seen. I've had people walk into the
studio when we were playing, whether it be Paul Simon or Ray Manzarek, and
when they see Michael play, all they can say is, Wow.
Martin Goldray
is a pianist trained in the classical tradition who is acquiring a
synthesizer technique, which takes literally years of practice. He tells me
that he feels it's just coming; even now, he feels that he plays too hard
on the synthesizer. And I definitely write for synthesizer. That kind of
rapid playing over extended periods of time cannot be accomplished on the
acoustic piano. If you tried it, you'd be in shreds.
Some listeners at Ensemble concerts are surprised at the loudness of the performance, especially since dynamic nuance is one of the key devices in your works
Well, one of the things you give up with amplified music is exactly that. I don't know whether there's much you can do about that. It's a tradeoff; almost every thing in life is. You gain in complexity of sound and timbre what you lose in terms of nuance and shadings. However, about half the music I write is acoustic. At the moment, I have six operas around the world, and in any year three or four of them are done in different places, often within the context of very traditional presentation. The Philadelphia Orchestra with Dennis Russell Davies did two evenings of Wagner and Glass, and there you have people who are trained in the kind of dynamic and nuance playing you were referring to. It's very pleasing to me to hear what happens to music when it's done that way.
Wagner and Glass That's an odd combination
Yeah. One program was Act III of Tristan and Act II of Akhnaten. Nice, huh?
I can imagine Wagnerians in the audience listening for leitmotifs in your work
And it wouldn't be too hard to find them.
Have you reflected much on your historical position, especially given the percentage of your work that was written specifically for your Ensemble?
Not very much, although I'm very interested in phenomena like the Ellington orchestra. What happens to an ensemble that's built around one person? I haven't made arrangements for the ensemble music to be performed outside of the Ensemble, but the operas can be done by anybody. The opera scores are copied out by professional copyists, the parts are clean and in good condition. Any company can rent them. The music is warehoused by Theodore Presser, who act as the agent. I've been very careful about that. And there's a consistent program of recording that goes on. But's it's not just a question of documenting. It's a question of setting a standard for the music, so someone should want to play, say, Music In 12 Parts.
No matter how posterity receives your music, it seems clear that practically no one else in our time has established such credibility in the art and pop music worlds, and demonstrated so successfully that one can use the energies of both traditions to create viable music, as you have.
It's so much fun to do that. And one of the reasons I do that is I don't
see why the hell I shouldn't. Years ago I found out there were a lot of
things I wasn't supposed to do, and I said, To hell with that!
That
started the very first time I played in a little night spot called Max's
Kansas City, back in 1972. I knew the guy who ran the place, Mickey Ruskin,
and he said, Look, why don't you play here? You can have the door.
We made about $300 that night, and after that I ssaid, Gee, I'll play
wherever anyone asks me.
In L.A. I sometimes alternate between playing
at the Roxy and at Dororthy Chandler Pavilion. It seems that we only have
one chance to do this, so I'm interested in looking into it all. I'll tell
you another thing. The people that I work with, like David Byrne or the
Roches, these are very bright, talented people. It's crazy to deny yourself
the opportunity to work with them for some imagined idea of propriety.
Several years ago, in talking about writing for voices, you told an
interviewer, I don't take plays and set them to music. Meaning is
conveyed in language. That's not very important to me. I use language very
much in terms of the sound. I like the idea that none of us can understand
it.
Yet, on Songs For Liquid Days, you did precisely take plays and
set them to music.
It just goes to show you can't trust Phil Glass [laughs]. But, no, that's a very good point. My attitude toward language is that it's a process rather than a conclusion. In fact, the songs were specifically about using language in quite a different way than I had talked about at that time.
They were words, but they perhaps didn't tell a story in a traditional linear way.
Perhaps not, but in many ways the setting is somewhat traditional. The
music is meant to fit the meaning of the words. In the first song, for
example, the song about the hum [Changing Opinion
], the hum becomes
the sound. And at one point, when the words talk about sometimes it was
a pulse,
you hear it obviously in the muisc. So the words and the music
do play off each other very specifically, in a way that they don't in
Satyagraha. This seems to be a very different way of working.
Given that you wrote from the completed lyrics on Liquid Days, was the process of composing music different than it might have been when doing a libretto based on solfege or numbers, as in Einstein On The Beach?
It was. First of all, in the case of Einstein the primary subject
matter was conveyed to me in drawings; there was some text as well, but
mainly the drawings that [director/set designer] Bob Wilson made. So I
wasn't starting totally from scratch in a certain way. In other words, if I
was doing the scene called The Trial
, I had dozens of sketches of
the scene before me when I wrote the music. In writing the Songs,
the words took the place of the drawings. In other words, the music
related to a specific subject, which was the words, so that I began with
the words, and, literally, the words inspired the music. I don't know how
else to say it. It's just the way that a painter will look at a table and
draw the table.
Not all the lyrics are linear in the sense of boy-meets-girl, or boy-proceeds-from-point-A-to-point-B, though.
And yet the point of contact can be quite direct.
The connection between lyric and music must have been more obtuse in some of the songs than in others.
That's true. For example, the last song, Laurie Anderson's
[Forgetting
]. I had that series of words to set. They came in groups
of three, but I set them in rhythmic groupings of four. That meant that
every of three had a space in it; it would be one, rest, two, three, or
rest, one, two, three, or one, two, three, rest, and so forth. I remember
looking at the words and seeing that she had so consistently used the
group of three that I could hit the three into the four and form a kind of
rhythmic tension between the words and the phrasing. That's how I began
writing that song; I set the actual words at the end. Then I took the
second group - They rushed slightly by, these lovers
- and I used
that same music again. That left me the first group and the third group to
set up. That became the narrative part of the song.
You also seemed to depart from the specific written list of words at the end. The piece seemed longer than the written libretto.
Oh, yes, that's right. You see, it says, So she repeats these words
over and over again.
I spoke to Laurie and said, Since you say `over
and over again,' why don't we do it over and over again?
She said
Yeah, that's okay
So I extended the four lines to maybe 12 lines.
Which of these songs was the most difficult for you?
They weren't particularly difficult really. It's funny. I have this way
of hardly ever remembering the hard parts. I think in a way, this one we're
talking about, Liquid Days
, was it. And [David Byrne's] Open The
Kingdom.
The difficulty was that it took me a devil of a time to figure
out what the hell they meant. They were given to me as a pair. David is
very helpful and very easy to work with in one way, yet he often will not
tell you the most important thing you need to know. He just doesn't talk a
lot. I looked at these two songs for a while, and I finally saw that they
were both love songs. One was about domestic love and one was about
religious love. That was very interesting. Once I saw that I had the key
to it, I realized that it was exactly like certain traditions of music.
The vocal music of South India is like that: Songs that are either to your
lover or to your god, always one or the other. And I saw that that was
what these were, so I just decided to put them together. They form a range
of human love, in a way, don't they?
The music on the words open the kingdom
stood out
dramatically, as if to evoke religious choral singing.
Absolutely, yeah. Well, I saw it that way. And you take words like
days of fishes,
uncertain,
I'm asking,
open the
kingdom
[all from Open The Kingdom
... These are all religious
images. Whereas the other one, Love wiggles on the floor,
and
Love could use a shave,
that's something that happens at home. Love
becomes this kind of comfortable person that you've been hanging around
with. It makes it nice that the girls [the Roches] are singing it.
You've written long works in the past, though you've written smaller pieces too. In what sense was this project different from working in large ensembles and blocks of time?
Well, as you say, I've done quite a lot of smaller pieces. They're not as well known as the big pieces, which I think have become famous for their size. You know, I'm the guy that did the five-hour opera, or the six-hour concert, and so forth. However, it was a disappointment to some people that the songs were rather over-long in terms of what one might have heard on the radio. That first song is about eleven minutes long.
That's an interesting comment. It seems to us that the length of
Changing Opinion
is just about right for what it is.
Seems right to me. Who would make a comment like that? It's not even
exactly true. Hey, Jude
was about eight or nine minutes. There have
been long songs, and Hey, Jude
was one of the most popular songs
that was ever written.
Jimmy Webb's MacArthur Park
ran over seven minutes.
Yeah, and the people who wrote those things were masters of popular music. I can hardly be called that. I'm someone who's stumbling into the song form. I wasn't thinking that having written all these three-minute singles I could afford to write an eight-minute song. It wasn't like that at all. The length, to me, was determined by the words and by the musical needs. I wasn't thinking of the packaging aspect of it, which is like how are you going to get it on the radio? There is one three-minute song there, but that's by accident. On the other hand, I knew I was working in the LP format; that was in my mind too.
Although Songs represents a different format than the one we're used to seeing from you, it's still clearly written by you.
Yeah, the authorship is clear.
So in what sense does the fact that these are songs change the essence of your music?
Well, certainly, being geared to the words, the structure changes more rapidly than on some of the other stuff, except for the first song, which has rather long passages. I don't think there's one A-B-A song in the whole thing, but they are formed from smaller units that are put together.
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