Audiences at performances of the Philip Glass Ensemble may be surprised to find the composer not on the podium but behind his own set of keyboards, dutifully following someone else's directions. Non one has hijacked the group, however, or overthrown the founder in a bloodless coup, but for direction, synthesizer programming, and all the heavy keyboard parts, he defers to the mystery conductor, Michael Riesman.
The tall, rugged-looking Riesman dominates the stage with his quiet, autorative presence. Offstage, his contributions to the Ensemble are just as commanding. He runs rehearsels, checks out new gear, and creates all the keyboard sounds for the Ensemble from Glass' indications. He also takes samples for the group, hiring musicians to blow or bow for the Ensemble's Emulator library. The fact that he also finds the time to persue his own composing and performance, much less submit to a Keyboard interview, is a tribute to his discipline.
There are some fundamental differences between Riesman's and Glass' music. Where the Glass Ensemble sticks to written arrangements, Riesman regards improvisation as the key element in his non-Glass performances. "The improvisations I do in concert have a wide stylistic range," he says. "When I was a kid, I used to improvise in the styles of Mozart, Chopin, and so on; I'd imitate the styles I knew. As I got older, I broadened my vocabulary to include jazz, pop, country, and so on. In none of these areas do I feel knowledgeable enough to say, `I am a jazz player' or `I am a country player,' but I can fake the styles well enough to get by."
Yet there are also strong parallels between Glass' and Riesman's careers. Both are New Yorkers, with solid musical backgrounds; Riesman carried a double major in composition and conducting at the Mannes College Of Music in New York, then pursued advanced studies in composition with Roger Sessions and Leon Kirchner at Harvard. Like Glass, Riesman considers himself primarily a composer rather than a performer, though he began taking piano lessons at age six. Perhaps the most significant interest shared by the two lies in their willingness to break out of the traditional concert format and present alternative music in the kinds of setting that many established classical artists might avoid.
"I taught for a year at the State University of New York at Purchase," Riesman recalls, "but even then I was doing solo keyboard concerts of improvised works and experimenting in different areas of performance, including playing in clubs in Greenwich Village - the old Folk City, the Gaslight, and so on. Eventually, I decided I wanted to get out of the academic world, partly because of [composer] David Amran, whom I'd gotten to know. His attitude is that all kinds of music are legitimate. He makes an effort to integrate all the music he loves into his own work, and I decided I wanted to do that more. The music I had been writing at that time was somewhat academically oriented, but what I really enjoyed doing when I sat down at the piano was to improvise and to absorb the influence of popular idioms. This created a disparity for me, since i felt improvisation was an important part of my talent and I wanted to make my own music more accessible."
Initially at least, Riesman has reached the public through his association with Glass. They first came into contact with one another 13 years ago. "I gave a concert at a downtown gallery, 112 Green Street, in early 1974," Riesman says. "One of the people who came to that concert was Dicky Landry, who was at that time the saxophone and flute player in the Ensemble. Philip was looking for a keyboard player to replace Bob Pelson, who was leaving, and after hearing me, Dicky suggested my name. I had met Philip socially before, but now we got together and read through some of his music."
Like many first-time listeners to this day, Riesman had mixed feelings about Glass' music. "When I first heard about this music, I thought `Well, Yeah,'" he shrugs. "And when I actually heard the music in concert, I had an initial reaction of, `Well, there's nothing going on here.' But by the end of the concert, to my great surprise, I was taken with it."
As the Ensemble's longtime music director and chief keyboardist, Riesman has worked out an approach to handling the demands of Glass' style. "We don't memorize the music in the Ensemble, but it's not that different from learning, say, a piece of chamber music in the traditional way," he says. "The technical problems of fingering passages are comparable. All notes are written out, so it's not a collaborative work in that sense.
"Other than playing the notes, my biggest job is to direct the rehearsels," he continues. "New pieces always have some kind of ensemble problem. His music is rhythmically very challenging; I would say we spend most of our rehearsel time working out the problems of multiple meters and cross-rhythms in new pieces, and making sure everybody can stay together. When we're just starting a piece, we'll take it a little under tempo. I find that as we play the piece to the point where we feel comfortable with it, we usually tend to speed up somewhat above the original tempo indications."
Because Glass' work doesn't often follow conventional notions of theme, variation, and recapitulation, Riesman points out that the process of learning a new piece can be more like assembling a puzzle than following some grand developmental line. "For example," he says, "I recorded a solo piano piece, `The Opening,' on Glassworks. It consists of four phrases, each of which is repeated three times. There's no other structure. Each time the cycle goes around, I play it somewhat differently, but that's not to say that the second time is the development and the third time is the recapitulation. But there's another piece I've recorded that will be released sometime later this year - the Dance 2 for organ. In that one there is a sense of development, because the technique that Philip uses to sustain the piece is one of increasing the complexity of the relationship between what the two hands are doing. There are rhythmic patterns which are at first a simple two against three, which then becomes elaborated into larger groupings of threes and fours and eights against sixes, and twelves against eights, that kind of thing. Melodic devices enter to compound a group of three, say, into a group of four times three, or eight times three. As the piece goes forward, the excitement is that the rhythmic complexity, as it becomes more convoluted, makes you listen each time for what it's going to do next. That kind of development doesn't have an exposition and recapitulation, but it does go up from the beginning into levels of increasing complexity."
Even after the Ensemble nails down a new Glass work, tempo remains a crucial element. Again, it falls to Riesman to keep the piece moving at the proper steady clip. "My role in the group is to be the rhythmic center that everyone follows," he explains. "My left hand always plays the bass part. The way our monitor system is set up, every player in the group is hearing himself plus me. This is something we arrived at after years of experimenting with different monitor setups. It's really the best way to keep everybody together, since I'm always there with that moving left-hand part. We don't use aids at all in live performance, except on one piece, `The Funeral' from Akhnaten, for which we use a Korg DDD-1 drum machine. That piece calls for a drum, and we can't afford to bring two drummers on tour to do one number. We used to use a Drumulator driving a Simmons head, but now we just use the stock sounds on the DDD-1 to do the original drum part as Philip wrote it."
In the studio, keeping an even tempo is a different story. "We almost always use click tracks now," Riesman points out. "The last record we made that didn't use click tracks all the way through was Einstein on the Beach, but even there we used click tracks for some of it. All the more recent work, from Glassworks on, including The Photographer, Satyagraha, Songs From Liquid Days, and the film scores Koyaanisqatsi and Mishima, were click track from beginning to end. For more complicated metrical changes, we sometimes use multiple click tracks, one that is beating, say, straight eight-notes, and another one that beats the accented notes."
Dynamics, too, are important in Glass performances. Although crescendos and diminuendos appear in his operatic works, Glass leans more toward terraced dynamics in his solo and ensemble pieces, perhaps as a reflection on their mathematical precision. In leading the Ensemble rehearsels, Riesman is aware of the composer's indications. However, he says, "We don't really follow most of the dynamics he writes. I'm in charge of adapting Philip's other music to be played by the Ensemble, and when I do these arrangements, we sort of ignore the dynamics, except as they exist orchestrationally. That is, a flute might be by itself, and then be joined by other instruments. But because the Ensemble consists of three and sometimes four keyboard players, including Martin Goldray and our singer, Dora Ohrenstein, who plays keyboards on a few numbers, dynamics become something of a problem with all these electronic keyboards. We do tend to play everything on the loud side," he admits wuth a laught.
When asked to trace the evolution of the Ensemble's keyboard setup, Riesman harks back to the era of Farfisa organs, which were the staple of the group's sound at the time of his induction. "The next keyboard was the Yamaha YD-45 dual manual portable organ, which was a big step up in color; we added that at the time of Einstein on the Beach, which was 1976. After that we got a bass keyboard, an ARP Explorer, Model 1900. It was a cheesy little monophonic synthesizer, but it had a great bass sound. The Explorer did one thing that no other synthesizer like it did. It had four tabs on the oscillator, so you could do 16-, 8-, 4-, and 2-foot stops simultaneously, as well as four waveforms - square, sawtooth, trangle, and a shorter pulse wave - which you could have all at once. With four octaves and four waveforms, the bass sound was quite exciting, with enough top end to add bite to it. Introducing a deep bass sound into the Ensemble was a major change. That was the sound we used for many years."
The first programmable synthesizers were added around the time of Glassworks. "That's when Philip starting writing some brass parts," Riesman says. "The first synthesizer we bought was the [Sequential] Prophet-5, which we used primarily for doing brass sounds and French horns. The next step was to add a second keyboard player, to cover the arrangements of the new music Philip had been writing - the soundtrack for Koyaanisqatsi and The Photographer. We simultaneously acquired an [E-mu] Emulator I and an [Oberheim] OB-Xa to be able to do those pieces. After that, we got a Roland JX-3P, which we used primarily as a backup for the Prophet and the Oberheim. Then the [Yamaha] DX-series came out, and we acquired a DX7 and DX9. Later we added an Emulator II, which we used in the studio, but not on the road. We also have a number of limiters and reverb devices, which are mainly used on the acoustic instruments. The keyboards are pretty much fed straight through the P.A.
"The latest thing," Riesman continues, "is that I've completely replaced my stack. I was using the Yamaha YC-45D organ and the ARP until about a year and a half ago. The ARP was on its last legs, though, so I replaced it with a [Roland] Juno-106, which now does the bass parts, usually MIDIed with my DX7. Then the Yamaha started to die, so I replaced that with a Roland MKB-300 MIDI keyboard controller driving a [Yamaha] TX rack and a [Roland] Super Jupiter. I keep my DX7 underneath the MKB-300, mainly fir programming the TX rack. There are a few pieces where I need all three keyboards, but in general I don't like to play the DX7 because the keys are just a little bit small and the action if mushy. I much prefer to play the MKB-300."
No matter what the keyboard, Glass' parts make technical demands that the typical concert pianist may find difficult to handle. There's lots of repetitive finger motion over long stretches, with relatively little movement up and down the keys. Though it sounds simple in some ways, it can be exhausting over the course of an evening; Riesman once calculated that at each ensemble performance, he was called upon to play approximately 80,000 notes! He has, however, adjusted. "If I were to suggest exercises for preparing to play Philip's music, I'd just say the standard scales and arpeggios that everyone learns," he says. "But, really, the best practice for me has been to just play Philip's music over the years. The music itself is like an excersice because of its repetitive nature. It stays pretty stationary most of the time. The patterns tend to be four- or five-finger patterns, so the hand doesn't move all that much. I try to move the fingers as little as possible, to push the key down only with the force necessary to make it move, and no more. This is how I can keep it up night after night."
Though the Ensemble keyboardists play strictly on electronic keyboards - the piano parts, for example, are usually handled by Martin Goldray on the Roland MKS-20 digital piano module - Riesman maintains that his piano technique has not atrophied. "Playing Philip's music has actually helped my piano technique," he says. "It has been very good for my technique for playing other music too. I thought that learning to play this way would somehow be confusing, or I would have to learn two techniques, but my piano technique has been helped a great deal, because learning to play efficiently is effective on any keyboard. You know, when Martin Goldray joined us, he had only played piano; he had never touched a synthesizer. At first he had endurance problems because he was playing the synthesizer like a piano, hitting them hard. He's just beginning to learn now to lighten up. That's really what the Philip Glass technique is about: efficient use of the muscles. It's just a question of playing with more force on the piano, but the method is the same."
Away from the Ensemble, Riesman divides his time between other Glass projects and his own music. When we spoke with him, he was racing against time to complete a click track for an upcoming session with the Stuttgart Opera, "They're going to record Akhnaten, with Dennis Russell Davies conducting," he says. "We're doing it the same way we do most of our records, which is through layering in the studio and bringing in smaller groups of musicians, one of strings and winds, one of brass, then percussion and keyboards, the chorus, and, at the end, the soloists. Since Philip writes these long lines and long passages without rests that are just about unplayable, it's really the only way to do it."
Since most operas are recorded live, in one pass, we wondered whether the Glass/Riesman overdubbing approach had caused any consternation among the participants. "We had some resistance from Dennis Davies," Riesman admits. "He was a candidate for Satyagraha, but he didn't want to work this way then. He did change his mind, though, after hearing the record. So when we came to do Akhnaten, he agreed. You might say that most of his job was done yesterday in the studio, where the tempos were set and the performance defined. In the studio, he's primarily going to be beating time to the click track. The hard work will be done by me in the control room, doing the punch-ins."
On the Satyagraha click track, Riesman used a keyboard because "I had no way of knowing where I was on the click track without having a guide track. However, now there are SMPTE reading devices and units like the Roland SBX-80, which we're programming to produce a click track that includes all the expressive nuances of ritards, accelerandi, tempo changes, and so on, and to give us a readout in measures of where we are. I can simply follow that and do a vocal guide track that counts out bars with the click. That way we can dispense with having to do a time-consuming keyboard guide track."
Chief among his own projects is a solo album, Formal Abandon, due for release in March on the Rizzoli label. "It's a one-man job," Riesman notes. "I wrote, performed, and produced it myself. It's sort of a keyboard concerto, with two extended instrumental pieces, one on each side of the record, both created as dance pieces for [choreographer] Lucinda Childs. The first side I would call a piano accompanied by an orchestra of layered synthesizers, including Emulators - basically the setup I've been using with the Ensemble. The second side is also a concerto, but the lead part is taken by synthesizer; the piano becomes a member of the orchestra. The structure was composed; the interior orchestra parts written out. The solo parts are improvised."
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