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 Philip Glass follows up his 2007 Academy Award nomination with the American premiere of a new piece at the Lincoln Center Festival  The Philip Glass Ensemble was an outlet for Glass's minimalist operas and other works starting in the late '60s.
Both feature films from 2006 that he scored, "The Illusionist" and "Notes On A Scandal," were nominated for a raft of awards (including Best Composer for "The Illusionist" from the Broadcast Film Critics Association Awards, and an Oscar nomination for "Notes"). Then it was announced he would be producing a new major piece entitled "Book of Longing," based on the poetry of Leonard Cohen, for the Lincoln Center Festival.
But despite his many accolades, Glass is constantly working on both where his career is going and where his vast catalog of music has been. When Glass began gaining recognition for his work, his sound, and that of others who were exploring the new music realm (which included serial music, instrument manipulation and subtle shifts in time and harmony) was achieved by constructing music with new and then unheard-of compositional methods. Inspired by Indian ragas and Ravi Shankar, Glass' unique brand of heavily rhythmic minimalism has inspired countless musicians, and, aided by some impressive film scores, has helped bring modert art music to the masses.
Since coming to popularity in the '60s, Glass has rendered his musical visions in formats that range from opera to rock band huge, avant-garde theatrical collaborations with the likes of Robert Wilson. His innovative soundtracks for such films as "Koyaanisqatsi " (1982), "Powaqqatsi" (1988), "Kundun" (1997) and "The Hours" (2002) have brought his music to an ever-widening audience. And though Glass's singular style permeates everything he does, he always find a new way to apply his unique sound to each project, which is one of the main reasons that his music always comes off as fresh and alive.
philipglass.com
Q: When you look back at your musical career, do you see how your music has changed?
Philip Glass: I do. I'm also a performer, as you know, and I play with my own sound. This year I'm doing three or four retrospective concerts. They come up every year. These concerts include music from '69 to the present, and I do that every year a number of times, and when I do my piano solo concerts I do the same thing. I play from '79 to the present, so I don't mind doing that.
I go back to my roots and hear pieces I wrote in 1969, and I know we're playing them differently than we used to, and I'm astonished sometimes by how different the language of the music can be, but I find it very invigorating. I don't mind doing that at all. I think it's not a bad idea, to be confronted with that. Rembrandt did self-portraits his whole life. My friend, Chuck Close, has done self-portraits all his life. These are visions of the artists, but it's interesting. I had a friend also, he worked on a well-known painting, he died when he was young, but he did a self-portrait every birthday.
Q: Who was that?
PG: A guy named John Russon, and he's not known. He died quite young in his 30s and he didn't have a body of work that would be remembered, but what he did, and I remember this very clearly, every year he did a self-portrait. And you can say that everything an artist does is a self portrait. I've just been setting some poems by Leonard Cohen to an evening white piece, and when I look at Leonard's book, it's called "A Book of Longing." To me it seems like the whole book is a self-portrait. [Ed: the resulting piece, "Book of Longing," will be performed on July 14-15 as part of the Lincoln Center Festival]
Q: For some people self-reflection is not always a happy experience.
PG: I think it's nourishing and important. You're not going to like everything the same, you're going to be like, "Well, that was interesting," or "This wasn't such a great moment." I mean, everyone's career has ups and down, they may even be big big ups and downs. They may even, seismographically they could be small up and downs, and they will seem big to the person doing it.
We all have feet of clay. We're standing and dissolving into the earth, we're not gods. Well, there have been people like Mozart and Schubert, who have been gods in the world of music. We haven't seen them lately, but most of us are human beings, and strength and weaknesses are things to be revealed and rejoiced in.
Q: How do you see your evolution in terms of writing film scores?
PG: I see myself changing with the rest of the world. I see myself changing as technology has changed, I see myself changing as writers write differently, I see my music for film changing as films have changed.
In other words I'm not changing by myself. Being an American at the beginning of the 21st century, we are in a very rich cultural milieu, and I'm a part of that. I'm reading a new book by Norman Mailer, I've been reading him all of my life and the guy just wrote a new book! His ideas have changed too. This is true for [all] artists. What's not interesting is not that I've changed--of course I've changed. What's interesting is how my changes are lining up with changes around me.
Q: Have you ever had this situation with two movies out at the same time before?
PG: No. I was a little nervous about it.
Q: What were your approaches to each film respectively?
PG: I remember "The Illusionist," it's a really, truly independent movie. There wasn't a lot of money behind it. I think most of the money came from somewhere, I'm not really sure exactly, but it has to be done quickly. You have to be quick on your feet with that. There's no time to rewrite and reshoot and reloop and all that stuff. And so you have be very accurate and very quick in your assessments and you have to get it done.
I think that gave the music a kind of freshness and fluidity which it might not have had. It just feels very spontaneous to me when I look back on it, and it was. [When] I look back on it, everybody was trying to get the thing done on a very tight budget.
"Notes on a Scandal" was also an independent movie, but it was an independent movie made by a very experienced producer, Scott Rudin, who's done a gazillion movies. In fact, of my favorite movies for Oscar consideration this year, one is, I think, "The Queen" and also "Venus," you know this guy has a lot of experience. And there was time to work on "Notes" and it meant that I virtually worked the score three times. It didn't make it worse, it made it better.
Going into it I was working with [director] Richard Eyre, most of the time, and every time we approached it again, we started with one thing and before we knew it we were writing the whole thing again. Each time we did it we got into more subtle layers of the film, and the film has those layers, and we weren't overdoing the film. The thing about "The Illusionist" was that it was a simpler story and an easier story, and it didn't really need that, but "Notes on a Scandal" did. And we gave it everything. Scott was there all the time, Richard came numerous times and spent weeks with me each time. And we worked our way through it, three times.
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