Books

Writings on Glass: Essays, Interviews, Criticism

Edited by Richard Kostelanetz, with Robert Flemming
New York: Schinner Books, 1997
386 pages, $30.00
A few years ago, the young playwright David Ives made a splash with his deliri-
ously postmodern series of one-acts, All in the Timing. Perhaps the most mem-
orable and amusing piece among them concerns an epic trip to the baker titled
"Philip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread." Without denying the cleverness of the con-
cept, one would be hard put to imagine another contemporary American com-
poser of significance whose very style evokes the instant recognition on which
Ives's parody hinges. Yet, despite the enduring visibility and influence of Glass
within the cultural fabric of the last quarter century, we still await a rigorous
assessment of his achievements, above all in the hybrid forms of music theater
for which he is best known and which he continues to evolve.
1
What the present collection offers is a useful, though by no means compre-
hensive, survey of Glass's career and development until the early 1990s. Editor
Richard Kostelanetz assembled this volumepublished in honor of the com-
poser's sixtieth birthday from a remarkable diversity of sources, which points
to the unusual intersection of spheres one encounters in Glass's world. The
twenty-six contributors range from music critics such as Tim Page and Allan
Kozinn to experimental theater pioneer Richard Foreman, musician Joan La
Barbara, sculptor Richard Serra, and the editor of a Buddhist magazine. While
the book includes analytical studies of several landmark works, roughly one-
third of the material is presented in the form of interviews with the refreshingly
articulate Glass. These, together with an assortment of profiles and journalis-
tic chronicles, sketch a largely impressionistic portrait of the composer that will
appeal to the general reader, as will the personal context in which they place his
innovations.
A lengthy interview with Ev Grimes on the early years reminds us of the sur-
prisingly traditional nature of Glass's educational formation. That the com-

a
t

U
n
i
v
e
r
s
i
d
a
d

A
u
t

n
o
m
a

M
e
t
r
o
p
o
l
i
t
a
n
a

o
n

O
c
t
o
b
e
r

1
6
,

2
0
1
4
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
o
q
.
o
x
f
o
r
d
j
o
u
r
n
a
l
s
.
o
r
g
/
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d

f
r
o
m

8 8 B O O K S
poser's ultimate discovery of his own voice was based on outright rejection of
a rigid academic mainstream is well known. Yet Glass early on acquired habits
of extreme self-discipline that he never abandoned, thanks in part to his gruel-
ing period of study with Nadia Boulanger. From her he learned that "you don't
write carelessly, and you don't write notes that don't belong" (p. 36). Boulanger
in fact recurs as a haunting, ambiguous presence in several of the interviews,
and Glass contributes some delightful vignettes of her imposing personality.
On one occasion, having failed to spot a hidden parallel fifth in a harmony exer-
cise, the composer recalls being asked whether the attentions of a psychiatrist
might be necessary for one "so distracted, so out of touch with reality" (p. 323).
The years in Paris in the mid-1960s emerge as a pivotal phase, for they
included not only the work with Boulanger but two artistic epiphanies, namely,
Glass's discoveries of Indian music (in a film project with Ravi Shankar) and
the theater of Samuel Beckett. For the hitter's Play, Glass wrote incidental music
that first enunciated his new style and that he now lists at the beginning of his
catalog of complete works. The steps by which Glass renounced the regnant
serialism of the era to arrive at a style based on repetitive structures often read
like a Cartesian process of scaling down: "I reduced all the music that I knew
to something that was based on the simplest materials of music that I could
think o P (p. 206).
Yet, as many of the selections in Writings on Glass document, that style arose
not simply as a reaction to prevailing cultural trends but from a ferment of var-
ied influences. These include, to mention a few, Darius Milhaud, Virgil Thom-
son, and John Cage. (Everybody who listens to Glass's music, incidentally,
seems to have a personal favorite of proleptic minimalism from the Western
canon, whether the prelude to Das Rheingold, Ravel's Bolero, or the opening
measures to Handel's Zadok the Priest) Parallel investigations in the theater and
visual arts proved to be of equal importance. Indeed, much of the earliest writ-
ing on Glass appeared in art magazines, such as a stunningly brilliant essay by
Richard Foreman (reprinted here) comparing Glass with filmmaker Michael
Snow. Although it is applied to the composer's early instrumental works, Fore-
man's phenomenological inquiry into a style in which "naked presence is the
mode and matter of the artistic experience" (p. 86) becomes uncannily prescient
of responses that would be evoked by the composer's first operas.
Selections by La Barbara, former Village Voice critic Tom Johnson (credited
by some with coining the term minimalism as a musical style), and Edward
Strickland trace the evolving sense of a new "movement" in New York's down-
town scene in the early 1970s that embraced a dazzling (and sometimes com-
peting) polyphony of voices. An intriguing notion floated by Johnson is that
Glass's initial appeal lay in countering decades of dodecaphonic angst with
music that "conveys a mood which is overwhelmingly joyous" (p. 52). With the
sparely wte&Music in Twelve Parts (1971-74), to which Page contributes a lucid
introduction in this volume, Glass's career reached a turning point. Its epic
length (which, it should be noted, underscores the misleading nature of the tag

a
t

U
n
i
v
e
r
s
i
d
a
d

A
u
t

n
o
m
a

M
e
t
r
o
p
o
l
i
t
a
n
a

o
n

O
c
t
o
b
e
r

1
6
,

2
0
1
4
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
o
q
.
o
x
f
o
r
d
j
o
u
r
n
a
l
s
.
o
r
g
/
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d

f
r
o
m

BOOKS 8 9
minimalism when applied to much of the composer's oeuvre) set a pattern for .
the music theater works that were soon to become a Glassian obsession.
"A lot of my work came out of a need to evolve a musical language that could
be married to the theatrical language that was going on around me," notes Glass
in one interview (p. 321). The largest segment of Writings on Glass focuses on
this engagement. It has extended not only to a remarkable number of full-scale
and chamber operas but to influential film scores and a variety of composite
music theater pieces.
2
Opera lovers, even those not favorably inclined toward
Glass, will find the larger aesthetic issues broached in these discussions especially
fascinating: the tremendous potential of metaphorical, associative, collage-
oriented dramaturgy (most radically explored in Glass's first venture into opera,
Einstein on the Beach); the emphasis on collaboration that results in a new kind
of Gesamtkunstwerk not centered, like Wagner's, on the vision of a single artist;
the approach to setting a text and the increased fluency of vocal writing that
have developed with each new opera topic; and the relation of music to image
(onstage or in film) that requires a particularly active role on the part of the
audience. On the last point Glass observes: "Early on in my work in the the-
ater, I was encouraged to leave what I call a 'space' between the image and the
music. In fact, it is precisely that space which is required so that members of
the audience have the necessary perspective or distance to create their own indi-
vidual meanings" (p. 141).
The three "portrait" operas devoted to Einstein, Gandhi, and Akhnaten as
iconic figures representing the shaping forces of science, politics, and religion,
respectively, receive notably uneven treatment here.
3
David Cunningham's ram-
bling essay on Einstein on the Beach clutters its occasional insights with poor
writing. (One howler that escaped detection occurs in a digression interpret-
ing the image of the violin-playing Einstein: "He apparently wrote a book on
Mozart" [p. 165].) Valuable reflections on Satyagraha are offered by Kozinn, but
they are too brief to give more than a taste of that opera's unique lyric quali-
ties. Though fundamentally at odds with Glass's own vision of "singing arche-
ologyf the Egyptologist Paul John Frandsen contributes an intriguing approach
to the "tragic" opera of the trilogy, Akhnaten.
Other works that become the focus of discussion are the score forKoyaanisqatsi
(in an interview with film professor Charles Merrell Berg) and one of the com-
poser's most resonant operas of the 1990s, Hydrogen Jukebox. Although embar-
rassingly self-indulgent, Thomas Rain Crowe's commentary on the latter
includes some perceptive statements by the composer about the challenges faced
in setting Allen Ginsberg's texts in order to create a composite portrait of Amer-
ica. Peter G. Davis's short, highly critical review of The Voyage (titled "Star
Drek") raises some important questions about the direction of Glass's operas
in recent years. Its inclusion, however, suggests only a token effort on the part
of the editors to present a nay-saying perspective.
A charge one sometimes hears from the composer's detractors is that his suc-
cess in attracting first-rate collaborators is what keeps the music from collaps-

a
t

U
n
i
v
e
r
s
i
d
a
d

A
u
t

n
o
m
a

M
e
t
r
o
p
o
l
i
t
a
n
a

o
n

O
c
t
o
b
e
r

1
6
,

2
0
1
4
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
o
q
.
o
x
f
o
r
d
j
o
u
r
n
a
l
s
.
o
r
g
/
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d

f
r
o
m

9 O B O O K S
ing into banality. Glass himself acknowledges how crucial has been the input
from other sources: "The emphasis in my work has been on collaboration
throughout.... Fm convinced that this is one of the major reasons that I fol-
lowed a path diflferent from other composers" (p. 8). Far from being a sign of
weakness, diis tendency seems, in Glass's most significant works, to prove the
power of his music to measure up and give new dimensions to the visionary
demands of such diverse artists as Robert Wilson, filmmaker Godfrey Reggio,
and Ginsberg. The famous put-down by former New York Times critic Donal
Henahan that Glass writes "going-nowhere" music similarly misses the point.
It is above all in amalgams of music theater created with his collaborators that
Glass has explored the potentialities of a way of storytelling unbound by con-
ventional narrative events. A pithy statement of the composer's aesthetic, widi
important ramifications for his theatrical sensibility, is the following: "One of
the main things about my music is that it doesn't exist in colloquial time. And
one of the first things that people perceive in my music is extended time, or loss
of time, or no sense of time whatsoever" (p. 172).
In general, Writings on Glass serves as a useful introduction to the recurring
interests and wide sphere of aesthetic concerns that continue to inform Glass's
career. (A good deal of these are summarized in a far-reaching interview with
Richard Serra.) Patience, however, will be required to endure an alarming
degree of editorial sloppiness. A simple spell-check should have located the egre-
gious "Ahknaten" throughout an entire interview (pp. 316-17), though it might
have left composer Conrad Susa (p. 22) sharing a coat of arms with John Philip
and the composer's ex-wife JoAnne Akalaitis shorn of an e. Far worse is the mat-
ter of dates of compositions, which create great confusion for the reader when
they don't tally with those given in the appended complete list of works by Glass
(see pp. 39-45, for example). Anyone attempting to order recordings based on
the catalog numbers given in the discography should exercise caution (the cor-
rect one for the Nonesuch sound track of AnimaMundi is 79329-2). And aside
from the all-too-frequent signs of a book hastily thrown together, how could
phrases such as this slip by unmended: "It provides for myself a similar experi-
ence to hearing a music of this texturally dense systems variety for the first time
ever" (p. 155)? Still, in the absence of an adequate alternative, Writings on Glass
will provide much useful material both to inveterate enthusiasts and to the
merely curious. Perhaps it is a measure of the book's success that one ends by
feeling that Glass deserves better.
ThomasMay
NOT E S
1. The groundwork for such a study might K. Rober Schwartz, Minimalists (London:
include some of the useful, though . Phaidon, 1996) for the broader context of
admittedly limited, tangents introduced in mutually shaping influences that would like-
Wim Mertens, American Minimal Music wise have to be addressed in a full-scale criti-
(London: Kahn and Averill, 198?). See also cal analysis of the composer.

a
t

U
n
i
v
e
r
s
i
d
a
d

A
u
t

n
o
m
a

M
e
t
r
o
p
o
l
i
t
a
n
a

o
n

O
c
t
o
b
e
r

1
6
,

2
0
1
4
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
o
q
.
o
x
f
o
r
d
j
o
u
r
n
a
l
s
.
o
r
g
/
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d

f
r
o
m

B O O K S 9 I
2. This volume contains no discussion of
the trilogy of hybrid form that Glass created
in response to die films of Jean Cocteau
Orphic (1993), La belle et la btte (1994), and
Les enfants terrible* (1996)since the
composer's own book on these projects is
forthcoming. Nevertheless, they represent
a fascinating new stage in Glass's perennial
experiments with operatic narrative. The
interested reader is strongly urged to seek
out the excellent recording of La belle et la
bite available on Elektra/Nonesuch 79347-2
as an example of the composer's growing
mastery of transparent vocal writing and
orchestral scene painting.
3. For an engaging, anecdote-rich intro-
duction to the "portrait" trilogy, the reader is
advised to turn to Glass's own memoir of the
composition of each opera. See Philip Glass,
Music by Philip Glass, ed. Robert T. Jones, 2d
ed. (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995). While
some listeners prefer the original LP release
of Einstein on the Beach, a new recording that
includes more musical material and a higher
level of vocal ensemble was issued in 1993 on
Elektra/Nonesuch 79323-3-
Opera on Screen:
A Guide to One Hundred Tears of Films and Videos
Featuring Operas, Opera Singers, and Operettas
Ken Wlaschin
Los Angeles: Beachwood Press, 1997
636 pages, $75.00 (available as a CD-ROM, $55.00)
For all of its faults, this book is a seminal work, fast becoming the reference
work for all future endeavors in the field. Indeed, so vast in scope is it that,
rather than try to reinvent the wheel by coming up with my own description
of what Opera on Screen covers, I will merely quote from the author's admirably
concise yet comprehensive introduction:
This guide . . . has been organized alphabetically as an encyclopedia
with entries on operas, operettas, zarzuelas, singers, composers,
writers, conductors and subjects of interest. The net is wide and inclu-
sive and includes, for example, singers whose opera career was only on
the movie screen and operas that have not been filmed but have cinema
content. There are entries on operas composed as films and imaginary
operas as well as television directors who have created TV operas and
film directors who have worked on the opera stage.
Special subject entries include Animated Opera, Best Opera on Film,
Best Operetta on Film, Castratos, Divas, Directors of Opera on Film,
Directors of Opera on TV, Filmmakers on Stage, First Operas on
Film, First Operas on TV, Imaginary Operas in Films, Operas and
Operettas About the Movies, Operas as Movies, Operas Based on
Movies, Operetta, Puppet Operas, Silent Films About Opera, Silent
Films of Operas, Television Operas, Vitaphone Opera Films, Voice of
Firestone, Worst Opera on Film, Worst Operetta on Film, Zarzuelas.

a
t

U
n
i
v
e
r
s
i
d
a
d

A
u
t

n
o
m
a

M
e
t
r
o
p
o
l
i
t
a
n
a

o
n

O
c
t
o
b
e
r

1
6
,

2
0
1
4
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
o
q
.
o
x
f
o
r
d
j
o
u
r
n
a
l
s
.
o
r
g
/
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d

f
r
o
m