It's late on a Sunday night and Philip Glass is tired.
It's obvious from the way he digs at his eye sockets with thumb
and forefinger and pushes a hand through his crop of curly hair. He
lapses into an opaque gaze that freezes his eye movement and focuses
on nothing. For a moment, he is silent. Then his face comes alive and
in his conversation — or, more accurately, his lecture — Glass
is animated and exuberant again, filled with energy as he meanders
without transition from topic to topic, rarely staying on message.
On this night, Glass teamed with renowned Mandingo griot (a person
trained from childhood to memorize, perform and perpetuate the music
of his culture), Foday Musa Suso, for a concert of Euro-African
classical works under the title "The Screens," a collection of
collaborations by Glass and Suso based on a play by the controversial
French writer Jean Genet. Only ten minutes earlier, Glass guided his
four-man ensemble toward a faded out conclusion of its encore piece at
the Calvin Theatre in Northampton, Massachusetts. A second standing
ovation ensued in the audience and the musicians walked off stage to
cheers of "More, more." Now, changed and waiting backstage for the
crew to strike set and pack for the ride back to New York,
Glass' enthusiasm for talking music contradicts the fatigue set
in the circles under his eyes. He rubs his eyes again, then continues.
"It's a most interesting time," he says, helping himself to
backstage, post-concert fruit and cheese and crackers. "On the one
hand, it's a horrible time to be alive. On the other hand,
it's the very best time to be alive. On a social level,
it's a complete disaster, of course. But the funny thing is,
there's never been a time when an individual had more available
to him in terms of history, culture, a kind of global view of
humanity, civilization. From the point of view of the individual, the
opportunities of understanding transformation have never been
better."
Labeled one of the four founders of compositional "minimalism" in the
1960s, Glass has since left behind the despised moniker by producing a
succession of monolithic harmonic constructions and elaborate
music-theater works. And while he has slowly come to be respected in
the stuffy circles of "legitimate" classical music, he continues to
contribute to what his critics would call popular art. Though his fame
has become international, Glass has had to consistently evolve in the
creation of his art and career strategy. In the process, he has
confounded some of his critics, won over others, and gave some of his
harshest detractors plenty to write about.
Never mind about them, Glass says of those who criticize him for his
choices to work across cultural gaps. "I've been taken to task
by different writers," he says. "But I don't pay much attention
to it. I don't worry about it very much. I've learned that
the culture of writing about music and the culture of listening to
music aren't the same. What Verdi used to say about his music:
he said, 'No one likes it but the public.'"
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