Philip Glass: from Einstein on the Beach to a superfan in Manchester
‘I’ve done very good collaborations with people I don’t know very well,” says Philip Glass. “Even with people I didn’t like very much.” Sitting in La MaMa, the experimental theatre in New York’s East Village, one of the founders of minimalist music is talking about a body of work that includes three symphonies based on David Bowie’s Berlin albums, two sci-fi operas with Doris Lessing, an orchestrated version of Icct Hedral by Aphex Twin – and that’s only scratching the surface.
Now 82, Glass has found another collaborator, one who “has a comfortable relationship with his unconscious”, and who is bringing the composer’s unearthly music to a new generation. Already renowned for his Olivier award-winning adaptation of Shockheaded Peter and such outdoor shows as Sticky (which saw the construction of a 100ft tower using Sellotape), Phelim McDermott has directed three of Glass’s great operas – Satyagraha, about Gandhi; The Perfect American, about Walt Disney; and Akhnahten, about the pharaoh who briefly brought monotheism to Egypt.
This week, the pair will debut a new work at the Manchester international festival. Called Tao of Glass, it explores their creative relationship: the old master and the younger fan. “It’s about my obsession with Philip’s music,” McDermott says, speaking in a cafe in London, near the offices of his Improbable theatre group. “The first show I ever made professionally, when I left Middlesex Poly, used music from Glassworks. I listened to that album obsessively when I was a student.”
Tao of Glass owes its origins to the children’s author Maurice Sendak. Glass and McDermott had hoped to create an opera based on In the Night Kitchen, Sendak’s book about a boy almost getting baked in a cake. The pair visited him at his house in rural Connecticut to hatch some plans. “We’ve got to do this show before I die!” Sendak told them – but sadly he did die, shortly afterwards, in 2012.
That put an end to their adaptation of In the Night Kitchen, a crushing experience for both McDermott and Glass. “When you’ve lost a piece, it can be devastating, like the loss of a child,” says the composer, a father of four. Tao of Glass both is – and is about – the work McDermott and Glass decided to make instead. It will consist of 10 scenes set to music by Glass, performed by McDermott and several puppets: some created from paper or objects to evoke a dream world; others expressing the essence of Glass and his music; and a more traditional puppet of a child that represents McDermott as a boy, as his son, and as a character from a dream show that never gets made.
Tao of Glass also asks where inspiration comes from. Glass is sure it originates in the subconscious. “When I imagine music when I wake up in the morning, that means I’ve been dreaming about it. And then, with very little effort, I can connect that dream with projects I’ve been working on. But the actual connection happens in the part of your mind that doesn’t relate to the everyday world. Music doesn’t come from this world, it comes from the dream world.”
Glass’s dreamlife must be as active as ever. This year alone, he has debuted a symphony, Lodger, based on the 1979 Bowie album, and created the music for Glenda Jackson’s second crack at King Lear on Broadway. Does he compose every day? “Pretty much, because I don’t have enough days, so I can’t afford …” he trails off. “I was just in Indianapolis, doing concerts, but I was writing during the day. I got back to New York at one o’clock on Sunday and by three, I was working, and I’ve been working every day since. That’s not uncommon. People who paint paint all the time. I knew Allen Ginsberg very well and he was writing constantly. Sometimes we were sharing quarters because we were at a retreat, and, in the middle of the night, he would wake up and write poetry.”
Ginsberg, he says, would change his poems mid-performance, which would throw Glass off-balance when he was trying to accompany him. “I would say, ‘Allen, I can’t follow you when you do that.’ And he’d say, ‘What did I do?’ I’d say, ‘It’s like running after a rabbit and you’re never sure where the rabbit’s going to jump to next.’ We always had fun together. Phelim is very similar in the sense that he can draw on his unconscious very easily. That’s what you see when you’re looking at his work. But then people might say that about me and that’s probably true.”
McDermott says he often gets his best ideas lying in a flotation tank – most notably, the one about getting the English National Opera chorus to juggle throughout much of Akhnaten. “Sometimes,” he laughs, “you get an idea and think, ‘That’s so stupid it will probably be really good.’” The chorus were duly given lessons by master juggler Sean Gandini. “In the end, they said, ‘This is helping us learn where we are in the music.’ So actually they really liked it.” The hypnotic, repetitive and incrementally unfurling nature of Glass’s music – not to mention a libretto largely sung in the languages of ancient Egypt – make it as hard to perform as it is gorgeous.
As a young Glass fan, McDermott saw ENO’s European premiere of Akhnaten in London in 1985. After picking up his ticket, he says, he spotted the composer in the street and followed him around Covent Garden until Glass disappeared into a sushi restaurant. “I guess there was a fantasy – if I stopped him, what would I say? A little bit like when I saw Quentin Tarantino at a crime writers’ festival in Nottingham. On some level, Tao of Glass is me finally daring to stop Philip and ask him a question.”
McDermott eventually met Glass after Seán Doran, then ENO’s artistic director, suggested he direct Einstein on the Beach, whose visionary original production was created by Glass and director Robert Wilson. “I was like, ‘What? That’s a really stupid idea.’ It’s such an extraordinary piece, it’s like a crazy dream.” Nonetheless, McDermott went for lunch in New York with Glass, who told him: “Your genuine reluctance makes me think you should do it.” Instead, McDermott directed Satyagraha.
Opera, says McDermott, suits his seat-of-the-pants approach. “You’ve got a chorus, an orchestra, some singers with extraordinary talent and personalities, and a set that could kill people if it hits them on the head. You rehearse, you’ve got three days with the orchestra, a dress rehearsal and then you do the show. It’s like doing a big outdoor gig. You have to go, ‘Well,
the crane comes through here, the audience will hopefully walk through here and the fireworks will go off there.’ You have to create an environment in which all these things come into conversation with each other.”
There is a spiritual dimension to Tao of Glass, as the title suggests. Glass once described himself as “a Jewish Taoist Hindu Toltec Buddhist”. McDermott, meanwhile, is interested in Taoism: “It’s basically a belief that nature has a process and a flow that you’re either in alignment with or you’re fighting.” He believes in it “in the sense that making shows, creatively, hasn’t been anything to do with me. Somehow I’ve managed to get out of my own way. In the rehearsals for Tao of Glass we would throw the I Ching every now and again. Generally, the message I get is, ‘Stop trying to be in control.’ Which of course is the hardest thing in the world.”
It’s McDermott’s second time at MIF – his first was Bambino, an opera for babies. He’s a Mancunian who grew up watching shows at the Royal Exchange, where Tao of Glass will be staged. “I used to sit and watch Max Wall doing Waiting for Godot – some extraordinary performances. The dream was, ‘I’ll direct things here.’ But it never really happened. So I gave up on that dream and now it’s come back. The Tao decided that it does happen, but not in the way you think. At first I thought it would be In the Night Kitchen but now it’s me. So I’ll be there, and my 15-yearold self will be there as a ghost.”
Another ghost will be Glass, who won’t be on stage but present in spirit, especially if McDermott manages to pull off another dream – to get Steinway to produce a piano that can record Glass playing the keys, and then at the touch of a button play compositions back, with the keys moving just as Glass touched them.
Meanwhile, McDermott is set to take Akhnaten to the Met in New York in November – and then, he believes, he will finally be ready to tackle Einstein on the Beach. There’s also the big dream: that Glass’s three “portrait operas” (Satyagraha, Akhnaten, Einstein) can be presented for the first time somewhere as a Ring-style marathon. “These operas are terrifying because you go, ‘There’s this scene. What actually happens? Anything?’ And then you do things you could never normally do.”
Tao of Glass is at the Royal Exchange theatre, Manchester, 11-20 July.