Minimalism is the answer
OTTAWA— Short of a trip down the rabbit hole with Alice in Wonderland, it would be difficult to imagine a more surreal adventure in Ottawa than a visit to the National Arts Centre last Saturday.
For there, on the stage of Southam Hall, two months before his 80th birthday, sat Philip Glass, superstar American minimalist composer, listening to the 82-year-old Petula Clark singing a song he wrote for Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones.
Yes, this was the same Philip Glass who had just been awarded the 11th biannual $50,000 Glenn Gould Prize for his contributions to music, technology and communications.
And yes, this was the same Petula Clark whose hit recording of “Downtown” inspired one of Gould’s most unexpectedly admiring essays.
Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice would say.
But then, the world has moved along since 1987, when the Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer won the first Glenn Gould Prize and certainly since 1982, when Canada’s greatest pianist died at the premature age of 50. If subsequent Glenn Gould Prize laureates could range from Oscar Peterson (1993) to Pierre Boulez (2002) to Leonard Cohen (2011), who could have been truly surprised by last Saturday’s event in Ottawa?
Clark, I should add, was present to host the event, which took the form of a concert by the National Arts Centre Orchestra under Dennis Russell Davies, devoted primarily to the music of Glass, including performances of a movement from his Tenth Symphony, the complete Eighth Symphony and solo pieces performed by pianist Simone Dinnerstein and cellist Matt Haimovitz.
It also included “Heavy Sleep”, a piano piece composed and played by Timo Andres, the 31-year-old American musician chosen by Glass to win the accompanying City of Toronto Glenn Gould Protégé Prize.
Although still pursuing an active career, Glass has served simultaneously as an influential guide to the emerging generation of musical artists. He is the mentor in music to Peru’s Pauchi Sasaki this year in the multidisciplinary Rolex Mentor and Protégé program.
His primary source of fame rests, of course, with his work in changing the direction of music. Was it inevitable?
“I wouldn’t say that,” he responded in a pre-performance interview, when I reminded him that Boulez had once called Arnold Schoenberg’s 12-tone technique of composition a historical inevitability. “Something had to change, but when I got back from Europe (having studied with Nadia Boulanger and worked with Ravi Shankar) we weren’t trying to produce an insurrection, we just wanted to write music we liked.”
Although “we” included such fellow minimalists as Terry Riley and Steve Reich, it was the Juilliard graduate from Baltimore who achieved the highest profile for his work, which eventually included more than 20 operas and scores for a long list of films.
“Music people are always 20 or 30 years behind everybody else,” Glass smiled. “I was interested in art that every five years had to have a different name. But music? No one who went to hear music wanted to listen to modern music anymore.
“My mother took the train from Baltimore to hear my first concert in New York. Six people were in the audience at Queens College and she was one of them. Seven years later she came to New York again. This time there were 3,500 people. What had happened? That is the question.”
The answer in part was minimalism, a movement away from the cerebral complexity of Schoenberg and his school — which never appealed to a large public — toward a simplification of musical vocabulary and syntax.
“The money for music had flowed through the academies,” Glass said. “It wasn’t that the music (written there) wasn’t beautiful, but it didn’t reach many people.”
When one of Glass’s professors in “the academy” asked of the new audience “Who are these people?” his young student replied, “You’d better find out. This is the audience of the future.”
“Now there is a new generation not writing like we did,” Glass said. “And it’s wonderful. My protégé is one of those composers. I remember John Cage saying to me, ‘too many notes.’ I said, ‘John, I am one of your children whether you like it or not.’”
Cage is one of many musical figures who appear in the pages of Words Without Music, a story-filled memoir published last year that prompted film director Martin Scorsese (for whom Glass wrote the score for Kundun) to ask “Who knew that he was as good a writer as he is a composer?”
Philip Glass still has his critics, among whom I number myself, but he asserts with a grin, “You’ll learn to like me.”