81 and going strong, Philip Glass prepares for Kennedy Center debut
I haven’t learned them all yet. I got up to 12 and I got busy doing other things. Practising takes time.
WASHINGTON: The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts will see a longoverdue debut on Friday when the composer Philip Glass, 81, will perform there for the first time, playing his piano etudes with four other pianists. On Mar 16, the Kennedy Center will present another Glass work: the score to Godfrey Reggio’s 1982 film “Koyaanisqatsi,” with the Philip Glass Ensemble and the Washington Chorus.
Glass’ music, of course, has been at the Kennedy Center plenty of times before. The Washington National Opera premiered his revised “Appomattox” in 2015; Leonard Slatkin performed his 7th Symphony with the National Symphony Orchestra. But “I’ve had to wait a little while to get on stage myself,” he said earlier this week in a telephone conversation about his etudes, “Koyaanisqatsi” and the creative process.
Glass’ 20 etudes represent an autobiography on the keyboard, written over the course of 20 years. On Friday, he’ll play the first two, and then numbers 16 and 17.
“I haven’t learned them all yet,” he confesses, speaking of the whole set. “I got up to 12 and I got busy doing other things. Practising takes time.”
Number 17, he says, was originally a piece he wrote to a poem by Allen Ginsberg called “Magic Psalm.” When he sat down to write the 17th etude, he had a sense of deja vu, picked up the “Magic Psalm” score, and saw that he’d written “17” in the upper corner of the music — earmarking it for the etude set. “That one was free,” he quips.
“The first set were written in a very pedagogical spirit,” he says. “I wanted music to practise that I liked. So I decided, I’ll just write it myself . ... And what happened is my playing got better. It really did work. Then I took a break, maybe three or four years.”
The next 10, he says, were “testing my ideas about harmony, harmonic relations”; they tend to be longer and more challenging.
He adds: “Writing number 20 was interesting because I knew I had to do something that both completed the cycle of music but you hadn’t heard it — new, and final. I thought about it and didn’t know what to do until the day came to write it, and I sat down and wrote it in a couple of days . ... Brains are working even when you don’t know they’re working.”
Although, he observed, sometimes you think you know exactly what you’re going to write, and it comes out completely different. “And what happened to the piece you never wrote down?” he muses.
As for “Koyaanisqatsi,” he treasures his memories of working on it, not least for the rare process of working side by side with the filmmaker, creating music as the film was being made.
“That almost never occurs,” he says. “I managed to do it one other time, when we were doing ‘Kundun’” — Martin Scorsese’s 1997 film about the Dalai Lama. “I convinced him I should do the music first and he should play it for the actors before he shot the film.”
Indeed, Scorsese got so reliant on this process that Glass once had to fly back from Europe to quickly write some more music when the filming got ahead of the score.
“Koyaanisqatsi,” unlike “Kundun,” remains a modern classic — although Glass says that Reggio remains littleknown, and very modest about its creation. (The director was less modest when, four days before the premiere, he went back and changed the order of the film’s last five scenes.)
“You would believe from him that (his movies) made themselves,” Glass said.
“I’m sometimes like that too,” he adds. “There’s a reason for that. When you’re writing, you’re so focused on what you’re doing that you don’t pay attention to what you’re doing. You don’t see yourself writing. All of a sudden it’s dinnertime and you have 30 pages. The activity requires all of our attention . ... We’re not reliable guides as to how we work. The we that can comment on it is not there during the act of creating. ... But when you’re done, you don’t really know how you did it.” — WP-Bloomberg
Philip Glass, composer