Philip Glass had already published his seminal opera Einstein On The Beach when he drove a taxi to pay for the rent and a more sumptuous lunch. That was in 1978 – and the composer, who had started with a small, unsuccessful ensemble in 1969 after studying piano at the Juilliard School in New York, had suddenly become something of a star in the classical music scene that was newly forming at the time. But that didn’t lead to a career.
The young postmodernists, who radically refused tonality and brought a new attitude to the genre under the label “minimal music”, had begun to assert themselves – and apparently they didn’t give a damn about fine etiquette. While Steve Reich, La Monte Young and Terry Riley continued to condense this art form to the point of experimentally atomizing every audible structure, Glass was already looking for space and freedom for himself, which makes him the most recognizable representative of this so-called minimalism to this day.
Border crossing between pop and high culture
Inspired by Asian sound artists – and Ravi Shankar in particular – the musician traveled to India, became a Buddhist, did yoga before it became a trend and turned to composing for theater music. Although it was possible for him, he gave up on an academic career and wrote music like crazy. According to the company, it has been more than 12 hours a day to date – and so far more than 20 operas, almost 40 instrumental works and countless compositions for film and television stand for a productive working life that always crosses the border between pop and high culture, between U – and electronic music was looking for.
Terms that the busy Glass tried to avoid. Instead, he founded his own ensemble in the 1970s and became a skilled businessman who booked the halls for his concerts himself and chose cities that had not previously experienced a single classical concert of this kind. Glass found his material in everyday life without music and, always without fear of contact, delved into mythical subjects of historiography (such as in the Gandhi opera “Satyagraha” or in the opera “Akhnaten” about the Egyptian king Akhenaten and the Amarna period) as well as in the Classics of literature and cinema. He took Kafka’s Metamorphosis to his chest, taking as much melancholy from the eerie short story as he casually added to his fantastic Glassworks.
Between simplicity and complexity
One always has the feeling that Glass’s works are merely finger exercises, for their emphasis on decelerated repetitive structures can be quickly identified as those of the master. But if you take “Glassworks” or the “Dancepieces” for example, then the simple sequences of notes, which are stoically strung together again and again and seem to change in nuances, emerge in connection with changing tempi, exotic use of instruments and hints of jazz to create a very unique atmosphere out, which Glass could also play out as a matter of course in his fascinating soundtracks for “Koyaanisqatsi”, “Powaqqatsi”, “Candyman’s Curse” (!), “The Truman Show” or “The Hours”.
Soapy films like “Breathless” with Richard Gere gratefully absorbed his sounds and thus refined (or sold them off) them into the common good. He also gave pop music a few “Songs From Liquid Days” with lyrics by Suzanne Vega, David Byrne, Laurie Anderson and Paul Simon. He also helped the latter out in the studio with the recordings for Graceland.
Between audience admiration and critics’ scolding
Glass was spoiled by success, but the criticism did not spare the musician, who always appeared thoughtful in interviews, from the start. Glass was decried as a bore (some of his works stretched out into four-hour meditations), demoted to a kitsch artist, and for each of his works at least one reference piece could be found that put the originality into perspective.
The American loner has never been pigeonholed, but that hardly hurt his sales figures and effective performances. Thanks to iconographic photographs and the famous immortalization by painter Chuck Close, his face should also say something to even the biggest music philistines.
Fortunately, Philip Glass did not run out of ideas even in the late autumn of his career: he has now written 12 symphonies, with “The Perfect American” he brought a celebrated opera about the dark sides of Walt Disney to the stage and in the rather lost, but In the original series “Tales From The Loop” his subtle art of sound was able to smolder freshly and freely without being dominated by annoying images.