don furnaloni

In a recent interview, Philip Glass
talks about the kind of dispossession he has come to grips with over the years that
is required of the composer to make good, definitive music.

“After a ten or fifteen year period, I
would kind of forget that I had written [certain pieces]. I began functioning
in a different way. I began functioning more like an interpreter. I was no
longer really the composer and I couldn’t remember the piece that I had
written. I didn’t know why I had written them. I didn’t know what I was
thinking at the time. But there was the music. And one of the things that I have
enjoyed very much is keeping that library of music alive …

What that has allowed me to do is to
form a different relationship to that body of work than I would have had, had I
been simply the composer and given the music over—though there are a lot of
pieces that I have done that with like the operas and other ballets and scores.
But there is a continuous body of work which I have been performing in all this
time and what it has allowed me to do is to form a completely different relationship
to that music and that would be the one of the musician as interpreter rather than
as the author. And it is a very different way of approaching the work. For one
thing, the tempos start changing, the way to play changes, I begin rethinking
the pieces in different ways, not in terms of what I meant, because I don’t
know what I meant. But in terms of what I found in the music and what I find in
the music now. And what that has done for me is that I have become extremely
appreciative of musicians who spend their lives interpreting music. When I was
a young man I thought that the important people are the composers and the
people who interpret the music are not that important. I have a completely
different idea now. I now think that the composer just puts dots on the paper.
But the people who make the music are the players. And I’ve really come to
think of it that way.

I’ve just done a cello piece and I looked
at the score and I’ve written the notes down. There’s almost no dynamic markings.
I put no metronome markings. I put no phrase markings in. Well, why bother? Why
should I do that? If I do that, I’m telling these people how to do the music in
a way which, if they’re good musicians, they’ll know how to do it, and if they’re
bad musicians it doesn’t matter what I write because it’s not going to help … I
leave it up to the interpreters to find their way into the music. To be
truthful, it’s a very radical way of approaching music. When you think of the
generation before me, every gesture of the score will be notated. Every moment
of the score will be choreographed. I say to hell with that.

With The Book of Longing,
there are five solo parts. I’ve just written the notes and the soloists have
created a performance of the work which they have done through their own
musicianship. When I say it’s radical, it’s radical in the sense that I’ve
given up big areas that composers have always felt that they had to control. I
just gave it up. And what happened is that I get much better performances.  

—

Composers tend to gravitate toward
their predilection might be. Mine has been to work with people who are writers,
movers, painters, and singers. For me, I did that first of all as my natural
inclination. But then, I began to discover that there is an even better reason
for doing it which was that by working with collaborators I found that they
became a source of inspiration for the music and therefore, it could become an
engine of change for the music itself. The biggest problem that composers have—and
young composers will say to you that they’re trying to find their voice—but what
they don’t know is that actually finding the voice is easy. By the time they’re
thirty, they’ll definitely find it. The difficulty is getting rid of it. You spend
the rest of your life trying to figure out how not to be the person that you
were for your first important piece. You want to get over that right away.

[In collaborating] with people from
west Africa, from Australia, and from China, from Great Britain, and Nova
Scotia for that matter, I was working with people who were not working with the
tradition of Central European Art Music—notated music. I recognized the quality
of the music, but in order to be able to write with them I had to understand
how they made music … And when working with them I began to see that there are
different ways of organizing music. So the collaboration has become encounters
and events which have propelled me in direction that I could not have
anticipated. And what these encounters did was provide me with an opportunity
to rethink music again. In other words I was never more comfortable when I didn’t
know what I was doing. I was never more uncomfortable when I knew exactly what I
was doing. And I found that if I got rid of the things I knew, then it was
possible to write music again. “

When listening to Glass, I began to wonder about the risk of dispossession that God takes with His Bride and how that compares to the work of a composer. Is Glass’ take on music damning or does it actually leave open some space for something completely new to hit our ear drums?

If you have no idea, who Philip Glass is, or the music he has created, try this out.