Philip Glass: Life, Music, and Minimalist Style

Introduction

Philip Glass is certainly the world's finest-known living serious composer, owing in large part to the vast number of his American recording contracts. He has a readily identifiable, if controversial, style that is both imitated and parodied the world over. He is familiar to pop audiences, crossover audiences, new music audiences, and opera audiences, and increasingly to chamber music audiences and symphony-goers. He performs regularly around the world with his ensemble, generating around sixty concerts a year. Although he has written a substantial amount of concert music, Glass has arguably won the most recognition for his work in dance, film, music theatre, and opera.

Biography and Early Influences

Born in Baltimore on January 31, 1937, Philip Glass discovered music in his father's radio repair shop. In addition to servicing radios, Ben Glass carried a line of records and, when certain ones sold poorly, he would take them home and play them for his three children, trying to discover why they did not appeal to customers. These happened to be recordings of the great chamber works, and the future composer rapidly became familiar with Beethoven quartets, Schubert sonatas, Shostakovich symphonies, and other music then considered "offbeat." It was not until his upper teens that Glass began to encounter more "standard" classics.

Glass began the violin at six and became serious about music when he took up the flute at eight. By the time he was fifteen, however, he had grown frustrated with the limited flute repertoire as well as with musical life in post-war Baltimore. During his second year of high school, he applied for university admission, passed, and — with his parents' encouragement — moved to Chicago, where he supported himself with part-time jobs waiting tables and loading airplanes at airports. During off-hours, he practiced piano and concentrated on such composers as Ives and Webern.

Glass's academic history was an entirely orthodox one. He initially studied flute at the Peabody Conservatoire, then piano, harmony, and composition with Louis Cheslock. He graduated with degrees in mathematics and philosophy at the age of nineteen from the University of Chicago. After attending the Juilliard School of Music, he studied with Darius Milhaud in 1960 and with Nadia Boulanger between 1964 and 1966 in France. Boulanger made Glass return to the basics, as she did with all her students; and although Glass appreciated the experience in some respects, he chafed at the discipline. In addition to what he considered Boulanger's excessive preoccupation with musical theory, nearly all the contemporary music to be heard in Paris at that time was part of Pierre Boulez's Domain Musical series — which Glass has since described as "a wasteland, dominated by these maniacs, these creeps, who were trying to make everyone write this crazy creepy music… what one looks for in a composer is that singular personality that comes out of the soul of the person — that creativity cannot be taught."

This reflected clearly the stress Glass felt as he found himself cornered and confined by rules and regulations, unable to do what he really wanted. On his own initiative, he finally decided to introduce harmonic modulation into his music as a rejection of orthodox theoretical constraints. "I decided to change the rules," Glass recalled. "I noticed I had been operating under a lot of rules that had been automatic, and that there were things that weren't possible in my music because I had made them forbidden. I said, 'Why can't I do it?' 'Well, there is this rule.' 'Rule! Who is making the rules? I'm making the rules.' And that was the end of the rule. You can learn all the rules and yet the personality of the composer was not in the rule book."

A story Glass often tells illustrates how his thought process developed: "I had been working with Boulanger for some years. I was in my mid-twenties and I had a good grasp of harmony. I brought in a harmony exercise and she told me that it was wrong. I said, 'Madame Boulanger, I know that it is correct.' I quoted all the rules, analyzed it, and proved to her that I had all the voicing correct — from the point of view of the rules, it was flawless! And she said: 'No, no, it is still all wrong!' She grabbed a score from the piano — a Mozart piano sonata. 'This is what Mozart did.' She found an exact parallel to my passage and said: 'Look how he resolves it. The soprano resolves on the third, not the root!' I looked at her in admiration. Until then, she had never mentioned anything like this to me, and I suddenly realized that beyond the rules there was something else going on."

In Paris, Glass was hired by a filmmaker to transcribe the Indian music of Ravi Shankar into notation readable by French musicians. In the process, he discovered the techniques of Indian music. After researching music in North Africa, India, and the Himalayas, he returned to New York, renounced his previous music, and began to apply Eastern techniques to his own work.

During his stay in Paris, he worked on a film score and met Ravi Shankar and his tabla player, Alla Rakha. This was his first direct encounter with Indian music; he was employed to work with Shankar on a 1960s film by Conrad Rooks called Chappaqua. His task was to take Shankar's raga inventions and notate them so that Western musicians could play them on the soundtrack. Glass approached this task without much prior knowledge of Indian music and tried to figure out as he went along just how it "worked." His initial conclusions were imperfect, but this was the first step toward his own mature style. His work at this time was not well received in Paris.

In 1966–1967, Glass stayed in Tibet and India, where he became a Tibetan Buddhist and was drawn to Oriental meditation. During these trips, his interest in non-European music grew and he paid special attention to musical traditions based on additive structural principles. By the end of 1967, Glass had returned to the United States and settled in New York, where he slowly began to find associates and set up his own performing group, the Philip Glass Ensemble.

Having worked as a furniture remover, plumber, and taxi driver, he was still driving a taxi even after the premiere of Einstein on the Beach in 1976. However, this non-musical work was always kept to a minimum while he was touring with his ensemble. He followed the practice of not allowing his music to be published in order to ensure uniqueness and to maintain a high standard of performance. Glass is always present at rehearsals, working closely with the singers, whom he says play a central role in keeping the music vitally connected with the public — something he calls "crucial if the music is to maintain a high degree of communicativeness."

Not much is known about the works Glass wrote before 1966 — some eighty compositions, of which around twenty were published, written mainly in what Glass called "a more traditional style," all of which he disowned after 1968.

Glass's first recordings, made in the early 1970s, were not intended as commercial products. "In 1969 and 1970, when I was touring, I wanted to get my music on the radio," he recalls, "but I discovered that radio stations at that time would only play LPs; they would not play cassettes. So what I did was to start a record company called Chatham Square."

By 1974, he had composed a large body of new music, not only for use by the theater company Mabou Mines (of which Glass was a co-founder), but also for his own performing group, the Philip Glass Ensemble. This period culminated in Music in Twelve Parts, a three-hour summation of Glass's new music, and reached its apex in 1976 with the Philip Glass/Robert Wilson opera Einstein on the Beach — a four-and-a-half-hour epic now seen as a landmark in twentieth-century music theater.

In addition to Einstein, Glass collaborated with Robert Wilson on several other projects, including the CIVIL warS — Act V (Rome Section) of the multi-composer epic written for the 1984 Olympic Games — White Raven, an opera commissioned by Portugal to celebrate its history of discovery and premiered at EXPO '98 in Lisbon, and Monsters of Grace, a digital 3-D opera.

Glass's Style and Minimalism

On November 1998, it had been thirty years since the first music by Philip Glass was heard in a U.S. concert. The work was Strung Out, a solo for amplified violin. This spare, almost austere music puzzled some people and fascinated others. Most unsettling to traditionalists was the lack of narrative progression in Glass's music. Using the classical concerto as an example, Glass once explained: "Most music begins with an introduction, then it develops and has all sorts of adventures, some happy, some sad, and then it finally comes out at the end."

There was also the curious effect Glass's music had on the listener's sense of time. The constant beat and subtly shifting rhythms over a static harmonic structure tended to hypnotize and make the listener lose track of time. Although Glass's music showed signs of becoming decidedly larger — some of it, like Music in Twelve Parts, ran for hours — it remained structurally sparse, using few chord changes. Instead of long developmental sections, which had been normal in "serious" music, there were increasingly complex repetitions and overlapping of lines.

Because Glass's music repeated and varied a very small library of basic musical ideas, the term "minimalism" began to be applied to it. A number of other composers were experimenting along the same lines, and the new music caught hold, rapidly developing a cult following. A movement, more or less, came into being. Suddenly musicians began arguing the merits and demerits of the new music. Along with its abilities to thrill and inspire, this music displayed the ability to annoy, even infuriate. A typical audience reaction to Glass's music during the late 1970s and 1980s included frantic bravos and violent boos, sometimes coming from the same people. Not since the days of the young Stravinsky had music appeared that so engaged the emotions of those who heard it. While many were hailing Glass as the man who had revitalized music and made opera a viable art form again, just as many were castigating him for "destroying" music. Like it or not, there was something haunting, even mystical, in Glass's complex simplicity, and it began attracting large audiences.

One interviewer, impressed with the mystic qualities of Glass's music, asked him about his own religious beliefs. Glass, ever ready with a quip, declined to discuss religion. Why? pursued the interviewer. "Because my music is so odd already," explained Glass. "I see no reason to make myself sound any odder."

The great breakthrough came in Paris with Glass's discovery of Indian music. Forays into North Africa and the Himalayas followed, with Glass eagerly absorbing the principles — though hardly ever the actual sounds — of Eastern music. The outcome was his return to New York, where he renounced all his former music and began again virtually from scratch.

It is easy to lose sight of one of Philip Glass's major accomplishments: the revitalization of opera. The half-century between Puccini's Turandot (1926) and Glass's Einstein on the Beach (1976) was marked by increasing complexity in music, to the point where "new" music of any kind became identified in the public's mind with ugliness and obscurity. Occasionally an opera company would produce something new, but it consistently failed to attract an audience, and the production of new operas became anathema to opera companies. Satyagraha (1980) changed all that. As one theater piece after another emerged from Glass's studio, the opera world sat up and took notice. There have been highly successful operas since, by composers other than Glass, but without Glass paving the way it seems unlikely that the others would have been conceived at all, much less produced.

The term "minimalism" was coined by journalists when these composers were labeled with this controversial designation. Other names have circulated — rhythmic music, acoustical music, meditative music, systems music, processed music — all attempting to categorize this style. The term "minimal" can only fairly be applied to the limited initial material and limited transformational techniques composers employ, and even this applies only to the earlier works of Steve Reich and Philip Glass. The term is most conspicuously strained when applied to Glass's Music in Twelve Parts, which lasts longer than four hours, or to Terry Riley, well known for his all-night concerts.

Minimalism contains certain techniques that produce its unique sound, and through this the music has in the popular imagination been reduced to mere repetition — obscuring what it is actually about. Repetition is a strong surface feature, but the most important element is the procedure or procedures used to develop the music. To define minimalism properly, it is essential to understand the basic principles of minimum material combined with maximum repetition. To achieve the required effect, composers employ such techniques as phasing, mass transposed layering, and the accenting of isolated notes within a motif. In mass layering, several players play the same motif at different transpositions, and each player progresses in turn. Within this technique, certain players may emphasize a note from the repeating motif which, when combined, produces a tune that would otherwise be isolated. An excellent example is Steve Reich's Six Pianos (1974). Beyond these basic systems, minimalism can also consist simply of the repetition itself, combined with harmonic progressions.

Philip Glass's particular interest was in additive progressions, based on repetition in which musical figures are structured according to an additive method. The "arpeggio" trademark is so characteristic of Glass as to be the primary vehicle of this process. Its origin lies in Indian music, and it stands in opposition to the Western principle of divisive time, in which longer units are subdivided into smaller ones. The Indian musician, by contrast, works with larger units created by assembling smaller units that have a structure different from the larger units they ultimately form. As Glass explains: "These larger units or periods are integrated in a cyclical process. Other cycles with different rhythms are added afterwards, like a wheel-work: everything works simultaneously in a continuous transformation."

The overlapping and interweaving of rhythmic structures, combined with an almost total absence of harmonic development, lend the music a slow, curiously hypnotic quality — but they can also produce passages of great drama, a factor Glass has put to effective use in film scores. Koyaanisqatsi and Mishima are his finest works in that genre.

Whereas the basis of Glass's earlier works was additive structure, an evolution is visible after 1970, when he moves toward a growing vertical differentiation — the use of harmony as a structural principle. The musical texture has become richer and more differentiated through the expansion of Glass's ensemble and the notation of given lines in unison or parallel motion, as well as through the introduction of rudimentary counterpoint. The preoccupation with rhythmic structure was no longer dominant.

This interest in harmonic differentiation continues through to 1974 with Music in Twelve Parts. In addition to previously used techniques such as additive process, repetitive construction, continuous quaver movement, pulsation, a stable harmony per part, and the introduction of sudden modulations at each transition, Glass introduces a number of new techniques.

In creating his own style, Glass illuminated the relationship between simplicity and complexity. His music has been called "mesmeric," "uplifting," "mystic," and full of "religious serenity." Traditional composers complain that his music is insultingly simplistic — of course it is, if one defines complexity as something only a peer can penetrate. Nevertheless, if the goal is music with structure, integrity, and conceptual fascination that excites and moves an audience, then music that fails to do that has fallen short. Glass's music has complexities its critics rarely consider. Rhythmic units fly by with such speed that a player requires substantial concentration not to get lost. Lines sometimes overlap in ways that are difficult to perform or perceive.

Glass's harmonic language certainly has its roots in musical Romanticism; but leveling the charge of "harmonic reliance" at Glass is no more or less useful than identifying "minimalist" trends in Beethoven (the first-movement development of the Pastoral Symphony, for example) or in Bach (the late canons). Glass's musical exposition is in many ways analogous to the organ works — based largely on thematic repetition, subtle rhythmic and harmonic variation, and fundamental conceptual simplicity.

He is often termed a minimalist composer, and while that may have been a fair description at the beginning of his career, the label no longer fits. The best way to describe his music is that it contains rhythmic complexity overlaid on a steadily evolving pattern. Many people would describe it as simplistic, but there is a hidden beauty and complexity beneath the seeming simplicity. Glass's style challenges the listener's perception of the relationship between simplicity and complexity. The principle of complexity within simplicity — and indeed beauty within simplicity — is not new to classical music; one need only consider the work of Mozart. When played at the great speed and high volume that Glass favors, unusual acoustical phenomena emerge — beats and combination tones — lending the music an unexpected textural richness. The highly amplified volume Glass prefers is also part of his connection with rock, to the point where non-rock listeners can feel literally uncomfortable.

Glass seems to have gone through three phases: his early music can be classified as definitively minimalist; the middle period was a crossover period in which his audience expanded from a fringe element to a wide cross-section of musical tastes; and a later period of performance and recording during which a large number of new works have been performed live.

Conclusion

Philip Glass is arguably the world's best known living serious composer, due in part to the number of his recording contracts relative to his contemporaries. His style is readily identifiable, if controversial — both imitated and parodied the world over. He is familiar to pop audiences, crossover audiences, new music audiences, and opera audiences, and increasingly to chamber music audiences and symphony-goers. He performs regularly around the world with his ensemble, generating around sixty concerts a year. Although he has written a substantial amount of concert music, Glass has arguably won the most recognition for his work in dance, film, music theatre, and opera — and his influence on the landscape of contemporary serious music remains profound and undeniable.