Making a Joyful Noise

By Michael Walsh.

Seven years ago, on his 41st birthday, Philip Glass was driving a New York City taxicab. From the age of 17 he had worked as a hotel night clerk, an airport baggage loader, a crane operator in a steel mill, a furniture mover and a plumber, all the while pursuing his real vocation: composer. Glass, however, was not hoping to make a big score with a pop song or a Broadway show. Rather, he was that least salable commodity, a revolutionary avant- gardist.

But there was a twist. Rather than inveighing against traditionalism, as radicals are supposed to do, Glass was in revolt against radicalism itself: the overintellectualized and emotionally arid music that had dominated contemporary composition for decades. By writing in a deceptively simple, joyously propulsive new style that came to be called minimalism, he hoped to restore the historic bond between composer and listener. Unlikely as it seemed, while bouncing along the potholed streets of Manhattan or dodging the drunks in his chosen neighborhood of New York City's Lower East Side, Glass was confidently engaged in the most stimulating musical revolution of the postwar years.

Little more than ten years ago, Glass's music was largely confined to SoHo galleries, where experimental music was welcomed, and other haunts of New York's proudly scruffy downtown arts scene. Now it seems that the world has become a Glass festival. Consider:

In three weeks his latest opera, Akhnaten, gets its British premiere at the English National Opera in London. Akhnaten received its first performance last year in Stuttgart, and has since played to packed houses in Houston and New York City. An earlier full-length opera, Satyagraha, which has had several productions in the U.S. and Europe, has been recorded by CBS Masterworks for release in July; Beverly Sills, a confirmed fan, has scheduled it for the New York City Opera next year. And last December the Brooklyn Academy of Music revived Einstein on the Beach, a 4 1/2-hour opera by Glass and American Theater Artist Robert Wilson that boldly proclaimed the triumph of minimalism to a mainstream audience with two sold-out performances at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1976.

In dance, Glass is composing a new work for Choreographer Twyla Tharp to be produced in 1986. His CBS album of chamber music, Glassworks, part of which was used by Jerome Robbins for a hit ballet called Glass Pieces, has sold 115,000 copies worldwide since its 1982 release. In Cannes recently, Glass and two others shared the prize for Best Artistic Contribution for their work on Director Paul Schrader's new film Mishima, about the Japanese novelist and warrior manque; Glass also scored Godfrey Reggio's 1982 vision of environmental apocalypse, Koyaanisqatsi. Currently the composer is finishing a new opera based on Novelist Doris Lessing's The Making of the Representative for Planet 8, to be premiered in Holland in the spring of 1986.

Heady stuff. But throughout the years of obscurity, Glass's strong self- confidence kept his spirits high. "There may be people out there who still don't like my music, but I don't think they can ignore it any longer," observes the composer.

But as Glass's popularity and influence grow, so do the complaints of his critics. Some detractors find the hallmarks of the minimalist style -- short repetitive melodies, steady driving rhythms and harmonies that remain unchanged for minutes at a stretch -- unsophisticated and boring. Others view the minimalists, a school that includes Glass, Steve Reich and John Adams, as a passing aberration whose modish success, in this view, is based on pandering to an audience's simplistic appetites for melody and rhythm.

Among Glass's most implacable opponents are those who still subscribe to the conventional wisdom that has dominated contemporary music after World War II. According to this school of thought, the twelve-tone system of serialism, invented by Arnold Schoenberg and developed by his disciple Anton Webern, was the pinnacle toward which musical evolution had inevitably headed. Any composer who did not accept such a theory of history was considered a reactionary.

By the late '60s and early '70s, though, the consensus was coming apart. A telling blow was struck when Composer George Rochberg, a prominent serialist, made a clean break with the twelve-tone system in his neoromantic Third String Quartet. As the primacy of serialism came into question, adventurous young composers suddenly realized that further advances could be made. Glass was one of them. "I wanted to create music that spoke to me emotionally," he says. "I wanted my own voice."

Although that voice has grown increasingly complex with each new work, its foundation remains minimalism, derived from sources as disparate as classical Indian music, the Balinese gamelan, African drumming and rock 'n' roll. In * early pieces like Music for Voices (1970), Glass often worked with a single figure of no more than two or three notes that was repeated insistently and gradually lengthened. Lately he has begun writing longer, more conventional melodies that are less circumscribed by the rhythmic pulse. But the musical accents are indisputably 20th century, New York, American.

Glass attributes the development of both his technique and his aesthetic to his experience in opera, a form many progressive composers had given up for dead not too long ago. "Phil has a keen visual sense and a profound understanding of drama and theater, especially its visual content," says Director Wilson. "Because of him, all kinds of people who thought opera was something that belonged in the 19th century have come to appreciate it." Another prominent element in Glass's music is rock. In the late '70s Glass could often be found at rock clubs, checking out the latest new wave bands. The relationship has been reciprocal: groups such as the Talking Heads and King Crimson have been heavily influenced by Glass's sound.

Glass's growing appeal is recognized at home and abroad. "Philip is an important force in the musical world today, and this explains why, thanks to composers like him, new American music is so wonderful right now," says Dennis Russell Davies, the American-born music director of the Stuttgart Opera, which has two Glass works in its repertoire. As principal conductor of the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in upstate New York, Davies is planning two concerts this summer that play off excerpts from operas by Glass and Wagner. It is a daring bit of programming, an attempt by a contemporary to assess Glass's place in opera's pantheon.

In person, the composer hardly seems so imposing, projecting instead an easygoing bohemian charm. With his deep-set, rather sad brown eyes, his tousled dark hair and his habitually distracted air, Glass might at first be mistaken for a leftover '60s hippie. But the unruffled exterior only partly obscures a highly educated, articulate man who possesses a fierce drive to succeed and is a shrewd observer and player in the game of musical politics. "Philip was always confident and always saw what he was doing and went after it," recalls his ex-wife, Theater Director JoAnne Akalaitis. Unafflicted with false modesty, Glass leaves no doubt that his favorite composer is himself. Says one friend: "When you hang out with Philip, you listen to a lot of Philip Glass music."

Where Glass hangs out is in Manhattan's seedy East Village, which has become the artists' crash pad that SoHo was in the '60s. On a block near the Bowery, Glass's brownstone stands near a forbidding Hell's Angels headquarters and a ramshackle men's shelter; panhandling winos, bag ladies and other urban lost souls are part of the cityscape. Glass loves it. "It's a great place to live," he insists. "This is one of the last authentic communities left in New York."

Chez Glass has a raffishness suited to the neighborhood. The composer shares the four-story town house with his girlfriend Candy Jernigan, 33, a free- lance record-jacket designer, whom he met a year and a half ago. In part- time residence are his two children with Akalaitis, Juliet, 16, and Zachary, 14. The household also includes two calico cats and a macaw. "I like to have a lot of life around me," says Glass, whose customary informal garb runs to nondescript dark shirts, well-worn corduroys or jeans and white sneakers or black boots. "I like all stages of the evolutionary ladder -- birds, cats, kids, a girlfriend. It doesn't bother my work a bit."

Despite the apparent chaos, Glass finds his home a restful place to work. He composes on a beat-up table, using a 25 cents No. 2 pencil, often working alongside his children. "When the kids come home from school, I sometimes still have to work, and there will be Zach doing his homework on one side of the kitchen table and me notating on the other," he laughs. Occasionally, he goes to the piano in order to gauge how long a particular section lasts, but, as is true of most composers, the sounds he hears are primarily in his head.

Glass learned to play the piano by listening to his older brother and sister taking their lessons and imitating them. The son of a Baltimore record store owner, he began studying the flute at the age of eight at the Peabody Conservatory of Music. Precocious academically as well as musically, Glass entered the University of Chicago at 15 and graduated with a degree in mathematics and philosophy. He studied music too, working his way through the Beethoven quartets and teaching himself the twelve-tone system.

He still lacked practical musical experience, so Glass set out for New York City and the Juilliard School, from which he graduated in 1962. Dissatisfied with his technique, he headed for Paris a couple of years later to study with Nadia Boulanger, the renowned pedagogue who had taught Aaron Copland and ; Virgil Thomson. "Boulanger believed that the training we got in America was simply not thorough enough," says Glass. "She was convinced that at age 27 I had to redo completely my musical education." As the oldest member of the Boulangerie, he studied counterpoint six to eight hours a day. To help make ends meet, he worked as an extra in films for a daily wage of 75 francs, or about $15.

His involvement in movies proved a watershed. Director Conrad Rooks, who was making Chappaqua, a counterculture movie with a score by Indian Sitarist Ravi Shankar, asked Glass to write down Shankar's complex, exotic melodies so that six bewildered Parisian studio musicians could play them. "Ravi and his tabla player, Alla Rahka, kept telling me I was getting it all wrong," Glass recalls. "No matter how I tried to notate the music, they kept shaking their heads. Out of sheer desperation, I just eliminated the bar lines altogether -- which, of course, revealed the fact that Indians don't divide music, the way Western theory says it must be done. Instead, they add to it. That was the closest I'll ever get to a moment when the creative light suddenly kicks on."

Glass began to apply some principles of Indian music to his own compositions. His colleagues, however, were skeptical. Recalls Glass: "A friend of mine said that my work wasn't real music. Well, I looked around Paris and concluded that to express myself I'd have to go some place else." In 1967 he went back to New York.

Glass returned at a time of remarkable artistic ferment (see box). In the late '60s Reich, a Juilliard classmate, had codified early minimalist theory in such works as It's Gonna Rain and Come Out. Wilson was staging The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud. Minimalist Sculptor Richard Serra (see ART), an acquaintance from Paris, was preparing a one-man exhibition in New York. Reich had already formed an ensemble, and he and Glass sometimes joined forces. A pair of 1969 concerts at the Whitney Museum of American Art attracted public and critical attention to the burgeoning phenomenon of minimalism. The beginnings of success, however, proved too much for the friendship, and the Philip Glass Ensemble split off and went its own way. Today the former friends are distant, even hostile.

Glass's style was evolving beyond the severe tenets of minimalism; the extreme sparseness of his idiom was giving way to a new melodic sensuousness. The pounding, rock-influenced sound was still there, but hints of traditional harmony had begun to creep in. "I just couldn't throw out my Western music and education entirely," he explains. Today he no longer considers his music minimalist, although the label has stuck.

In 1973 the Glass Ensemble performed at the Festival d'Automne in Paris, which was run by Michel Guy, a French aristocrat fascinated by the New York avant-garde. Appointed Secretary of State for Culture the next year, Guy later commissioned Einstein on the Beach, which had its premiere in July 1976 after a year of rehearsals. The unconventional Einstein was a near pantomime set to Wilson's typically elliptical spoken texts and allusive stage pictures of railroad trains and spaceships. There were no formal arias or indeed any set pieces at all; a small chorus sang "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight" and solfege syllables (do, re, mi) over hypnotic, relentless music. Sellout audiences loved it. The work toured Europe and then came to the Met in November.

In America, the work attracted widespread attention, both pro and con, but it ran up a deficit of $100,000; to pay off his share, Glass went back to driving a cab. The experience was worth the price. "The main thing about Einstein is that it put me on the world theater map," he says. "After that I could work in the theater -- not at will, but something close to it."

Glass's next operatic opportunity came in 1978, with a $25,000 commission from the city of Rotterdam for Satyagraha. Glass decided the work would be sung in Sanskrit, a mellifluous, vowel-rich language, to a text drawn from the Bhagavad-Gita. As his subject he chose Mohandas Gandhi's early years in South Africa, during which Gandhi developed his philosophy of nonviolent resistance. If the elemental Einstein was Glass's breakthrough, the gentle, serene Satyagraha was the first major work of his mature style. By poignantly transforming a flute line from the second scene into Gandhi's eloquent apostrophe to freedom at the end, Glass created one of the most powerful moments in modern opera. The melody is simplicity itself -- a scale consisting of the tones from E to E on the white notes of a piano, repeated 36 times -- but the purity of its calm resolve has the effect of an emotional tidal wave.

Akhnaten is the third of Glass's trilogy of operas about remarkable men. A musically luminous treatment of the rise and fall of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh some consider history's first monotheist, it unfolds in gradual waves to reveal two particularly striking moments: a ravishing trio for Akhnaten (a countertenor), his mother and his wife in the first act; and Akhnaten's glorious hymn to the sun disk in Act II. The prevailing mood, though, is dark and brooding, emphasized by Glass's use of an orchestra without violins. Rich in detail and sharp in characterization, Akhnaten is

Glass's most accomplished work to date. Success, however, has brought new challenges. Glass is that rarity, a composer who makes his living composing and performing, not teaching. His facility has never been in question, but since he has transformed the minimalist style from an end into a means, his task now is to maintain both quality and a sense of artistic progress. If such considerations trouble him, it is not apparent. He goes energetically about his work with the rude optimism of a creative artist in full bloom.

"Historically, innovations in music have taken place in the theater, and I intend to concentrate there," he says. "If I ask myself what I would do if I were 20 years old, I'd probably do just what I'm doing now. Which means I'm not about to sit back and wait for someone else to make the next musical leap. I think I'm just getting going. My best scores are the ones to come." If that is true, then the musical world is in for more invigorating shocks of the new from today's most innovative composer.

With reporting by William Blaylock/New York ;