Philip Glass amerikai

If you don’t know what to do, there’s actually a chance of doing something new.

128. oldal

“If you’re not a minimalist, what are you?” many have asked over the course of my career.
“I’m a theater composer,” I reply.
That is actually what I do, and what I have done. That doesn’t mean that’s the only thing I ever did. I’ve written concertos, symphonies, and many other things. You only need to look at the history of music: the big changes come in the opera house. It happened with Monteverdi, with his first opera, L’Orfeo, first performed in 1607. It happened with Mozart in the eighteenth century, Wagner in the nineteenth century, and Stravinsky in the early twentieth century. The theater suddenly puts the composer in an unexpected relationship to his work. As long as you’re just writing symphonies, or quartets, you can rely on the history of music and what you know about the language of music to continue in much the same way. Once you get into the world of theater and you’re referencing all its elements – movement, image, text, and music – unexpected things can take place. The composer then finds himself unprepared – in a situation where he doesn’t know what to do. If you don’t know what to do, there’s actually a chance of doing something new. As long as you know what you’re doing, nothing much of interest is going to happen. That doesn’t mean I always succeeded in being interesting. Sometimes I did and sometimes I didn’t. But not surprisingly, I found that what was stimulating to me came out of trying to relate music to the theater work of Beckett. That would not have happened if I hadn’t been working in the theater.

127-128. oldal

I like all kinds of art/performance, but I love it the most when it's fresh out of the can, not even reheated.

73. oldal

Charlie Parker was the great genius I had admired most in my youth. I saw him many times through the window of the Beehive before I was ever allowed to get in. To me, he was the J. S. Bach of bebop: no one could play like him. His alto playing was beyond superb.
The next person who, for me, came along and had that power in his music was John Coltrane, who could take a melody like „My Favorite Things” and pull out harmonies that one would never imagine were there. That gave him a freedom – both melodic and rhythmic – but also the harmonic freedom to explore implied harmonies. These he could outline in his playing to a point that was breathtaking. You almost never knew where he would go, because he could take it so far, and yet he was never really that far away. He was another great bebop player of our time.
In addition to Parker and Coltrane, there were other great players in Chicago: saxophonists like Jackie McLean and Sonny Rollins, as well as piano players like Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell – the great players of the forties and fifties. I came to know and love their music, and beyond that, I understood it. I heard it as a variant of baroque music. It is even organized in the same way. Jazz relies on a song's chord changes and the melodic variations that the changes inspire. Furthermore, the song has a bridge – an ABA form – and jazz solos will follow the same pattern.

34-35. oldal

Besides our weekly phone call, Ida wrote me a letter every week. Often it would be barely a page long, with hardly any family news at all, just whatever she was doing that day. Some thirty-five years later, when my own daughter, Juliet, was away at Reed College, I did exactly the same thing. I had learned from Ida that the content of the letter really didn't matter at all. It was the fact of the letter itself and its regularity that bound us together.

45. oldal

"If you go to New York city to study music, you’ll end up like your uncle Henry, spending your life traveling from city to city and living in hotels.”
That was my mother, Ida Glass, when she heard of my plans.

Első mondatok, OPENING (2015, Liverlight)

I sometimes hear about work described in terms of „originality,” or „breakthrough,” but my personal experience is quite different. For me music has always been about lineage. The past is reinvented and becomes the future. But the lineage is everything.
In this vein, I recall something Moondog, the blind poet and street musician, told me. He was highly eccentric and very talented, and in the early 1970s he lived at my home on West Twenty-Third Street for a year.
„Philip,” he said, „I am following in the footsteps of Beethoven and Bach. But really, they were such giants, and their footsteps were so far apart, that it is as if I am leaping after them.”

41. oldal