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Philip
Glass: An Interview
Part 1
Ask
Philip Glass a short question, and you'll get a
twenty-minute answer. He has so many things to say, most of
which usually appear in his works over a thirty-year career.
Benjamin Chee found this out firsthand, and here are
some excerpts from the composer himself:
About
the films
Koyaanisqatsi was premiered in 1983 and is now performed
almost every year. Powaqqatsi came along about five
years later. These films go beyond just watching a movie or
attending a concert. This combination has a special quality,
it allows us to break through to a new audience through live
film. A fact about the film running and the music happening
in real time: the quality of live performance is more impactful
for the audience.
About
the Qatsi trilogy
The third movie in the series is in the works. Naqoyqatsi
will be about digital technology. In fact, part of it will
be written in Singapore - I work even when I'm on the move
- and this will complete the Qatsi trilogy. It will
be about the way our world is changing; how our way of living
has changed and more importantly, how the rate of change has
increased tremendously.
About
the Retrospective concert
This is a chance for audiences to hear how my music developed
over thirty years, although not chronologically. That would
be too predictable. If you listen to my music over one to
three years, you won't find any discernible change, but you'll
find something over five, ten years. There are incremental
changes that happen over thirty years; the process of assimilation
by evolution rather than radical.
About
being more of an artist than a composer
It is true that a lot of my work involves other art forms.
Film, for example, is about image and movement - it begins
with a story, that becomes into a movie. I like to think of
my work in terms of collaboration - dance, theatre, opera
- and working like this allows me to cross generation lines.
On
working with other people
It's more interesting to work with different people all the
time, as it stimulates me to work in other ways. I don't dictate
what I want, but I expect my collaborators to bring a lot
to the work: movement, image, dance, even musical ideas. When
I was younger I worked with older composers; now I find myself
working with younger people. (laughs) I'm doing a series of
films now, and some of these directors are only in
their twenties.
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"So,
did you enjoy it ?"
That's
the first - and only - question I'm asked by everyone whom I run
into in the lobby after the show. More than just seeking a fellow
art lover's opinion to confirm their own suspicions that the last
one hour and thirty minutes have not been a total waste of time,
and they have had a truly profound, moving experience watching Koyaanisqatsi.
I'm
not sure whether Koyaanisqatsi is something to be "enjoyed"
as much as to be provoked and moved by. And of course, if one derives
a sense of enjoyment from that, then all the better for it.
Koyaanisqatsi
comes from the Indian Hopi language, which can be translated in
various contexts: "crazy life", "life in turmoil", "life out of
balance", "a state of life that calls for another way of living"
- all meaning, if you think about it, basically the same thing in
various degrees.
There
are no actors or dialogue in this film. The narrative, if you will,
consists of breathless, meditative cinematography accompanied by
haunting, repetitive music. The imagery is for the most part commonplace
and everyday, yet director Godfrey Reggio and cinematographer Ron
Fricke have captured these scenes and placed them in a way that
challenges the viewer to insert his or her own interpretation and
meaning.
Relying
heavily on cinematic techniques which today have been copied and
used by other filmmakers - you'd be surprised how many things from
Koyaanisqatsi have now become standard techniques in modern
advertisements - Reggio discovers an ineluctable imagery inconceivable
to the unaided human eye.
There
was time-lapse photography to compress and intensify scenes of nature,
industrial and urban cityscapes, be they blankets of shadow creeping
up a crenellated rock facade, manic streaks of vehicle lights zooming
in the night, the go-stop flow of human traffic in downtown New
York.
There
was something disturbing watching rows of sausages in a cannery
zooming down the production line juxtaposed against rows of humans
in a subway zooming down escalators, just as there was an ineluctable
beauty in watching a skyscraper-framed moonrise. Pictures of people
tossing balls at a bowling alley was transformed, in compressed
time-frame, into a surreal ballet.
Not
all was effects photography - there was also docu-drama-like footage
of atomic explosions, military hardware and exploding buildings,
ostensibly processes of change. There were lingering shots of clouds
and rock faces and desert - scenic and breathtaking, and at the
same time alien and inhospitable.
One
particular footage of a missile taking off from its underground
silo, rising into the air, erupting in a fireball of flame and the
camera tracking one of the flaming fuel tanks as it falls to the
ground, burning itself out, over trance-like chanting, seemed to
look forward to Powaqqatsi: life in transformation.
 One
of my concerns was how well the movie, which was incepted in 1977
and premiered in 1983, has aged over the last twenty years. Surprisingly,
Reggio's visionary opus holds up very well and says things about
the way we live which are still relevant, if not even more so, as
the rate of change of living has increased.
There
are anachronistic giveaways - United Airlines jet paint schemes,
military aircraft long since retired from service, low-resolution
(by modern standards) graphics, Pac Man, the size of mainframe
computers; but in no way do these visual time-stamps affect the
meaning or power of the film's message, because of the way the images
have been used.
It
would be all too easy to say that Glass's
music was a perfect accompaniment to this film without words - arguably,
his music will irritate, confuse and disappoint some people as much
as it will intrigue, impress and inspire others. I should point
out here that much of Glass's work is meant to be collaborative
- listening to the soundtrack without the movie robs it of its raison
d'etre and leaves it open, naturally, to criticism.
True,
there's nothing that people will hum as they leave the theatre (except
perhaps the motivic Koyaanisqatsi bass chant that opens and
closes the film) - they'd probably be haunted more by the stark
imagery for weeks to come than the music - but forming a verdict
to the music without trying to understand the composer and his approach
would be a serious error.
 Glass
(left; photo by Jim Ball from www.philipglass.com)
has reinvented the traditional structures of music and made this
in his own particular language and vocabulary, much as Reggio has
altered the common perception and expectation of what film ought
to be (such as leaving out actors and dialogue).
Admittedly,
a lot of the original large orchestral timbre has been lost in the
transcription down to a handful of acoustic instruments and voices,
plus a battery of synths and digital samples. Glass himself played
in the ensemble, sitting to the right of conductor Michael Riesman,
whose primary task was to keep the music in sync with the unfolding
film.
Apart
from one or two near-misses (and totally unnoticed by the audience),
the live music and the movie were very well held together. It was
Glass himself who played the very first sound, a subterranean, Richter-9.5
rumbling note as the main title appeared.
So,
did I enjoy it ? I did; we all did, each in our own way. Godfrey
Reggio himself has said that, "The film's role is to provoke;
to raise questions that only the audience can answer. This is the
highest value of any work of art, not predetermined meaning, but
meaning gleaned from the experience of the encounter." In Koyaanisqatsi,
he has accomplished this in the most powerfully moving way possible.
BENJAMIN
CHEE has made a lot of new friends at this year's Arts
Festival.
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you wish to Add a Comment to this review, please post your comments
to classical@inkpot.com.
Last
Concert Reviewed | Powaqqatsi Review
(June 20)
894:
20.6.2001 © Benjamin Chee
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