That unmistakable touch of Glass

Philip Glass is by now surely up there in the Telemann class among the most prolific composers in history. There must be an explanation, preferably a non-defamatory one, for how his technique has enabled him to produce such an enormous quantity of music. A glance at my iPod shows that Varese’s collected works are over in 150 minutes: Berg, Ravel and Debussy each managed to produce between ten and 15 hours of music at most.

Glass’s style, which has been called ‘minimalist’, though he doesn’t accept the label, works on a bigger scale. He has written 25 operas, some, like Einstein on the Beach, as long as Die Meistersinger. He owns up to 30 film scores, although the internet movie database connects him with more than a hundred different films. There are ten symphonies on a Mahlerian scale, nine string quartets and a dozen full-scale concertos.

The early pieces can be immense— ‘Music in Twelve Parts’ lasts four-and-a-half hours in performance. Even committing to listening to Glass’s oeuvre would be a time-consuming occupation, let alone writing it. The fact that he has now published rather a charming full-scale memoir on top of this colossal output makes one wonder whether his energy may not start to fall into the category of the pathological.

The music, quite unlike anything written before, emerged from a New York background both predictable and peculiar. On the orthodox side were flute lessons, the Juilliard School, and, like most American composers of the 20th century, a stint in Paris learning from the French guru Nadia Boulanger. (Virgil Thomson remarked that every American town had a drugstore and a Boulanger pupil). On the less predictable side was a long 1960s stint delving into Indian mystical thought, years spent working as a plumber and a taxi-driver before recognition as a composer came in his forties, and, most significantly, a background in the visual arts and in ‘happenings’ rather than in musical life.

Glass says that one incentive to develop his own style was the recognition that contemporary music just didn’t seem to interest the Manhattan artists he hung out with and worked for; they had rock and roll on their studio gramophones, not Stockhausen.