Two Philip Glass Interviews

Philip Glass: In fact, each of the films of the trilogy - Naqoyqatsi we have completed but it is not ready to do live yet. I would agree with what Godfrey said except that before each of the films Godfrey decided that each of them would have a different visual language and that each should have a different musical language. And so Powaqqatsi doesn't look like Koyanisqatsi. Koyanisqatsi is the one with all the fast moving stuff. That doesn't happen at all in Powaqqatsi. When we began approaching that, we discussed it a lot. Whereas the first film used the ensemble that you heard last night [performing La Belle et la Bete ] - the synthesiser, wind players, singer, Michael Riesman as musical director, Dan Dryden doing the sound - in order to invent a new sound, we decided to make it a different kind of music piece. I wanted a lot of World music material. The second film was also filmed in South America and the southern hemisphere. Koyanisqatsi was all filmed in North America. Powaqqatsi is really a world cultural film, southern hemisphere primarily. The other thing is that one of the ways we work is that I went on location with Godfrey. Michael (who will be the conductor tonight) and I went together and visited places in Africa and South America. We had already been to India numerous times and also to the Far East, so I didn't do that again. One of the things I was thinking about was what the piece would sound like, what the sound world would be like. In that way, the sound world of Powaqqatsi became unique. In a certain way, the methodology hasn't changed. But in terms of the visual language and musical language we consciously adopted new approaches.

RW: Godfrey, the opening of Powaqqatsi, the amazing shots of the goldmine in Brazil - 15,000 people ...

GR: 37,000 people when we were there. When I first visited it, it had 95,000 people?

RW: ... and your cinematographer and camera people had Philip's music on a Walkman on headphones as they were shooting the film. That's a very unusual way of working.

GR: The reason for that is that because that mine was very dangerous and very controversial, I had tried for four years to get permission to film there, without luck. Three months before the film was finished, I got permission and the score was already?I had images that were standing in proxy for those images, a Jacques Cousteau shot. Philip composed to that. So I invited Phil to come down. It would be an exceptional opportunity. We had the completed score in the ear of the cinematographer and the people that were in the mine that were all interested in wanting to hear.

PG:They wanted to hear. We played it for them. It was also a way of radically altering the normal way of image and music making. Normally - let's say in the film industry if I can use that word?

RW: "Dominant cinema"?

PG:?"Dominant cinema", if you will, but that includes independent films too. For the most part, images come first and music comes after. And we did it the other way round, to the point where the cinematographers were actually listening to the music while they were filming. I don't know what the result of that was. We'll see the result tonight [in Powaqqatsi ]. We just did it because we could do it, we were in a position to do it and we embraced it.

RW: It seems, looking at these movies, that the image and the music production is a kind of two way process. It looks to me, looking at Koyanisqatsi, that the film is cut in places to the music. The cuts occur on a downbeat.

GR: That's not exactly true. With polyrhythmic music, like Philip writes, you almost can't lose. On the other hand, you don't want to always be cutting in the same place. Then it would become obvious to the viewer, and boring. Sometimes it is not on the beat at all. You'll see that tonight. Working with Phil and his kind of music - this is why I chose Phil as a composer. I can only speak for myself but other directors tell me the same .It is like a director's dream to have this kind of music because it is very cinematic. It allows the viewer to think for herself or himself what it is that this is about. It is not directive in the sense of scoring for plot and characterisation where, if there is a heavy moment, the music is going to pick up, if there is some drama, the music is going to let you know that. This is a constant narration that runs through the film which leaves more freedom for the audience to have their own response to it. If there are two thousand people here tonight, there could, hopefully, be two thousand different points of view about it.

RW: That leads me to think. Thinking about your music, Philip, one thing that occurred to me is your music is popular; it is popular late 20th century music ...

PG: ...you mean people like it, not that it sounds like The Beach Boys?

RW: ... but I'm sure that almost every temporary Hollywood film score probably somewhere has some Philip Glass there. It has probably been played in every ballet studio in the world. It is incredibly, probably the word is "serviceable". It works with everything! Why do you think that is?

PG: I have no idea. It does appear pervasive. It is difficult for me because I'm always trying to run away from it. My position is quite different. It may be serviceable to the people who listen to it but it also presents tremendous problems. For example, when Godfrey and I got to the third film, Naqoyqatsi, what kind of score would I do that would have its own voice and yet be related to the first two? It becomes increasingly challenging to be inventive within a language which has become so well known.

RW: But Powaqqatsi is very different from the first movie, there is this whole world music feel and ...

PG: ... and Naqoyqatsi again is different.

RW: Tell us about it. We haven't seen it here yet.

PG: Well Godfrey should say something about how he made the film, and then I'll talk about the music.

GR: OK. Let me try to give a context, because it's a trilogy. The central theme of this whole trilogy is technology. Technology not from the point of view of something we use but as a way of life. Something that we live, as ubiquitous as the air that we breathe. These are not environmental films. They are not trying to lay a point of view on you, necessarily, though there is a point of view in the film. It tries to offer the viewer something to provoke you to a thought. Not necessarily while you see the event tonight but when you leave the theatre. Having said that, the first film, Koyanisqatsi, deals with northern hemisphere hyper kinetic industrial grids or societies. It was all shot in the United States but it could all have been shot in the UK; it could have been shot in Europe, in Hong Kong or in Japan. The second film, Powaqqatsi, deals with southern hemisphere living, cultures of orality, cultures of simplicity, handmade cultures, people that create their own way of life, and how those people are being seduced by our notions of progress and development out of the sockets of their own cultures and way of life. The third film, Naqoyqatsi, deals with the globalised moment in which we live right now. As it were, if you won't be offended, the Los Angelisation of the planet. Its subject matter is more difficult than the other two. The other two were actually shot in real locations and encountered real images. The locations for Naqoyqatsi were themselves images because virtuality is the theme of Naqoyqatsi, globalisation, how the world is being homogenised, being unified through technology as this unifying factor as the new environment of life. So we wanted music, in the case of the third film, that would, as Philip said, be a voice for this manufactured image or - if you want to use the term - manufactured evil, which is what the image can be because it produces uniformity. So - after several months of being marinated by myself and colleagues with all kinds of musics, sounds, technology, images - Philip said, because this film is so completely technological in terms of the image, that he would make a completely acoustic score.

PG: The idea was that, if I had gone in the same direction as the image, maybe a very hi-tech music score, I was afraid that the film would become unviewable, that this one-two punch of technology both for the eyes and for the heart would somehow be offensive, actually.

RW: What do you mean by a hi-tech score?

PG: Well, I've played a lot with technology myself. It could have used synthesised sounds, fabricated sounds - in the way that Godfrey was using synthesised images - sounds that don't exist in nature, so to speak, but can be created.

RW: But they are still pitched?

PG: Yes. They can be. You were talking a few minutes earlier [before the interview?] about Stockhausen, who works with electronics. So there is a whole culture of fabricated sounds and, in a way, that would have been an easy marriage with images that are also fabricated. I felt that there had to be some sort of a bridge between the spectator and the so-called story, the message of the film. So I did a piece that was completely orchestral. Not only that, but we had the opportunity, very late in the process, Yo-Yo Ma, the cellist, got interested in the project and he wanted to play. In fact, there was a lot of solo music in the piece already and there were a few places where I could contribute more solo music. And he became the solo voice of the piece. So the film functioned in a somewhat different way than it did in the others. It became a kind of counterweight to the image. But in fact I think it will succeed in the sense that it was through the music, in a certain way, almost through the security, the familiarity of the music that we could look at images that were quite almost violent in their alienation.

RW: (to Godfrey Reggio) Would you agree with that?

GR: Yes. I would say they were terrifying beauty. The images were awesomely difficult to look at.

RW: Can I come back to the movie that we are going to see this evening [ Powaqqatsi ] and the one we are going to see on Saturday [ Koyanisqatsi ]. How do you feel that these images have changed over the years? I am thinking in Koyanisqatsi, for example, we see images of collapsing skyscrapers and a lone fire fighter. After 9/11 these images have new resonances and meanings. When I first saw that movie in the late 70s, the meanings that were generated then are completely different from when I viewed it recently. How do you feel time has changed the images?

PG: It happened that I was doing a tour of the West Coast of the United States in October, November immediately after 9/11. The first thing that happened if you were doing concerts then was that a third of your audience had simply evaporated. This was across the board, for everybody. But the people that came, when they saw Koyanisqatsi, were so moved by it they were often in tears. I had never seen that when we had done Koyanisqatsi before. I'd been playing it live in this way since about 1983. We had figured out how to do it, Michael had begun conducting it and I reckon we'd done it live two hundred times, two hundred and fifty times maybe. But until that October, November it looked very, very different. The oddest thing about these movies is that we seem to age but the movies don't seem to age.

GR: You know, there's a Latin term that means, "One receives according to the vessel that they have". Because we are all changing, thank God, and we don't have to stay the way we are tonight. We could be different tomorrow. If you see these films, because they don't have the linear direction of a narrative and an overt story - that's not to say there's not a story there - it depends on the mood or the feeling you bring to the piece as to what you get out of it. That's not to say that the piece can do that for everybody because for some people it will be boring or uninteresting or pretentious. But for those that can get into it, it is what is known in the business as a "repeatable". It's something that can be seen over and over because what you bring to it will add a dimension that the film can't possibly offer without the viewer. In fact, when the film is made, I look at it from the point of view of a trialectic relationship, the image, the music and the viewer. The viewer in this case if the film works; if it doesn't, it is boring and you want to get out of the room as fast as possible. But if it does work, it becomes an engaged response. It is not something for your mind. These films are made to go over your head and hit you somewhere in the solar plexus (or under your head). Something where you can feel something, so it is like an experience. It is like when you are looking at the sunset. You would never ask what is the meaning of the sunset. It is whether it moves you. It is the same with the music that Philip writes. People frequently ask Philip and I, what does this film mean. Well, it means whatever you want it to mean, which is not to say that there is not a meaning. If you went to a Vivaldi concert, or a Philip Glass concert without the images on the stage here, you wouldn't ask your friend, "Gee, I wonder what Philip Glass meant by that." It would be more whether it was a moving or a meaningful experience. This is what we are trying to create with the work that we've done, a moving or meaningful experience for the viewer.

RW: This seems to me to be rooted in Modernist ideas. One of the things about the Modernist movement was that you could say that the responsibility for the generation of meaning shifted from the producer to the consumer. So in the paintings of Jackson Pollock he doesn't paint dogs and cats, T.S. Eliot...

PG: You can go further back. You can start with Duchamp. In fact Cage was the one who coined the phrase that the audience completes the work. That is what that is about.

GR: I don't know if he was a Modernist but Aristotle, in his teaching about what it means to teach, says that the learner is the efficient cause of knowledge not the teacher. The teacher is there to raise the question not to give an answer. So it has a root way back.

RW: Your film making, Godfrey, is it rooted in the experiments of the sixties and seventies. I'm thinking of the underground film movements in New York. At the end of the day, these are images made with projected light. That is what we have. You seem to be going back to the fundamentals of filmmaking, pre-talkies. There is no talking in these films, no dialogue. There's not much atmos recording. You don't hear much location recording.

GR: There's no location recording, very little. If there is, it is included in a montage of sound that comes in with the score.

RW: So is your filmmaking technique rooted in those. Do you feel rooted in that work that was going on in America in the sixties and seventies?

GR: I don't. I'll tell you why. When I was fourteen years old, instead of growing up in nineteen fifties America, I grew up in the Middle Ages of France. I was a member of a Catholic order and as a result had no education in culture. Some consider that a disaster and therefore say look at how bad the films are, others consider that an advantage - I didn't have to unlearn anything. So I approached these strictly from the point of view of a novice, as an amateur doing this, remarkably, for love. So I didn't have any measure to go with. Film critics always have measures, so for those of you who are film cognoscenti, you will know the name of Bruce Connor. In America, he is probably the greatest montagist. People say, "You must have been terrifically influenced by Bruce Connor." Well, the fact is, I didn't even know who Bruce Connor was. So anything you see here comes from an original act.

RW: Did you know what you were doing when you made this first movie?

GR: No. I knew what my heart was telling me, that I should make this film. But how do you begin? You have to not be mystified by the tools. I don't use a computer. I've never used a camera, editing machines etc. That's not to say I don't understand them. It just hasn't been my thing. But I wasn't mystified by them, perhaps through hardiness, frivolity, whatever; I was willing to embrace that which I hadn't done before, with some very capable colleagues. Not only Philip and I work on these films. Obviously these are not the films of two people. They are the films of many artists. When people come to work on these films, they do not come as professionals who are there for an income because they don't make much and the films don't make a lot of money. But they do come because it is an opportunity to collaborate and to create their own art in the context of a collaborative process. So the cinematographer, the editor, these people could be up here [on stage] with us. They have as much involvement in the life of these films as certainly Philip and I do.

RW: Do you know what you are doing now? What have you learnt?

GR: Especially now, I don't know what I'm doing. For twenty-seven years, I've had this isometric on me; I've had a commitment, not with grace and gratuity, but to an insane asylum, to make these movies. And that is over with now. Philip has been on tour for thirty-five years and I think he has got at least another thirty to go. I'm not sure what I'm doing right now, to tell you the truth. And I'm very happy about that.

RW: Philip, did you know what you were doing when you began writing the music?

PG: One of my first obligations was to listen to Godfrey. And as you all see, he is a very articulate fellow. And it has been a great joy and pleasure to be involved in a dialogue with him. It's mostly a monologue, to be truthful. [Laughter.] But I make the appropriate sounds to keep him going. So it's actually been evolving, although I've probably noticed it more than he has that his ideas actually do change over the twenty-five years. There has been a basic idea. It is interesting that, at the same time, I have been working in opera and dance and theatre, other forms which have to do with music and image, added to that, text and movement. Text doesn't come up in Powaqqatsi, except for one word in both of these movies, which is the only word that you'll hear, which is the title of the picture. However, the exercise of combining image and music is a fundamental activity that I am involved with and I do it in other ways. I was talking to some people recently who asked me what is the difference between writing music for a film and film for an opera. There isn't much difference. When you get right down to it, image and music reduces to something very ? For instance, Godfrey will sometimes come up with an assemblage of images. With Koyanisqatsi, it might be clouds, it might be aeroplanes. I look at them and my job is to figure what is the sound image that goes with the visual image. I have developed, over this period of time - not only with Godfrey, I have had the opportunity to work with dance and with opera a and theatre at the same time - to discover how broad and fluid that relationship between music and image can be.

RW: Did you know what you were doing right at the beginning when you began to write this music that is now loosely labelled "Minimalism", making music with minimal means, with limited number of notes??

PG: That was a by-product of a historical moment. It didn't really matter hat it was minimalism. It happened to be that moment when I was maturing as a composer and had encountered the music of Ravi Shankar and eastern music and I had begun to encounter? It is a long rigmarole that is not worth going into now?

RW: But it was the very antithesis of what else was happening.

PG: And terrifically exhilarating for that reason. One of the things I discovered very early on was that most of us work out of habit and that habit created taboos in the world of music and the world of film. There were things that you weren't supposed to do. Once I noticed that, I got very interested in what those things were. The fact is if something is taboo, which writing tonal music was in 1966, it meant that no-one had done it for a while, or writing repetitive music - no-one had done for a long time because you weren't supposed to do it - and so if you did it you were doing something very radical. The main problem of doing this was to discover what those taboos were. It is very hard. It takes a lot of reflection to figure what are those unconscious habits that we've been taught. The things you're not told, they are implied in your education. No one says, "You can't do this". No one says it in those terms but everything conspires to mould your music making in a certain direction. To break that educational habit and to see the materials of music in a different way takes a tremendous effort.

RW: Music without silence, as well. That early music never stopped and when it stopped, you knew it had stopped as well.

PG: I knew Cage pretty well, and we got along fine but he always said, "Philip, there are too many notes in music. Too many notes."

RW: Where have we heard that before? Which movie? To come back to tonight: we talked earlier about editing and image and music going together. How do you synchronise with the film in real time?

PG: Michael Riesman is the conductor. In fact we took on the idea. When it was originally made, it was synchronised mechanically the way it would be done in a mix. I went to see Napoleon by Abel Gance that was being done with a live orchestra. The music was written by Carmine Coppolla, Francis's father. I went to see this at Radio City Music Hall, where by coincidence we had premiered Koyaanisqatsi just a few years before. It is a 5000-seat theatre. It was full for Koyaanisqatsi also, but when I saw Napoleon, it was a film made in the 1920's and there were three screens. It was an extremely progressive movie. And they did it with a live score. I was so excited by this that I got home and I called Michael up and said, "I've just seen this film with live music. I think we can do this." And what I meant to say was, "I think you can do this, as the conductor"! Basically, we figured out how we could take this; part of the problem wasn't hard; it was taking the orchestra and rescoring it for the ensemble. With the synthesised materials we had, it wasn't hard to do, so the score could be adapted. Michael began studying the music, and already we decided there wouldn't be a mechanical click track. People do that but, for me, the exercise was to create a parallel existence of music with the image that wasn't locked together. What I wanted to hear was a music that flowed in between points of synchronisation that are called sync points. There would be moments when Michael had to be right on the picture and other moments when the music could vary in the way that, when someone plays the piano, when you put a metronome on that person, they are not playing at 120 or 140. There is a tremendous variation of anyone who is playing ...

RW: ... fluctuations in tempo ...

PG: ... and one of the things about real time performances, the things we like about it, is the fluctuations, the feeling of it happening right in front of you. I sometimes compare that to getting a picture of the moment of creativity. It is like the scientist who tries looking back in time at the moment of the Big Bang, to see when was that moment of creation. When you look at anyone playing, you get a snapshot of what that is, when someone is playing in real time. He or she may not be the composer but the activity is very, very similar. The closest that we as spectators can see that happening. I wanted to preserve that in this relationship. When I saw Carmine do it, he really just recycled a lot of Beethoven, The Marseillaise, it wasn't a brilliant score. What was wonderful was the liveness of it. So Michael's task was to synchronise the picture without hooking himself up to it mechanically. It was his problem. He was the music director, but I looked over his shoulder to see what he was doing. He began making little drawings in the score, on the music. In any particular scene - these things may be six or seven minutes - there may only be five or six or seven places where that has to happen. So in between there can be one or two minutes and in that time the music and the image just float together. The fact that they are synchronised at certain points, once the spectator sees that he becomes convinced that we are doing it. Actually, most of the time we are not doing it. We are only doing it every time we think you need to think we are doing it, if you see what I mean.

RW: But it works.

PG: Of course it works, because the mind of the listener will arrange that for himself. We don't need to do it. We'd be working much too hard if we did it that way. With practice, Michael has become extremely good at that. We began with Koyaanisqatsi and the pieces we are doing this week are all results of this experimentation. There could be more; I don't think we're done with it at all. Naqoy will certainly be the next one. There may be others as well. This whole synchronisation of live music to image is actually quite different to the mechanical linking. It opens up a completely different range of experience. I think that when we see these movies live, we are seeing them in a dimension which - if you saw them as they were originally done, if you have a video or DVD - is a special opportunity to experience them.

RW: For you Godfrey, when you come to an event like this evening, you must know these movies inside out. You made them. It is a unique experience every time.

GR: For me, as well. It raises the sensorial ante, as it were. You can feel it in your solar plexus. You can feel the percussion in your body. No matter how good the room might be in a theatre, it is not going to be the same as having these real instruments up here. Since these films are themselves experiential, as opposed to experimental, since they offer, rather than a story or information, an experience of the subject, this raises the possibility of what that experience can be tremendously. It is a real privilege to be able to be here and to hear this myself. It is different each time.

RW: I'd jut like to ask you gentlemen one last question. It has taken you twenty-five years to make this trilogy. Are you planning another one?

GR: Well, Philip announced it in October [2002], I think. So, yes, we are thinking about something.

PG: I said that by the time we get done we'll both be 90. But we're hoping to live to complete it. I don't know what we're going to do. I'm waiting to hear from Godfrey. He says he doesn't know what we'll do. The odd thing is that Godfrey didn't begin as a filmmaker and he has become a consummate filmmaker. I don't imagine he'll be resting long between films. We always have to wait because we have to find the resources but the project will appear very soon.

RW: A very good note on which to end, I think. (Applause.)

Forthcoming attraction
November 10th at the Royal Albert Hall.
Ennio Morricone's 75th Birthday Concert, featuring Morricone conducting the Rome Symphony Orchestra in a programme of his film music. Mouth watering!

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