Andres Schiff playing the opening of the well-tempered clavier by that enfant terrible of minimalism Johann Sebastian Bach. That technique of breaking up a chord, of rolling it,
is called arpeggio. In this case it's rhythmically defined, but for most arpeggios you can just put a wavy line in front of the chord and the player will, let me set the authentic instrument to
piano, instead of just playing it, the player will roll it. With harp music, even if you don't
put a wavy line in front of the chord, the player may very well arpeggiate it anyway,
that's what harp players do. Now most people think of Bach as a conservative composer,
not forward-thinking like Monteverdi or Beethoven. But hey, with this piece he was definitely a great composer. He was a great composer. He was a great composer. He was a
ahead of his time. It took more than 200 years for somebody to realize the implications of that
prelude and base a whole style on arpeggios. That's from a piece called Flow. That's flow as
in iceberg, not gently sweet Afton or Miss Ziegfeld. It's by Philip Glass from his album
Glassworks. Now, I exaggerated when I said that he based a whole style on arpeggios, but Glass, who, whether he likes the term or not, was one of the pioneering minimalists,
did base a whole style on what traditional composers considered merely the building blocks of thematic material. Scales, arpeggios, and what we might call deweys.
They're sort of mini arpeggios, alternating between just two notes of a chord. In the past, these things were used as accordions, but now they're used as a form of music.
Accompaniments, or parts of a more varied theme. But now, they're the whole enchilada, and they can go on for hours. In this excerpt from Einstein on the Beach,
you can hear the violin doing all three of these basic elements. Scales, broken chords, and two-note deweys.
Oh, I forgot repeated notes, too.
That's scales, broken chords, and two-note deweys, and do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-repeated notes. That's from Einstein on the Beach, an opera by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson.
That was Gregory Fulkerson playing violin. Okay, it's flashback time. Today's show is called PG&I. That's not an advertising firm or a public
utility. It just refers to the fact that Philip Glass and I have known each other since our student days at Juilliard. And we're going to be talking about the fact that we've been friends since the 1950s. And we probably only see each other now about once a year,
but we always pick up pretty much where we left off. And it's been a real pleasure to keep track of the progress of an old friend who has become one of the most influential and controversial
composers of our time. Of course, I take complete credit for his success. Who knows where he'd be
if I hadn't helped him move a full-sized upright piano down from a sixth-floor walk-up apartment in his home? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Or if I hadn't given him his Carnegie Hall debut playing flute in a piece of mine.
It was Carnegie Recital Hall, actually. Or if I hadn't persuaded him to join Bob Lewis and myself in celebrating our graduation in 1960 by going to 24 movies in a row.
There used to be 12 movie theaters on 42nd Street between 6th and 8th Avenues, each showing a double feature. See, the thing is that Phil jumped ship after eight movies. He couldn't take it anymore.
It was a couple of Steve Reeves' ancient Greek shield and spear flicks that did him in. Steve Reeves, I guess, was the Lucy Lawless of the day. Anyway, Bob and I saw all 24 movies.
And my theory is that Philip felt so ashamed at having crumped out that he developed a compositional style designed to show off his stamina.
You know, playing fast eighth notes for an hour or more. Although, speaking of movies, he did call me up once and say I had to go down to the block, as we called it, and see a movie called Bucket of Blood.
He said, I'm not going to tell you anything about it except whatever you think it's going to be, you're wrong. And he was right. It's one of those Roger Corman movies, but it's not really a horror film at all.
It's a takeoff on Beatniks, a great flick. And as a matter of fact, on the day of our wedding, my wife and I were driving to our honeymoon, and we went past a drive-in movie that was showing Bucket of Blood.
And I said, honey, I'm sorry, but we have got to... Oh, man. There's the irrelevancy alarm. I can't really argue with it. Hey, wait a minute. It's doing a printout. Let's see.
It doesn't usually do a printout. Okay, it says, stick to the point. You've got a lot to cover on this show. Bucket of Blood is a great movie, though. Amen.
Okay, back to Juilliard here. One of the things that struck me about Philip in those days, aside from the fact that he had... had some very interesting and sometimes weird friends,
was that his literary tastes didn't seem to match his music. His music was quite sweet, but the books he talked about were by Conrad and Celine and Beckett, much darker stuff.
Now, Philip ended up disavowing all his music written before 1965, when he was 28 years old. But I rummaged through some of my old scores and found a string quartet he wrote in 1963
while he was on a Ford Foundation grant. Writing music for high schools in Pittsburgh. Let me try to play a little bit of that for you here. Let's see.
I'll set the authentic instrument to number 28, fast strings. Now, that's no good. That's no good for solo strings, for a string quartet.
That's for backing up Whitney Houston. These string settings are all like that. Tell you what, I'll just set it to piano. It won't sustain as well, but it won't sound like Mata Vani either. Besides, that's what we would...
We would have done if we were showing each other the piece back then. Here's the beginning of Phil Glass' 1963 quartet.
Okay, now let me play you where that theme comes back.
You see what I mean? It's really sweet and quite traditional and shows, I think, the influence of Mio, with whom Philip studied in Aspen. It's nice stuff, but as I said before, it didn't feel like Philip.
And I don't think he was completely comfortable with it himself. I know he wasn't. He later disavowed it. On the other hand, he was drawn, perhaps even less than I was,
to what was considered the most important avant-garde music of the time, which was the post-World War II extension of Schoenberg's 12-tone school.
Here's an example of so-called post-Webernism around 1960.
From Structures for Two Pianos by Pierre Boulez, played by Emard et Bouffard. So, Phil Glass took off for Europe, studied with Nadia Boulanger, and while he was in Paris,
he was hired to transcribe a film score by Ravi Shankar, the great Indian sitar player, into Western notation. This necessarily detailed introduction to the Indian approach to rhythm,
radically different from the Western approach, turned Philip around. When he came back to America in 1967, his music bore virtually no resemblance to what he had written.
My wife and I, we both knew Phil at Juilliard, were at the first full concert of his music, which, according to a photograph I just ran across,
was at the Filmmakers' Cinematheque on May 19, 1968. There was a solo violin piece that was so long and so continuous that the music was mounted on poles at eye level,
as if it were a long scroll being exhibited at a museum. And our friend Dottie Pixley slowly moved to the room, as she played, ending up at least 20 or 30 feet from where she started.
It was a pretty austere work. I liked a shorter piece for two Wurlitzer electric pianos better. But soon after that, the Philip Glass Ensemble was formed.
Amplified keyboards, singers, and wind instruments fed through a mixer, and the new style found its voice.
I have to say right off the bat
that there's an inherent problem in dealing with music like this on a radio program. And that is, that the pieces tend to be very long, so I can't play them in their entirety.
And excerpting them makes it almost impossible to get into the frame of mind one has to get into for this extremely repetitive kind of experience.
Also, it seems to me that it's easier to get into it when you're there, enveloped in the sound, or when it's accompanying a visual medium, like a film or a dance or a play. But I have to give you a taste.
What was truly startling about this music when it came along was the loud volume, the fast tempo, the completely static rhythmic unit.
It's all even notes, often as here, throughout the entire piece. And the fact that the changes that do take place happen very gradually.
Somebody has said it's like watching the minute hand of a clock. Philip Glass has described the difference between the Western and non-Western approaches to rhythm like this.
In Western music, we divide time as if you were to take a length of time and slice it in the way you would slice a loaf of bread. He means like a 4-4 measure is divided into
4 quarter notes, 8 eighth notes, 16 sixteenth notes, etc. In Indian music, you take small units or beats and string them together to make up larger time values.
So you've got groups of small beats like this. 1, 2, 1, 2, then 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 1, 2, 3. In the music we're not listening to here,
you might have a four-note phrase which repeats a number of times, then it expands to a five-note phrase, which also repeats, then perhaps it expands to seven notes, then contracts to six, whatever it is,
according to some plan. Philip always used to play one of the keyboards himself, and you could see him give a small nod to the other players when it was time to go on to the next phrase.
Although any given phrase is very easy to play, to perform an entire work like this requires virtuoso concentration and stamina. Some of these early pieces can last over an hour.
Now, this is an LP, so just to give you an idea of how gradual the changes are and how much Philip has pared away in terms of variety
in order to concentrate on these small, melodic and rhythmic changes. They're small, but they sound big when you're into the whole piece. I'm going to raise the volume a bit and drop the needle down further along.
And once again, still further along.
Okay, and here's the end of the piece.
Sorry, Philip, I hate to do that needle-hopping, but that piece is the whole side of an LP. That very abrupt ending is also characteristic of his music.
Music in fifths by Philip Glass, played by the Philip Glass Ensemble. And these clothes I'm wearing are the Peter Schickely Ensemble, because I'm Peter Schickely,
host of Schickely Mix from PRI, Public Radio International.
PG&I is the name of today's show. The I is your humble host, and he's reminiscing about his four decades of friendship and fascination with Philip Glass. This is music with changing parts,
and it's probably one of the pieces that the Philip Glass Ensemble performed on a European tour around 1970, which included a gig at the Royal College of Art in London.
One of the members of the audience at that concert was Brian Eno, who later said, and I'm reading here, I first saw Philip Glass playing with his ensemble
at the Royal College of Art in 1969 or 1970. This was one of the most extraordinary musical experiences of my life. Sound made completely physical and as dense as concrete
by sheer volume and repetition. For me, it was like a viscous bath of pure, thick energy. Though he was at that time described as a minimalist,
this was actually one of the most detailed musics I'd ever heard. It was all intricacy and exotic harmonics. One of the things I noticed early on
with Philip's concerts was that the audience was different. At most contemporary music concerts in the 1950s and 60s, the audience consisted of other composers and their friends.
It didn't bother me that the audiences for new music were usually young and not numerous, but their inbred nature bothered me. When my dad described going to concerts in Berlin in the 1920s,
at which new works by Schoenberg and Bartok were being played, it wasn't only musicians in the audience. My dad was studying agricultural economics. Philip's concerts attracted a lot of people from the art world.
And in fact, most of his early concerts were in art galleries and museums because the mainstream musical world detested his music so much. He had no hope of getting grants,
and some of his early financial support came from well-known artists. A lot of musicians have always detested his music, too, and one of the reasons he formed his ensemble was to have his music played by people who like it
instead of trying to promote it. He wanted to persuade unsympathetic orchestras and chamber groups to play it. In this piece, Music with Changing Parts, Glass started adding long, held notes
to the rapid, even eighth-note texture. He was inspired to do this after noticing that sometimes playing in the middle of a space with speakers in the four corners, an illusion of long, held notes
was created by the beats set up by the interaction of the rapid lines. And he decided to reinforce
that with music with changing parts.
We came in on the middle of that piece, by the way. The piece is 61 minutes and 38 seconds long on this recording. After hearing that piece, I think at the Whitney Museum,
I asked Philip if he'd ever considered using textures like that as the background for a real melody in a more traditional sense. And he said something like, well, you know, it just isn't that kind of music.
And of course, he's right. What that exchange shows is where my head was and is at, Mr. Tune. Still, years later, Philip wrote this.
That was part of Facades from Philip Glass's album Glassworks. Now, before playing that cut, I intimated, rather coyly, that perhaps my suggestion to Philip
that he use his web-like textures to support real melodic melodies might have been partially responsible for a work like Facades. Do I really believe that?
Nah, not a bit. I was just being coyly obnoxious. The more he got involved with dramatic works, the more the austerity of his early music became tempered.
The reverse of my implication, however, is certainly true. Philip's music has definitely influenced mine. The kinetic energy of his pieces, fast or slow,
Facades, by the way, was choreographed beautifully by Jerome Robbins, and the ability of simple arpeggios, broken chords, to strongly define the beats,
even if, or especially if, they're irregular, I've lapped it up, even though my musical personality is warmer and less modern. Here's part of my first string quartet.
The chord pattern is based on the blues, but it's the arpeggios that define the shifting beats.
That's from my first quartet, American Dreams, and it was played by the Green String Quartet. Now here's a section from my second quartet. In this one, the chords change constantly, sort of like in the Bach Prelude
we heard at the top of the show. But the interlocking arpeggios, I'm quite sure, were inspired by Phil Glass.
The Lark Quartet, performing the second trio of the Pastoral movement from the String Quartet No. 2 in memoriam, by, as it happens, Peter Schickely, who is also the host of Schickely Mix,
from PRI, Public Radio International. Philip Glass is the PG of today's program, titled PG&I.
His music has always had strong partisans and strong detractors. But, lest you get the impression from the necessarily brief excerpts I've played and my little technical description,
that this music provides only cerebral satisfaction, I'd like to read John Rockwell's description of a 1973 performance of music with changing parts
in the Soho section of Manhattan. Glass's ensemble that night played with a spirit and precision that only years together can bring. The music danced and pulsed with a special life,
its motoric rhythms, burbling, highly amplified figurations, and mournful sustained notes booming out through the huge black windows and filling up the bleakened room.
It was so loud that the dancers Douglas Dunn and Sarah Rudner, who were strolling down Worcester Street, sat on a stoop and enjoyed the concert from afar.
A pack of teenagers kept up an ecstatic dance of their own. And across the street, silhouetted high up in a window, a lone saxophone player improvised in silent accompaniment
like some faded postcard of 50s Greenwich Village Bohemia. It was a good night to be in New York City. Let me just wipe away a tear of nostalgia here.
And I'm not kidding either. But it didn't make Philip any money. He never wanted to teach and kept earning a living completely separate from his music.
He worked as a plumber, as a truck loader. It was a non-union place with very high turnover. And I remember him telling me how one of the guys had shown him
how to load a truck so that when it was opened on the other end of the line, everything would fall out on the unloaders. When a sculptor, I believe it was Richard Serra, developed physical problems, he hired Philip as a lifter.
Phil once told me, I think I've finally reached the point of being able to make my living off my music. A year or two later I ran into him again and when I reminded him of that statement, he said,
Did I say that? I've just been driving a cab for the last six months. But it finally really did happen. The sold-out American premiere of the truly mind-bending five-hour opera
Einstein on the Beach at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1976 made Philip famous. It was not a Met production, by the way. The Met simply presented it for two nights after it had been touring in Europe.
Since it was obvious that his audience was not the standard classical music audience, Philip worked hard at getting his albums out of the classical bins at record stores and into the rock department.
When my wife and I used to visit our daughter at Oberlin in the late 1980s, you'd walk down the hall and hear Philip Glass emanating from many of the rooms. In fact, way back when she was 11 or 12,
our daughter used to sleep right next door to the living room in our place in Woodstock. And when she went to bed, she would sometimes ask us to put on Sinister Minister, which was her name for Philip's album North Star.
Phil also turned out to have a terrific feel for writing film music. A good gut instinct for what kind of music will complement images, say, of Monument Valley in Arizona.
Music by Philip Glass from the movie Koyaanisqatsi. But, of course, along with fame, not to say notoriety, came digs.
The repetitiousness of his music made Philip a prime target for parody. Someone wrote a one-act play called Philip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread,
which, of course, consists of the endless repetition of a very few phrases. It's very funny. I wish I could remember the playwright's name.
There was an essay on Phil as a cabbie, driving around the same block 20 times. There was, knock, knock, who's there? Philip Glass. Knock, knock, who's there? Philip Glass. Knock, knock, who's there? Philip Glass.
And, uh, oh yeah, this is the beginning of Beethoven's Waldstein Sonata.
Okay, now, here's Philip Glass again. This is Waldstein Sonata.
Well, you get the idea. And, of course, I couldn't resist either. One thing that doesn't always come out in Phil's interviews is that he's got a great sense of humor.
I guess it must have been around 1988. I called him up, and I got his lady love, and she said he was out in San Francisco, but she'd be speaking to him the following evening, and she'd have him call me.
And I said, well, tell him that at the annual PDQ Bach concerts at Carnegie Hall this December, I'll be featuring a new discovery called Einstein on the Fritz,
and I would love it if you two could come. So the next evening, the phone rings, and I pick it up, and it's Philip saying, Et tu, Brute?
It just happens that he and I were using the same copyist in those days. And when she showed him a woodwind part for the PDQ Bach piece, measure after measure of arpeggios, he said, looks right.
And, of course, he was there for the premiere of PDQ Bach's Prelude to Einstein on the Fritz, Schickele number E equals mt squared.
The Prelude to Einstein on the Fritz by PDQ Bach with Walter Bruno conducting the Greater Hoople Area Off-Season Philharmonic.
Now, before we get out of here, I just want to do one little thing. Remember that part of Philip's technique that I called Dewey's? Dewey, ooey, ooey, ooey, ooey. Like this, for instance.
Remember how I said that when Philip came back from Paris,
his music bore no resemblance to his old works? And yet, speaking of Dewey's, here's a bit of that early music.
What goes around, comes around. And, our time is up, our time is up, our time is up, our time is up, our time is, our time is, our time is, our time is, our time is, our time is up, up, up, our time is up, up, up, our time is,
somebody stop me before I slay myself with my wit. Let's go out with that lovely closing from Philip Glass's album, Glassworks.
And that's Schickele Mix for this week.
Our program is made possible with funds provided by this radio station and its members. Not only that, our program is distributed by PRI, Public Radio International.
We'll tell you in a moment how you can get an official playlist of all the music on today's program with album numbers and everything. Just refer to the program number. This is program number 166.
And this is Peter Schickele saying goodbye and reminding you that it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that certain je ne sais quoi. You're looking good.
If you'd like a copy of that playlist I mentioned, send a stamped self-addressed envelope to Schickele Mix. That's S-C-H-I-C-K-E-L-E, Schickele Mix.
Care of Public Radio International, 100 North 6th Street, Suite 900A, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55403.
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Good evening.
You're listening to Jazz After Dark on KRVS, 88.7 FM, Lafayette, Lake Charles. Member supported public radio for Acadiana.
I'm Mark Bacon, and this evening, a full evening of Ellingtonia. This coming Friday, we'll be back with a new episode of Jazz After Dark. Today, April 29th, marks the 106th anniversary of the birth
of this most prolific and lyrical of all jazz composers. In fact, if there was a Mount Rushmore of jazz artists, I think that Duke would have to be certainly one of them,
along with Louis Armstrong, and there the arguments begin about who the other two will be, and I'll avoid that.
But this evening, we're going to begin with Duke Ellington and his Washingtonians from 1927. And move through the decades with the music of Duke Ellington.