by Alvin Lucier
In music theaters these days, the director often assumes a kind of authorship role where he or she puts together all the components. Peter Sellars, JoAnne Akalaitis, Peter Brook, and Bob Wilson do that. Meredith Monk of course does everything; writes, dances, choreographs, and composes the music. Most people are good at just one thing; then they organize everything around them. But as a composer—I’m talking to the composers here—the more you know about the mechanics of theater, the more flexibility you’ll have in what you can do. You’ll work more. My old pieces are still being done as I’m working on new ones. The question is, who can I get to build this piece? I spend a fair amount of time talking people into doing productions. It’s not that easy; everything costs money. People are interested, but actually getting them to make a budget is a problem. Budgets can go from $100,000 to $100,000,000. Sometime you may get away [with] as little as $40,000 or $50,000. But then you’re really getting down to really small budgets. Once you start paying people, money will disappear very quickly.
Another way to do it is what I did with the theater company that I started with, Mabou Mines. I was the composer, and there were two directors and three actors. Basically we built everything ourselves. We did that for years until we got other people to start building.
Well, I think that you can always do a piece. I think that everything’s expensive and no one wants to do it, but you can still do it. Things aren’t very different now than they were thirty years ago. In fact, they’re somewhat worse. We’re at a time now where the theater, opera, and film world has become oriented toward the idea of entertainment. Even opera companies want to do works that are entertainment pieces. Now, of course, opera is a place where entertainment and art always came together; that was the great power of the medium. You had something like Rigoletto, which was fun to watch. It was a fabulous piece of music. The Magic Flute was hugely popular.
There’s been a big shift more toward entertainment and head counting. In a way, it was easier when we had little places like La MaMa on East 4th Street in New York City. Ellen Stewart didn’t care if anybody came. Now almost no one has that attitude. Everyone wants to know how many people are coming. Theater companies have boards of directors who want to know … it’s a nightmare.
However, you can still do it! There’s still always some jackass that will let you into his place and let you do a piece. You can always find someplace to do your work. In some ways it’s more difficult, in some ways it’s easier. When I did Einstein on the Beach, I didn’t know anyone writing an opera but myself, and now I don’t know anyone who isn’t writing an opera. Alvin, are you writing an opera?
ALVIN LUCIER
What?
PHILIP GLASS
Yes, are you writing an opera?
ALVIN LUCIER
I’m not writing an opera.
PHILIP GLASS
He’s the only one!
ALVIN LUCIER
But if you gave me a good idea …
PHILIP GLASS
But he would! We’ve got about fifteen minutes, let’s do a few questions. I think I covered, quickly and roughly, how I’m working.
QUESTION
I had a question dealing with situations where, having to intertwine several disciplines, you seem to be talking about it in terms of different trajectories that come together, and you come to some kind of functional understanding. Then you go off, you continue on your way, maybe you meet up with someone for a second time. I know that you have collaborated with Richard Serra, and, in addition to the people you mentioned, the question would be, have you ever found working with these people—their work and their conceptual status—so powerful that it’s affected your work in a way that was not ephemeral?
PHILIP GLASS
There are two answers for that. You get together in the first year. In the second year, you go off and do your own work; in the third year, you put it back together. That’s roughly the way it works.
There is a moment when the composer sits down and writes the music. There’s a moment when the designer is alone. I try to make everyone do their work first, so I have all the texts and designs. Theater people have that kind of flexibility. I was working with Doris Lessing on an opera recently, and when I was setting the libretto to music, I called her every day to talk about changes in the texts that had to be made for reasons of singing. That went on for months. She was in London and I was in Nova Scotia, but we were in touch all the time.
When we were doing Orphée we had to create an underworld and the ordinary world at the same time, and the director had to see how that was going to work. We couldn’t even start conceptualizing or building anything until we had solved problems of that kind. We worked separately but were never out of touch. No one goes to Mars and the other to the moon, and then they get together. You can’t really work like that.
Working with other people has completely changed what I’ve done. It’s happened most in collaborations with musicians more than with sculptors or painters. The times I’ve worked with other musicians have been very striking. For example, I remember working with Foday Suso, a griot (storyteller) from the Gambia. We were composing music to go with Les Paravents (The Screens) by Genet. I knew Foday and his music, but I had no idea how we were going to work together. The first day, the director, JoAnne Akalaitis, she said, “We’re going to start with the first thing, and I’m going to need music here.” I knew right away that, working with Foday, I wouldn’t really be writing music. He would play his music, and I would play along with him, and we would arrive at something through playing together. We could notate it later.
Foday said that he would have to tune his instrument, a seventeen-stringed harp-like kora. He played a note—it was kind of like a D. Then he played the next note up the scale, and I asked him what he called that note. He said simply that that was the next note. Then he played another note. I asked him what he called that one. He replied that it was simply the note after that. It suddenly occurred to me that he didn’t have names for the notes. It was almost as if the ground disappeared beneath my feet.
As a young musician, I remember my very first flute lesson. I was maybe seven or eight years old. My teacher handed me the flute and showed me how to hold it. Then he showed me a note on the page. It was a B-natural. He told me to blow. Then he put it all together: the instrument, the note, the name of the note, the way it looked on the page, and the sound. That was my first lesson. And all my lessons were like that. So, for me, notes always had names. Suddenly I was in a world where they didn’t. I almost fainted. I was so shocked I didn’t know how to proceed.
The same thing—not so catastrophic—happened with Ravi Shankar, when I worked with him years before that. We were doing a piece together, and I was trying to notate something he was playing. We were doing this clapping thing. You’ve probably all done some of that, working with Indian rhythm, tala, and learning to do it by speaking it, but not writing it. And I wasn’t getting what he was saying, so he said, “Here Phil, hold the pencil—you’ll think better.” He was right! As I held the pencil, I could figure out what he was saying!
In situations with composers like that, I’ve been completely thrown into areas that changed the way I thought about music. I know that there’s a well-developed world music program here. I got involved with world music in the 1960s in India and Africa. I never had formal training; I simply worked with musicians.
I remember working with Ravi Shankar in 1965. Some other musicians there were playing some music, and I was trying to write it down. Alla Rakha kept saying that it was not right. I was still using bar lines. I had no idea how the music worked. But a couple hours later, I simply erased all the bar lines, and within two or three hours, I was notating their music in a way that the accents were in the right places. That was the day that Ravi threw me into the deep end of the pool. I swam to the top! It was a profoundly traumatic experience.
QUESTION
I’m interested to know how actors and singers fit into these co
llaborations, or do they?
PHILIP GLASS
I have the most contact with singers. When possible, I’ll write for a singer I know, although I’m not always able to do that. Sometimes I will audition singers, so even if I don’t know them personally, I’ve at least heard them.
I was already forty before I began learning how to write for the voice. I would ask each singer how her vocal part worked. Very quickly, singers will tell you things such as where the break in their voice is, that they can go up here but have to go down there. So by the mid-80s, I was writing very well for the voice. Several singers told me to look at Handel, how he moves the voice through the low, middle, and the high parts of their ranges. A singer can sing Handel for a long time and never get tired.
I began holding auditions, sometimes fifty-five singers in one afternoon. I would ask the singers [to sing] certain pieces of Handel’s or mine. Very rarely would I let them sing Verdi, whose vocal parts are often in the top of their range and accompanied by a large orchestra. If a singer has a big operatic voice, it’s not going to help me very much if I’m going to be in a little concert hall with four musicians. I often think of the voice in terms of where the singer is going to be singing.
It is not the same with actors. There’s usually a song in a Shakespeare play. And for sure, the director will ask one of the actresses to sing. And for sure, they can’t. The last time I did a Shakespeare play, I asked the director to let me audition the actors before she decided who’s going to sing the song. Then I could tell her who could and who couldn’t sing. I told her which ones could sing. And she picked one of the ones who couldn’t sing. I asked her why, after we had gone through all that, did she pick that particular actress. She won’t be able to sing what I write. She said that I may not have noticed, but the actress she chose only had one leg. She wanted to work with someone who had a prosthetic leg. She had to walk in a certain way, and the director wanted to make that part of the piece.
In the opera house it’s not quite like that. Recently I wrote a piece for Herb Perry, a bass baritone. We needed a cover for him, so we asked his identical twin brother, Eugene, also a baritone. However, the best notes for Eugene were a whole step higher than for Herb. I ended up having to transpose five of the scenes for Eugene. So when he sang, five of the scenes were in a different key. I hope the librarian gets it right when they put out the music.
QUESTION
Could you talk a little bit about the piece that you did at the ABT [American Ballet Theatre]?
PHILIP GLASS
What was the piece?
QUESTION
I don’t remember what it was called.
PHILIP GLASS
Well, what I can tell you is that sometimes people will choose five or six of my pieces and make a ballet out of them. That happens a lot. Often I don’t have very much to do with it. The best situation is when a choreographer and I collaborate on a piece. That has happened quite a few times, particularly with Lucinda Childs, Twyla Tharp, and Jerry Robbins. Strange things can still happen because the worlds of dance and music are so different. I remember going out on tour once with a dance company. I took class with them for the whole tour because I wanted to know what it was like for the body to move in that way. The dancers laughed at me, but they were happy to have me there. I took class every afternoon. I couldn’t do the combinations. I fell down a couple of times, but I wanted to be involved in the dance in some way, and this was one way of doing it. It was a lot of fun to work with dancers, but also frustrating at times because we look at the work in very different ways.
One little story: I was making a piece with Twyla Tharp. When I sent her the tape, she said that the piece was completely different. I listened to the tape, and it sounded the same to me. I asked her to tell me what was different. She said that it was twice as long between the first and second movement. She meant the space in between the two movements. It wasn’t hard to make the spaces identical. I had no idea that she was listening to the silences, and I was listening to the music. She was dancing through the silences. Well, anyway …
ALVIN LUCIER
Thank you very much, Phil.
About the Editor
ALVIN LUCIER is an American composer of experimental music and sound installations. He is the author of Music 109: Notes on Experimental Music and coauthor, with Douglas Simon, of Chambers. Lucier was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music and received an honorary Doctorate of Arts from the University of Plymouth, England. He taught at Brandeis University and Wesleyan University, and retired from the latter in 2011.
About the Composers
MARYANNE AMACHER was born on February 25, 1939, in Kane, Pennsylvania. She studied with the composer George Rochberg at the University of Pennsylvania, and later privately with the German avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. Amacher was known for large-scale, site-specific sound installations that explore the propagation of sound in architectural spaces. Her work often focused on psychoacoustic phenomena in which sound is generated from within the ear. Amacher collaborated extensively with John Cage and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. In 1998 she received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award as well as the Prix Ars Electronica Award in the “digital arts” category. In the last decade of her life, Maryanne Amacher taught electronic music at Bard College. She died on October 22, 2009, in Rhinebeck, New York.
ROBERT ASHLEY was born on March 28, 1930, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He was educated at the University of Michigan and the Manhattan School of Music, following which he returned to the study of psychoacoustics and speech patterns at the University of Michigan Speech Research Laboratory. He rose to prominence in the 1960s as a founder and organizer of the ONCE Group and was a member of the Sonic Arts Union, a collective of experimental composers that included David Behrman, Gordon Mumma, and Alvin Lucier. Throughout his life Ashley was fascinated by the musical nature of speech. Perfect Lives, the first of over thirty operas for television, was premiered on British television in 1984 and has since been broadcast throughout the world. His final opera, Crash, premiered after his death at the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Ashley died in New York that same year.
PHILIP GLASS was born on January 31, 1937, in Baltimore, Maryland. He studied at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, the University of Chicago, and the Julliard School before moving to Paris to study with the legendary pedagogue Nadia Boulanger. There he met Ravi Shankar, from whom he developed an interest in Indian classical music. Much of his music, particularly the early works, is characterized by his use of the incessant repetition of rhythmic and melodic patterns creating mesmerizing and trancelike compositions. In 1968, he founded the Philip Glass Ensemble, a group with which he continues to perform. His opera Einstein on the Beach, on which he collaborated with Robert Wilson, earned him international acclaim in 1976 and continues to be performed today at venues around the world. Philip Glass is one of the most prolific composers in the world today, having produced eleven symphonies, eighteen operas, thirty-eight film scores, and seven string quartets, as well as numerous solo pieces and works for theater and dance. Philip Glass has collaborated with a wide range of artists, including Alan Ginsburg, Jerome Robbins, Twyla Tharp, David Bowie, and Martin Scorsese, and has been awarded three Academy Award Nominations.
MEREDITH MONK, born November 20, 1942, is a composer, theater director, vocalist, filmmaker, choreographer, and early pioneer of performance art. Her vocalizations are legendary, incorporating a wide variety of extended techniques that reach beyond language. After graduating from Sarah Lawrence in 1964, Monk went on to win many awards, including a MacArthur “Genius” Grant and two Guggenheim fellowships. In 1968, Monk founded the House, a company dedicated to exploring concepts of interdisciplinary performance. In 1978 she formed the Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble and recorded several highly successful albums, including her first widely celebrated Songs from the Hill/Tablet in 1979. Atlas, an Opera in Three Parts, was premiered by the
Houston Grand Opera in February 1991. Meredith Monk continues to compose numerous works for orchestra, chamber ensembles, and solo instruments, with commissions from Carnegie Hall, Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony, the Kronos Quartet, and the Los Angeles Master Chorale, among others.
STEVE REICH was born on October 3, 1936, in New York City. He graduated with honors in philosophy from Cornell in 1957. For the next two years he studied composition with Hal Overton, and from 1958 to 1961, he studied with William Bergsma and Vincent Persichetti at the Julliard School of Music. He received an MA in music from Mills College in 1963, where he studied with Luciano Berio and Darius Milhaud. Reich’s discovery and use of phasing and other innovative techniques has helped him earn a place as one of the greatest living composers. He has had a significant impact on contemporary music, influencing artists from Brian Eno to Radiohead. He was awarded the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in Music for his composition Double Sextet. The same year he received multiple Grammy awards for his Music for 18 Musicians and Different Trains. Steve Reich was awarded the Gold Medal in Music by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has received honorary doctorates from the Royal College of Music in London, the Juilliard School, the Liszt Academy in Budapest, and the New England Conservatory of Music.
JAMES TENNEY was born on August 10, 1934, in Silver City, New Mexico. He was a highly regarded pianist, composer, and music theorist. A pioneer in computer music as well as an important character in the Fluxus artist movement, Tenney is known for his conceptually driven and computer-aided compositions. He studied composition under many influential composers, including Edgard Varèse and John Cage. He was the co-founder and conductor of the Tone Roads Chamber Ensemble and has performed alongside Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and John Cage. He taught at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, the California Institute for the Arts, the University of California, and York University. James Tenney died on August 24, 2006, in Valencia, California.
