In 1969, Philip Glass was performing the European premiere of a daring new piece, Two Pages, when he realized that someone from the audience had joined him at the keys and was banging away beside him, in an obvious parody of the American composer’s ultra-repetitive music. Glass, who had toughened his knuckles as a boy in Baltimore, socked the interloper in the jaw—in some accounts of the oft-told story, he kept time with the other hand—and resumed playing. It wasn’t the last time an irate audience member would try to throw a wrench in Glass’ precision-tooled musical machinery. He’s had enough eggs lobbed at him to develop opinions on which projectile is worse—raw or hard-boiled.
But what a difference half a century makes. Once an enfant terrible of contemporary music, Glass, now 87, is among the most celebrated of the avant-garde’s elder statesmen, and age has clearly put him in a reflective mood. Following a spate of 75th-birthday events in 2012, he released a titanic retrospective box set in 2016 and published a smart, revealing memoir, looking back on a most unusual life in the arts: studying with the fêted French pianist Nadia Boulanger; trekking to Tibet in search of Buddhist gurus; pouring lead with sculptor Richard Serra; driving a cab until he finally made it as a composer, age 41.
Glass’ new album Philip Glass Solo is similarly contemplative. It revisits some of his most famous works for keyboard, which he recorded at home—on the same piano on which he wrote many of the pieces—in 2021, while concerts were still on hold, as part of his daily practice. (Even Philip Glass apparently finds it hard to resist the seductive pull of the quarantine album.) Dozens, perhaps scores, of pianists and organists have tackled this repertoire in the studio; Glass himself has recorded all these pieces before. What stands out here is the clear impression of a master craftsman looking back on his life’s work.
The album begins with “Opening,” the introduction to Glass’ 1982 album Glassworks. His debut full-length for CBS attempted to reach audiences beyond the art-world demimonde that had been coming to see his ensemble perform in downtown loft spaces; there was even a specially mixed cassette edition designed to sound better on the Sony Walkman, which had been introduced just three years before. “Opening” is not nearly as reduced or piston-like as earlier works like Two Pages or Music in Twelve Parts. To contemporary ears, its wistful modulations may sound more sentimental than minimalist. Where Glass once wrote with motorik intensity, his treatment of the polyrhythms—eighth notes in the left hand, triplets in right—ebbs and flows here, moving more fluidly than on the Glassworks recording.
“Mad Rush” is structurally similar to “Opening.” A lifelong student of Tibetan Buddhism, Glass wrote the extended piece to commemorate the Dalai Lama’s 1979 visit to New York City, performing it on the organ at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. He later recorded it for 1989’s Glass: Solo Piano, and returned to the cathedral’s organ for the soundtrack to the 2016 film The Last Dalai Lama? You wouldn’t necessarily guess the piece’s backstory from listening; both the music and the title evoke the kineticism of New York City, long one of Glass’ primary influences. But rather than urban chaos, the composition’s elegant clockworks speak to the importance of balance; perhaps that’s what Glass had in mind when writing music for His Holiness. “The principal thing that I’ve found [about studying Tibetan Buddhism] is that the training is extremely valuable and useful in living in a world of stress, full of negativity, what we would call evil,” Glass once said. “Bad things happen. When you live in a world that’s complicated, the training that comes with that tradition is very helpful.”
Comparing Philip Glass Solo to the composer’s previous treatments of the same pieces—particularly the four movements of 1988’s Metamorphosis, which first appeared on Glass: Solo Piano—a curious contradiction reveals itself. On the one hand, the new versions are imbued with a more measured, rubato sensibility—the kind of pensive air you might expect from a late-in-life recital. At the same time, there’s nothing mawkish or maudlin or even particularly nostalgic about them, despite the project’s ruminative context, or the pandemic that was raging outside. That’s even true of “Truman Sleeps,” from The Truman Show, one of the most poignant pieces in the composer’s catalog. (In what might be the apex of his pop-culture crossover, Glass performs it in a brief on-screen cameo in the film.) Where other pianists play up its melancholy, Glass here gives it a stately reading that benefits from the subtlest shifts in tempo and intensity; he also lays into the sustain pedal, suggestively muddying the waters and keeping its graceful changes from sounding too pretty.
What becomes clear is that not only are these performances less airily atmospheric than earlier versions, despite their more considered rubato; they are more determined, more confident, more knowing. Perhaps that’s natural; Glass wrote these pieces, after all, and here a life spent living with his creations makes its way to the tape. There’s a fascinating passage in Glass’ memoir where he describes the division between theory and practice that he encountered as a student at Juilliard. Budding composers were not expected to play their own pieces; indeed, no one assumed they might want to. “Making the practice of music and the writing of music separate activities was poor advice,” he writes. “Music is, above all, something we play, it’s not something that’s meant for study only. For me, performing music is an essential part of the experience of composing.” Philip Glass Solo offers a moving testament to the unity of the two sides of his practice. Treated to his thoughtful interpretations of his own work, recorded in the intimacy of his own home, you feel lucky to have the chance to sit with him.
