I never was a captive of other people's ideas about me.
Whatever they thought, it didn't matter to me.
I did what I wanted to, and I didn't care.
I've been like that all my life
and it's saved me a lot of trouble.
Even when it came to writing music,
I didn't care what people thought.
You know. There's a lot of music in the world.
You don't have to listen to mine.
There's Mozart, there's the Beatles.
Listen to something else.
You don't have to listen to this.
You have my blessings.
Go out and listen to something else, I don't care.
There are some days you can't open the door.
Philip hates to throw things out
and especially things that are given to him.
People give him pictures and books,
paraphernalia awful stuff sometimes.
Sometimes it's very sweet,
but we're not allowed to throw it out.
So, when he's out of town,
sometimes I sneak in here and I get rid of stuff.
But, I don't have to do that today.
This is very typical top of the piano.
He keeps a cloth on it,
which is very nice for this poor Baldwin.
When he's done with an opera or
a symphony he will come and clear everything off.
And it lasts for about three days.
He's working on a symphony right now and every once in a while
he'll come in here like a madman and say,
"l can't find a page."
And, I think, well of course you can't find a page!.
It's amazing you find anything in here!.
Oh, this is typical Philip decoration.
This is an Allen Ginsberg quote,
and he and Allen were very, very close friends.
These are just personal photographs.
This is Gelek Rimpoche,
one of Philip's teachers a beautiful man.
I hope you'll meet him. I'm sure you will.
A very nice guy.
The Dalai Lama, of course.
Here's Philip with the Dalai Lama.
Frogs we got in Mexico.
He collects little bands.
If you look around the house in the bathrooms
and things you'll find little bug bands and frog bands.
He hates overhead lighting, which is kind of embarrassing
because we have live wires sticking out of our ceilings everywhere.
He won't let me throw lamps out either.
The more the merrier.
These are all scores, but not originals.
The originals are kept in an archive space,
but these are the first copy after
the original scores of everything.
I believe his entire library should be represented in here.
I hope we never have a fire in this house.
There you have it!
You're getting a very quiet morning.
I'm very impressed!
It's not typical.
What time are you starting work today?
Around Eight, in ten minutes.
Somebody loves your pancakes over here.
OK boys, I'm going to work now.
For me, whenever I write,
whether it's now or 30 years ago,
there's always a feeling that I have no idea what to do.
That was true when I began and it's true now.
I'm writing "Symphony No. 8"
and I've no idea where it's going.
I'm much more spontaneous and intuitive
about writing now than I used to be.
I learned a lot of that from Allen Ginsberg.
He always used to say:. "First thought, best thought."
Here we go.
We play a game called
"Here he comes and there he goes".
I'm going over the beginning of this piece
and I'm just working on some of the orchestrations.
I finished the first movement of "Symphony No. 8"
so, now I'll have to go back and look at the beginning again,
and so I'm just considering
some orchestration ideas to go with it.
Shall I talk you through it a little bit?
These are strings.
These are all the strings.
And that one there.
And this would be the trumpets and the winds.
And maybe the xylophones.
So, you'll hear.
First violins, second violins, violas, cellos
and the double bases are down there.
You get the idea?
Yes!
I don't know if you can possibly get the idea!
I barely get the idea myself, but I try to!
Hi Chuck.
When we were coming up in the '60s, I think, we were hell bent to not have
Anything to do with anything.
-With anything... -That's right.
No one should listen to your music
and think of another composer.
And no one should look at my paintings
and think of another artist.
We, sort of, all climbed out of the primordial ooze together.
At the same time and, sort of, lumbered on shore.
Changing from amphibians...
But so much was in that ooze.
The New York art world had been around the Village,
but that property already belonged to other people.
So. we started colonizing what was to become SoHo.
SoHo wasn't named SoHo until well into the '70s.
No one was expected to live there.
In fact, before it was SoHo,
the fire department called it "Hells Hundred Acres"
because it was nothing but rags and rats and rats and rags.
When Philip and I came back from Paris,
we rented a seedy rooming house on
Ninth Avenue and twenty-third.
It was two floors for seventy-five dollars.
It was a lot of fun.
It was also hard because we were very poor.
Very!. Very poor.
But unbelievable!.
It was an unbelievable art scene.
I don't know if there's ever going to be a period like that.
You could do anything.
One could do anything.
I'm going to do a piece called
"1 +1 ", which I've never done before,
though I made the piece about four or five years ago.
I thought this was a good chance to do it.
The things I was thinking
about had nothing to do with minimalism.
It had to do with structure and content.
The people who were involved
with this new language would
never have called it that.
It was a journalistic shorthand for a movement.
Chuck was beginning a series of portraits.
And the idea, if I remember -tell me if I'm wrong about this
-instead of doing portraits of famous people,
Iike Rembrandt did,
he was doing portraits of anonymous people.
People that no one knew.
The day and night,so...
He rounded up all these people to come
and take their pictures.
And it was like getting a passport photo.
It was very quick.
And everybody who was photographed that
afternoon became a famous artist.
And we were supposed to be anonymous!
Phil's hair was one of the reasons why I think
I've recycled his image so much.
Because those dendritic, Medusa-like curls were great...
... to translate into little dots or diagonal lines or
fingerprints or wads of pulp paper pulp.
Every time I pumped his image through a new medium,
it was interesting to see what would happen...
...with different kinds of marks.
Certainly people looked at my...
... early dot pieces, where the same stupid dot
was sprayed over and over and over.
There were no dots that
were fancier dots than any other dots.
There were no dots with flourish.
They were the same stupid, inarticulate,
non-expressive, non-symbolic mark.
But clusters of those marks would build an image.
And the same thing was happening
in Phil's music where...
... What started out
as a very minimal activity ended up
making this very rich and textured and complex sound.
We had emerged from a very overly ideo-logic movement,
in which music theories were dictating the procedures
that composers were following.
By the time my generation came along,
it seemed to us that these ideas were exhausted.
So, that the idea was to start music in a different place.
That meant abandoning a whole array of
procedures and techniques,
and trying to invent something new.
What's interesting is that a new language
requires a new technique.
It's such an obvious thing in a way.
If you don't need a new technique than
what you're saying probably isn't new.
One of the most interesting things
I did is I started an ensemble.
I called up some friends I'd gone to school with,
and I got them together,
and I put the music in front of them, and I said,
"Let's try this out."
It gave me a chance to hear the music I was writing,
but it also made me independent of all the other music organizations.
He's got his hippie headband on there.
I didn't have to ask anyone's permission.
Or approval.
I could just do what I wanted to do.
This was kind of the classic ensemble.
Dickie Landry;
Jon Gibson;
Richard Peck;
Iris Hiskey, the vocalist keyboard player;
Michael Riesman, of course, our music director;
myself; and Philip.
The ensemble was my mouthpiece, so-tospeak.
I didn't use the ensemble to support me.
I supported the ensemble.
Everybody was paid, and by the mid '70s
I was paying unemployment insurance,
and some years later was doing health insurance.
I made the job a good job.
Here's another early one.
At the same time,
I'd to get a day job to support the ensemble.
He plumbed a lot of places
and he plumbed our first loft.
He plumbed our second loft too, actually.
He is a much better musician than he was a plumber.
The plumbing always leaked.
The earliest times I heard your music,
they were never in performance spaces anyhow.
No.
They were in someone's loft...
-Or in an art museum. -ln a park.
... Or in a park.
... Or in a park or an art gallery,
but not in a place where acoustics would figure...
Well, we weren't even allowed in those places.
Of course not!
I was living down close to SoHo on the
corner of Bleecker and Elizabeth.
I did concerts in lofts and galleries.
There would be sixty, eighty,
a hundred people there every Sunday.
Usually the audience was sitting on the floor,
Iying on the floor, kind of meditating.
We would sit in a circle in the center of the art gallery,
and then the audience would be around us,
and out in the periphery of the room
in the four corners would be the PA speakers.
So, we performed in this kind of
huge sound field that enveloped both us,
and the audience.
Everybody was part of the same sonic experience.
That's why, I think, the experience was so intense.
Of course everybody was high.
The audience was high. The musicians were high.
Everybody was high.
Philip didn't do drugs, but everybody else did.
The audience could walk in and out.
And in the early days, we would usually lose
probably twenty-five percent of the audience,
or a third of the audience, would have left.
They couldn't stand it.
They hated it.
You have to remember, his music was very loud
and very repetitive and really intense.
Knock, knock who's there?
Knock, knock... Phil Glass!.
What would happen is it ended suddenly.
It would just like -it would end.
The audience would just sit there for
a minute or two and then would just applaud.
It's like they had a revelation.
Oh, this one I'll never forget.
Some people had a visceral reaction to it
where they completely hated it.
This was an incredible concert.
We're playing outside in the park and in the middle of the concert
this guy comes up
and starts pounding on the keyboard yelling at the top of his voice.
"This is not music!. You can't do this!
This is an insult!"
"I'm a music teacher!."
and he was talking to the audience saying,
"These people can't play! They can't even play scales!"
At which point, Richard Peck began to play all the scales.
And finally a cop had to come over
and ask us if we wanted to take the guy away.
It was hilariously funny.
My favorite reviews were all the negative ones,
which you wear as a badge of honor I think
because if the work is rigorous enough and difficult enough
and severe enough and tough enough
nobody's going to like this stuff.
So, then you get the bad reviews, you think, well,
I must be on the right track because...
You see!. They don't understand it
and they don't like it.
We used to rent Frank Zappa's old tour bus
when we went on tour sometimes.
And we used to have great fun on the tour bus
reading the reviews out loud from the night before.
"lncessantly repetitive and gradually
additive mosaics of sound that are either
hypnotic or boring depending on one's reaction to the music."
"The effect is rather like trying to rub your stomach
and pat your head at the same time
and the results are just about as rewarding."
"His operas to date, stand to music as the sentence,
'See spot run,' stands to literature."
I still have a very strong, solid hate faction
Good.
I find that reassuring.
Absolutely.
Some of the older composers and the critics
vilified us to such a degree that we became famous!
It was a great help.
It propelled us right into the center of the music world.
Good to see you.
Let's see if there're any brain waves...
He's thinking.
That hollow sound you hear.
Thanks again Chuck. I'll see you later.
I don't know if Philip told you this,
but he inherited one-twentieth of a parking lot
with his cousin Normie, the dentist,
in downtown Baltimore.
So, he had a little bit of money.
And he said he wanted to find a place to Write music.
So, we drove through mainland
Nova Scotia, and then ended up in Cape Breton lsland
where the car broke down.
Right here.
And we liked it a lot there.
It was really amazing.
So, Phil bought a place.
This is our house, and this is our beach.
Pretty great, don't you think! Fantastic.
I've been here thirty-six years.
I came up in '69.
I had some other kids and I wanted to get out of the city.
I wanted them to have a place outside of New York.
"Phil-ville." That's what his friends call it.
"Phil-ville."
There's "The Big House." It's always been
called "The Big House," overlooking the cliff.
And that's where people gather.
Daddy!
Where did you get that?
I got it from Rudi!
That's a great truck!
Philip's got like eleven cabins, and our friends come and stay there.
They stay in the cabins.
Then a little further down the road
is the farmhouse with a big wheat field in front of it
and a beautiful view of the ocean.
And then across the road up on a hill is a house
that Philip bought that originally was called "The Hermitage"
because people never saw Philip and he worked all day long
and they just called it "The Hermitage."
And then I came along.
It wasn't appropriate to call it The Hermitage anymore!
So, we call it Philip and Holly's House.
Can Marlowe have a ride Cameron?
No!.
You're actually going to document this whole thing?
All your secrets.
I have so few secrets.
Actually, I have one secret.
It's a very easy secret:
you get up early in the morning and you work all day.
That's the only secret.
Is there another one?
I've never been filmed before making pizza.
I'm getting nervous.
What if it doesn't work?
We'll go out and buy some.
Think of it as a new work.
You must have the same thing sometimes.
I have one sitting on my piano right now.
How is the symphony coming along?
How's it coming along? Well, I don't know.
I don't even know what movement I'm working on.
I think, I'm working on movement one,
but it occurred to me that I maybe had it backwards.
Maybe it's the middle movement and not the first movement.
I don't know.
But it's a very hard piece to count.
How do you mean?
The rhythms are very tricky.
How's that for careful measurement!
One would imagine you'd begin at the beginning.
One would know, shouldn't one!
And usually I do. I mean, mainly I do know.
But this symphony is puzzling to me.
Most symphonies I just start at the beginning and write to the end.
And this one, it's a little different.
I'm not quite sure why.
It seems like there're various currents of thinking
in the stuff I've done that seem to be appearing
in this piece in an unexpected way.
And so, I don't really know.
It's puzzling, I mean, I don't actually know sometimes
where we're going with it.
Do you like big chunky pieces of garlic?
The kind that kind of explode in your mouth!
That's what you're getting.
Usually, it occurs to me, what happens at a certain point
in the piece is you actually know what the piece is about.
And that can happen very close to the end.
Doesn't that happen with a film?
Oh yeah.
It can happen very close to the end, "Oh..."
and you'll come to that place and say, "Oh..."
That's what it is!
"That's what it is!"
And hopefully it happens before the piece is over!
It almost always does.
If you've done it for years and years
you become confident of it.
But if you're younger you may not be confident of it,
and it can be very scary.
But at the point that I am at, it comes.
It's kind of like you're waiting
with a fishing rod in the water.
You're waiting for the bite.
It will come.
There! Oh! There it is!
But the thing is, is that it doesn't come if
you're not there waiting for it.
You've got to do the work, or it doesn't come.
Do you find ideas turning over in your head the whole time?
Or are you very specific about when you sit down for work,
and that's the work time?
I think of the processes a slightly different way,
and I think, that you'll understand this as soon as I say it.
I think of it as one of those rivers that's
running underground and you don't know where it is.
But, you know that it's running.
That's exactly the feeling.
I say, "l know!. There's a river under the ground!"
And you don't know exactly where it is,
but you do know it's there.
If you try to find it you might not.
So, it's like divining water?
Who the hell knows?
You don't wake up in the middle
of the night with a mad, jotting frenzy?
It's happened. I try to resist it.
I resent it actually.
I'd rather it came in the morning
when I'm ready to go to work.
But there have been times when I've said "OK!"
and I'll go downstairs and I'll write it down.
But I do it rarely.
Somebody is testing your pizza dough Daddy
to make sure that it is OK. Is it OK Marlowe?
-How is it? Is it good? -Yes?
Yes, Marlowe says your pizza dough is OK.
But sometimes, you don't know until the audience is in front of the piece.
-You need that point of view... -Phil?
Yes.
Cameron just broke a glass all over the steps
and all over the grass so no one can go barefoot anymore.
OK.
Oh my gosh!
That's the second glass these kids have broken!
They basically have nothing to do
with this house until dinnertime.
Just when you think you know what you're doing,
something happens and you don't know.
I'm going to put this right in the garbage.
Watch out.
I'm going to put this right in the trash.
"'Wow"' said Christopher. "l love play clay."
So, he got himself a piece of red play clay
and wapped it in his hands. Wap, wap, wap."
OK. So, then how are we going to do this?
We have four pizzas to make.
What should we do? Potatoes and onions?
That might be a good combination.
Oh good! This is almost done.
Who's tending the fire?
Before we were talking about how the last part of it is the audience.
This is it! Now the audience...
Is going to tell us if it's any good.
OK, Showtime Scott!
Showtime.
And a "baa" here and a "baa" there.
Everywhere a "baa baa"!
Old MacDonald had a farm "E-l-E-l-O."
This baby doll has Philip's curly hair.
But Cameron was exactly the kind of personality Philip was.
That was what Philip was like as a little boy.
You think Philip looks like Cameron?
I think so.
I don't know when that could be, before the war?
You know it was a very long time ago Scott,
I'm going to be seventy,
we're talking about the '40s!
Here is the best picture of the three of us.
That was Philip, and you can see how much he looks like his boy.
I was born in December,
Marty came in April and Philip was born in January.
So, it was very close dynamic.
He was a little 'udge, I must say.
My mother always said,
"l just got Sheppie and Philip, but I selected Marty."
She always said Marty was chosen.
We always knew he was adopted.
Here's Philip's father, my father,
in the marines during the war.
He had been in the marines,
that's the interesting thing about my father,
as an eighteen year old and after Pearl Harbor Day
he re-enlisted.
Much to my mother's shock.
Huh! My mother almost killed him.
This was his first store and this was on Howard Street.
Philip and Marty worked on Saturday in the the record store
so, they heard a lot of music.
And my father liked classical music
and he knew a lot about it.
They would always give dad free samples of
records that they were trying to promote, and whatever.
So, every evening we were constantly listening to classical music.
If you didn't sell some records you could return them.
But in order to return them, you had to break them.
So, Philip and I used to go down to the basement on Howard Street
and we'd dance on the records.
We would throw records.
We would dance on them.
We would jump on them.
He was just a very active, precocious, athletic boy.
This is mom holding court in the library.
She was a toughie.
He drove my mother -not my father
-he drove my mother mad because he was quite smart.
I don't know what Philip will tell you.
I mean I looked at it that
my mother was supportive of Philip.
I mean, she didn't know what was going on with him,
but she was supportive of him.
At his time, he was the youngest
ever student at The Peabody.
At the regular Conservatory.
Yeah, he was their youngest.
Not in the Preparatory.
There's an exercise that he did
practicing his composition skills.
See here is, he got a C-Minus on this one.
Somebody must have been grading it that
really didn't foresee his ultimate talent.
Maybe he's going to tell you that he always wanted to be a composer.
I don't know.
I'd be surprised though.
He probably knew something was there.
Shep and I took piano lessons
and I don't think Philip did.
I think, he really kind of
watched what we were doing and did it.
And then my father took piano lessons,
but his main problem was that his fingers
were so large that he had a problem hitting just one key.
Why didn't Philip take piano lessons?
You know what, I think, he took flute.
That's what I think too.
You're going to get pay dirt!
Here's Philip Glass, 1952 at camp.
It was Philip who discovered
The University of Chicago
and said that he wanted to go
when he was fifteen!
Philip bugged my mother so much,
and my father that they just said, "OK."
He could go.
It certainly wasn't my parents pushing this child prodigy.
Huh! Not at all!
God, I can't believe it!
They say the wrestling team,
but I kind of think it was the freshman wrestling team.
Don't you think? I don't know.
This is when they went up to Chicago.
That's '56, 1956. It's on the back.
Oh, it must have been when he graduated.
Yeah, this must be when he graduated The University of Chicago.
There it is.
Don't ask us where the Morris came from.
I don't have a clue.
They thought he was going to be
a doctor something like that.
Something sensible that they could understand.
He went to Chicago and graduated in three years
and came back to tell Ben and lda, our parents,
that he was going to go to Juilliard.
And I believe that they were in shock!
They were absolutely in shock.
And then he went up there and got himself in.
He's a very determined fellow.
And he also could manage people very well.
He managed my parents, for the most part,
to get what he wanted.
I don't mean it in a bad way -I mean he
brought my mother around.
Ah, The Juilliard commencement concert, 1962.
My mother and father would have preferred him to
be a professor of music at someplace,
but he didn't think it'd be performed.
He didn't want to do it that way.
He wanted to perform, and he put together his own little...
Those guys.
He wanted people to hear his music.
He isn't happy if you just have one performance and it's well reviewed.
That does not make Philip happy.
He wants it to be performed a lot, and have a lot of people see it.
Is that Philip?
I guess they think that's Philip.
God, The New York Times!
It was so vicious!
But Philip's always been very stoic, I would say.
He doesn't get as excited as me,
or whatever the wife of the moment was.
This picture, which I am sure you've seen others like it, is by Candy.
Philip always had this thing about his wives
had to be half his age plus seven, or something like that.
Marty knows.
You'll have to ask him. I forgot what it was.
Here's Candy.
I don't know what you're going to do about Philip's wives.
We've already decided we aren't going to tell you anything about them.
But that's Candy.
She was so smart, so nice, so beautiful.
She wore these big red glasses and she
had very white skin and a very full mouth.
She was very beautiful.
She was a quarter Chinese.
I mean everybody loved her.
The most difficult characters loved her.
Not that Bob Wilson is difficult because he's not
-he's a total sweetheart -but he adored Candy.
And Chuck adored Candy. And we adored her.
And the kids adored her - Juliet and Zack loved her.
This neighborhood back then was really bad.
And she was going out on the street and
collecting crack vials to do these art pieces.
She found these...
All crack vials she wanted were right in her neighborhood.
And she would put down,
"Fourth Street between Third/ Second/ Northside/ 12:15pm."
She liked things that were quirky and weird and strange.
She loved ephemera.
When you look at this piece of
The "Pot Crushed on Houston."
She would find things
that looked like garbage or trash or whatever
and then she would take them home
and put them in kind of an elegant setting
and make something beautiful out of them.
Candy was misdiagnosed.
She was getting very weak.
And...
I think, they told her to quit smoking and take vitamins.
Right. One day, she turned yellow!
She was admitted to the hospital.
And the doctor came in and said -
I remember this like it was yesterday
"Candy Jernigan you have liver cancer."
As Stokes said, it all happened so quickly.
Philip was so sad.
It was like he was standing in the middle of the room going,
"What happened? "
He was devastated. He lost a soul mate.
He was so sad.
I think, he still worked.
He worked. He...
I think, that's one way that he gets in touch
with what he's feeling is to keep working.
And he was sad for a lot of years.
I'm talking years.
Really until Holly.
Rebecca introduced Philip and myself.
She was a customer at a restaurant of mine.
Can I tell him the whole story?
Yes you may.
She asked me my name one night,
and it was very busy and loud and I said "Holly,"
and she heard "Colleen".
So, for a year, she and Philip would discuss
"Colleen" at this restaurant.
"Let's go see Colleen tonight."
I had no idea these discussions were taking place.
And my name was Holly!
Anyway, I was married at the time and unavailable.
And Philip was just melted into the woodwork.
He kind of had a crush on me,
but I was unavailable and he didn't make a...
Not a peep.
Not a peep!
And he was a vegetarian so, he would come in,
and he would look at me and he would say,
"What should I have for dinner tonight? "
And I'd say, "The vegetable torte."
And he'd say, "Thank you."
And then one day, he came in and he said,
"So, how's your husband??'
And I said, "He's gone, thanks for asking.
Got a truck and a dog and he's gone!"
And Philip - I didn't know at the time -
was kicking her under the table!
Black and blue.
"He's gone! The man is gone!"
So, anyway, the rest is history.
Rebecca called me a couple days later at the restaurant
and asked for my phone number.
And I said, "Does he know what he's getting into?
The footsteps are barely cold out the door.
I am not ready for this. "
And she said, "Holly, he's probably the
smartest man you'll ever meet.
I think, he knows what he is in for."
When we first met,
the age difference was a big problem for me
in accepting the idea of having a romantic relationship with him.
And my brother had just died.
And then Philip came into my life.
And I said to him...
Hopefully you'll just edit this right out...
I said, "Great.
Am I going to fall in love with you and you're just going to die on me!"
I mean I was so callous!
But I just didn't want any more loss.
And he had just lost his wife, Candy, at the age of thirty-nine.
And he said,
"ln my experience the older one doesn't always die first."
As I got to be with him more, he was so young at heart,
and that just slowly evaporated this age difference.
He also was incredibly romantic and fun and funny
-all this stuff that I had been missing from my life.
I think, I benefited from our age difference
in a huge way, for years.
Once I was in Los Angeles
and I was talking to a group of film composers and they said,
"What's the difference between writing an opera and writing a film??'
And I thought about it for a few minutes and said, "Not much."
Really and truly.
When you work in films you can complain about producers
and studios and directors
and when you work in an opera you have nobody to complain to!
That's the big difference.
I began working in the theater
and I learned about the image and music.
I learned how to make that work.
I began doing it when I was twenty.
So, I've been doing it close to fifty years.
This is this lMAX movie about Mars.
And I'm just starting one of the cues now.
It's an art but it's a real craft too.
You might almost say it's a science.
That psychological distance between the image and the music.
It's both subjective and precise.
Basically, the process is that Philip hands in a piece of music,
and then I'll play it in as best I can.
At the end of that, you have this "demo"
of piece played by synthesizers.
What you immediately notice about Philip,
is that his whole thing is so very family.
It is the opposite of the lonely composer in the hut.
You like that parallel?
It's so bad!
I know!
The way in which to me is that he's larger than life
is the way that he can take on so many projects
and do so many things all at once.
Take that down a note.
I don't think that's what they're complaining about.
I can't keep the pace with Philip with three movies.
Let's repeat it and see where it ends up.
When you have four movies -
as we have now -it's a lot, a lot.
His mind is always on the sound.
He's written himself into a situation where
he doesn't really ever get to have a day off.
You know, where if he's like,
"I'm just not going to write today"
then there's like thirty-five people saying,
"Where's the manuscript?
Like, what's going on! We need this thing!"
Wait a second, wait a second.
Solo Strings!
What are you crazy!
Well.
You keep this a secret from me until now!
I'm sorry. Can we reassign it?
Yeah.
But it's kind of nice sounding.
Let me hear it anyway.
Let's hear it.
Philip doesn't participate in that composer as deity,
Iike Wagnerian bullshit thing.
I love the sound of the string sextet.
Like for instance,
I really, really don't want to do that as a string sextet.
For example!
I seemed to of talked him out of it.
So, that's a victory for the day.
Generally speaking, the more secure the filmmaker is about his art,
the easier he is to work with.
They know what they're doing and if you know what you are doing,
then they're happy to let it work.
The difficulty that you as a filmmaker may have
is not being able to talk in the language of music.
However, it's my job to make that language available to you.
Hi Woody.
I got the length wrong.
I don't know how that happened.
I should have been out by then and I'm not.
When we saw the picture -
we couldn't think - what kind of score is it?
It's not a jazz score, it's not a Cole Porter score.
I just did an opera score.
It's not a classical music score.
We could do, but it would be a little cliched.
And then it was though six heads turned and everyone said,
"Philip Glass" together.
Philip does "Existential Dread" better than anybody.
It's the ideal music for creating emotion.
One person who does know music that well is Errol Morris.
He was a prodigy cellist at the Juilliard
School before he was a filmmaker.
So, when I write music for him...
...He asks me to send him the score and he plays it.
And you think that makes it easier?
No. It makes it harder!
I remember he was quoted at that time
calling me a "benevolent maniac".
There would be discussions in the editing room.
I've got to find someone to write music like Philip Glass.
And then of course the conclusion, the best
person to write music like Philip Glass was this guy.
The impersonator. The great imposter!
The best Philip Glass impersonator to be found!
The two most important film people
-that I began to work with at exactly the same time -
was Godfrey Reggio and Errol Morris.
I made three movies with each of them,
oddly enough, and over the period of twenty-five years.
And they work in completely different ways.
Jew, Jesuit.
For the film "KOYAANISQATSI,"
I wanted to create images that had more to say
than our language can speak.
And I felt that they should have
the emotive armchair of an original composition.
In that sense the composer can become a true collaborator.
He created a relationship where we were actually working as equals.
So, that I would sometimes write the music before the film,
or the music would come after the film,
but the editing -the whole post-production
-we did together.
And his studio was usually right next to mine.
I would be there every afternoon.
And we looked at images and music together all the time.
So, that was as complete a collaboration that
you can find with a filmmaker.
He has created a musical language that
is the acoustic door to the unknown.
Something possessed of an enormous
complexity in it's simplicity.
Like an ever ascending score
that never reached to the heavens.
Eisenstein says that the epitome of the relationship between composer
and filmmaker is that one should end up being able to...
...See the music and hear the image.
The music is bathed in that which is sinister
and foreboding right from the start.
Yes. Is that OK?
I think so.
When I see the whole picture together
we may suddenly look at it and say,
"Well too much is given away in the beginning." Or not.
Or no, it's completely arresting at the beginning
and it would be very boring
if the music didn't propel you forward with that sense of anticipation.
So, I don't really know.
Of course, what you find out very Quickly,
is that the filmmaker...
... He's always going to win!
So, you put up as much of a fight
as you want to and after awhile you give up.
It's the old story: we got stuck on the temp score.
And I remember, during the mixing of the film
that there was an issue about certain gongs.
Marty is one of the best filmmakers on the planet
and he was very easy to work with.
"Kundun" had maybe thirty-six or thirty-eight cues.
He had serious comments about maybe four or five of them.
Certain gongs, we said, had to be the old ones!
And they had gotten some new gongs in.
I am sorry, but it's true!
I think, they had really been very proud of
the sound of the new gong that they had gotten in there.
And we just tried it in the mix,
and we all looked at each other and said,
"l don't know, I don't know."
It's a hard argument to have with someone
who knows so much!
And he always wins!
I think, I'd like to get through Reel Three by Friday.
You'll just have to stay up a little later tonight.
I'm always so conscious about shooting down
what the composers come in with.
That's one of the reasons why I don't like to work with them
because they come in, they work hard on stuff,
and then I don't think it's really right, and I tell them.
And they try again,
and then by the fourth try they're starting to get upset,
and it's a nerve-racking process for everybody.
But Philip's got a very cavalier attitude about this stuff.
I mean he goes home, he writes it that night.
If it's not right he's the first one to dump it
and couldn't care less and writes two new cues the next night.
It's unusual.
The actual process of working together,
it was a bit harrowing.
What sort of things did that entail?
Communication. Basic communication.
Like this is up and that's down.
This is right and that's left.
Very basic things!
Like we could see things very differently.
Am I allowed to talk about this?
Collaborations properly speaking should be difficult.
Why not!
It's two people struggling to produce something
they may not have the same interests,
they may in fact have divergent interests.
But if it works, it works very powerfully.
It has to do with, I guess, some kind of temperament
or some kind of chemistry that happens between people.
It takes, I'd say, pretty well a lifetime to figure it out.
Backstage at the Arts Centre.
Isn't it a glamorous profession!
One of the things that's been most interesting for me
is finding the engine of change in my work.
How do you continue to grow?
And my technique is through collaboration.
Ladies and gentleman, the call is fifteen minutes.
Fifteen minutes to the top of the show.
Fifteen.
Time to put on my underwear.
The kangaroo is his totem.
Is that right?
That's on his shirt. Just so you know.
OK.
We always think of music as this medium
that crosses borders
and I had begun working with Ravi Shankar in 1964.
I had already been addressing
the problem of combining Western music with people
Who had a different kind of training.
I began to discover the things that were in common
rather than the things that were different.
All of us had one teacher that we worked with.
The transmission of the technique and the style of the music,
and the tradition of the music
-it's done in the same way - it's a one-on-one tradition.
Then I cross in the front and I go up here.
OK.
My teacher was Nadia Boulanger.
I like the bench if it is the right height,
-but it might not be. -Her teacher was Foray.
It is a person-to-person transmission.
You study with a teacher, that teacher studied with a teacher,
that teacher studied with a teacher.
We're probably only two
or three teachers away from Beethoven!
This is her
Probably, teachers' like that are one in a generation,
if that many.
It was a frightening experience to study with her.
Frightening!
You did not want to make mistakes in her presence.
She could have a tantrum.
The lesson would stop,
and I would be in for a personal assault
on my qualities as a human being.
I would crawl out of the room.
You just didn't want to go through that twice.
After that I never brought any mistakes.
She started me from the beginning
and she made me redo my whole technique.
It was a kind of athleticism, but a kind of musical muscle building.
She gave me a complete confidence in what I could do.
She took you to a level of musicianship
That you were incapable of getting to by yourself.
I can say truly that there's not a note of music
I've written since that time
that was not a result of the time I spent with her.
She took me from being a graduate of Juilliard to being a composer.
Kartik, the sitar player, he plays Ravi's compositions.
Because Ravi's eighty-five and is not on the road with us.
Well I am a protege of master Ravi Shankar.
As you know, he and Philip collaborated
on this particular composition that I'm playing.
In lndia, if you have a teacher you are his student
until he leaves this earth.
And Ravi is still here so, for that matter,
he's my teacher too.
Hello.
This is Marlowe.
Hello.
I was hired to be Ravi Shankar's assistant on a film.
I didn't know anything about lndian music,
but you have to remember this was '62/ '63.
The Beatles hadn't gone to lndia yet.
And I had to notate his music and I had to do it
on the spot with sixteen musicians waiting for the parts.
He did it!
Look at that!
That was my first encounter with Ravi.
I've been learning from him ever since.
You're the Junior Superman.
He's a born teacher.
When you're in his presence he begins to teach you.
The structure of the music is very different from Western music.
In Western music, you can say in an oversimple way,
that the tension of the music is
between the harmonic movement and the melody.
And lndian music is different.
The dynamic is between the rhythm and the melody.
There's no harmonic movement.
Suddenly, the whole parameters have changed.
I was writing down the music
and I would play it back and he said, "No, no, no.
The accents are wrong, the accents are wrong,
the accents are wrong."
And he kept saying that
"All the beats are the same, all the beats are the same."
I didn't know what he meant.
And finally when I realized that if I looked at it in a certain way,
I could see that...
... Everything added up to sixteen.
I said, "Oh, every phrase is sixteen."
I said, "Oh. Then let me have a bar line here,
a bar line there."
And I got rid of all the other bar lines.
And then I played it for him.
And he said, "Yes. That's right."
I said, "l see! All the beats are the same."
He said, "All the beats are the same!"
And I said, "Oh, that was it."
It was a moment when I understood what I was interested in.
It was my moment.
I saw that this was a door into another world of music.
I knew there was a music there to be written
that had to do with combining two different languages.
An intersection of Eastern and Western music
that could become extremely productive.
I saw that right in front of me.
It is almost like I spent my days with
Boulanger and my evenings with Ravi Shankar.
I became the child of them both in a way.
She taught through terror and he taught through love.
And the results are pretty much the same.
The collision of their intellects happened inside of me.
What was the result of that?
The result was...
I had the ability to write music that was
So radical that I could be mistaken for an idiot!
And I was often. I still am! To this day!
And yet, it absolutely didn't bother me.
I came back to New York in '67.
By '68 I had my ensemble together.
And within nine years of my return,
I was at the Metropolitan Opera.
It was as if all of the downtown
New York art scene had decided to attend the performance.
So, it was close to four-thousand people every night.
I remember, I was backstage at one point,
and I was standing next to someone
who was running the place.
He said, "Who are these people? "
I was feeling very cocky at the time and I said,
"Well, you better find out who they are
because this is your future."
This is a very famous picture
by Mapplethorpe of Philip and Bob Wilson.
The important thing about
"Einstein", it was such a...
... is seminal the right word?
But anyhow, it was such a big deal.
I mean a lot of things that we take
for granted about music and about performance
and all that stuff that other people are doing,
Bob and Philip did.
My mother was there.
She'd seen me in 1968, eight years before,
playing in a large auditorium in
which there were six people in the audience
and she was one of them.
Eight years later she came back to New York, and...
I don't know what she thought!
What had happened in such a short period of time!
But she was supportive.
And my father probably just shrugged his shoulders.
There's my father up there.
There's this long period he didn't talk to Philip.
It was so stupid.
Stupid.
But, Philip's personality is similar to my father's.
They're very stubborn.
It was something that was troubling him.
It wasn't troubling on my side.
It sounds unusual -usually it's
the younger man that runs away -
but in this case it was the older man that did.
Well he didn't like JoAnne.
That was the most of it.
Parents are such jerks some of the time.
Don't quote me.
The week before the week before he died
he died in a car accident so, we didn't know it would be that week
we met again and he opened that door again.
But we didn't get a chance to talk about it anymore.
Great "Einstein" stories.
We went to watch "Einstein" with Bob Wilson's parents
who also didn't have a clue.
They just rolled their eyes.
They didn't know what was going on.
My mother turned around to Wilson and said,
"Did you know this was going on in Robert's head?
I certainly didn't know it
was going on in Philip's head."
When "Einstein" was playing,
The New Yorker ran this cartoon.
What does it say?
It says, "Those drums tapping incessantly
With barely a change of timbre or rhythm,
do you suppose it could be something by Philip Glass? "
We went crazy.
It was in The New Yorker!
Let me tell you what I've done.
And then here, we have B natural there.
I've had to change the trumpet.
-But you agreed to that. -That's right. That's the same thing.
That's done. That's right.
Now there's something that I saw, look on page twenty-one.
I don't remember doing this
-of course that doesn't mean anything but look at that timpani.
What the hell is the timpani doing there?
Where?
I changed that. I just took the trills off.
What is that doing there?
-I have no idea. -You wrote that.
-I didn't write that. -lt doesn't mean anything.
No, it doesn't mean anything.
I don't think that trill's right either.
Which trill?
In the trombone.
You'll hear it today and if you don't like it you can take it out.
What was that?
You'll hear it today and if you don't like it you can take it out.
I don't think I wrote it.
I'm very happy to welcome you to my city.
Not only my city, but Brooklyn Academy of Music
is an artistic home for me.
It's very important.
And that you are premiering
the "Symphony" means a lot to me personally.
I want to thank you for all the effort,
And please, welcome to my home.
Where does music come from?
My experience with music is that
it's like an underground river that's always there.
And like an underground river you, don't know where it comes from
and you don't know where it's going.
The only difference is whether you're listening to it or not.
For me writing music is listening to music.
I don't think of it, I listen to it.
In other words, it's already there.
It's not something that has to be imagined.
It has to be written down.
Drawing is about seeing.
Dancing is about moving.
Poetry about speaking.
And music about listening.
I never was inclined to be involved with the theoretical ideas of music
that would have been about thinking -
I didn't care about theories of music.
I cared about listening to music.
I begin by hearing very little, very little.
I hear something and I've trained myself to follow the sound.
Follow the thought of the sound to follow the sound of the sound.
And eventually I'll hear what it is.
Let's say that you woke up in the morning
and you looked out across the field
and it's very foggy - you can't see very much.
If you wait a little bit you will start to see the outline of the tree.
And maybe with time you'll see a building.
And in time you might eventually be able to see everything
that's in that field.
And that's the way that listening is for me.
With the "Eighth Symphony",
I had a great difficulty with that,
and Dennis had difficulty with it too.
I finished writing the symphony and then we started looking at it
and we began questioning the notes:
Is this an E flat or A natural? Is this a B or...?
And I said to him,
"Dennis when I wrote this I was at the limits of what I could hear."
I could barely hear it.
I'm writing down what, I think I heard,
but I'm not really sure.
Maybe that's too frank an admission to make,
but it happens to be what happened.
What I have become content with
is to see music as a mystery, and I leave it at that.
Is that what you thought?
Yeah, that's it.
You're a Buddhist, right?
No, no.
You're not? I read that you're a Buddhist.
I read the same thing!
You might say I'm a Taoist, I'm a Hindu, I'm Jewish, I'm Christian.
I mean it's true I'm interested in all of these things.
But I can't say that I'm exclusively anything.
In the Taoist concept, there's only one consciousness.
And we label that as "mind consciousness"
and "body consciousness".
They speak different languages but they're really one.
When I touch Philip, the body consciousness
speaks to me directly.
Then I know what to do.
I don't have to ask him.
Qi Gong was a very hard one for me.
I did it for a long time before I felt anything.
My son Zack did it -he brought me to Sat Hon
-and for years Zack would say,
"Do you feel the Qi? Have you felt the Qi yet??'
And I said, "No I haven't felt it" and it went on for years!
At least five or six years before I finally felt it.
Oh, that's it!
It takes great patience on the part of the student
and on the part of the teacher for that matter.
The Taoists call someone like Philip
"Tong shi", which means fellow learner.
And what we really say is that you cannot
possibly teach without learning simultaneously.
And that teaching is just really learning on the other side.
With a very critical difference, which is I get paid to learn.
Qi is the foundation of life.
Qi means breath.
The basis of Qi Gong is working with one's breath
and through the breath one contacts the spirit within.
And it is possible to connect with the sacred.
One of the things I learned from the yoga teachers years ago
I learned about maintenance.
I have a lot of music I want to write
and in order to do it I better take care of myself.
With sitting meditation if you don't get enlightened,
you're stuck.
But with moving meditation, if you don't get Enlightened...
...at least you get healthy!
Philip's Buddhism...
He even doesn't talk about the word "Buddhist."
He doesn't like labels.
What's so interesting is he has Sat Hon.
And then he has Gelek Rimpoche,
who he's known for years,
and they have a very deep and long running relationship
Hey! How are you?
Good to see you.
Thanks for coming.
Thank you.
You've met Scott.
-Yes I did. -Hello again.
Philip wanted to have guidance.
Getting freedom from...
negative emotions and negative activities.
So, how to get rid of hatred, obsession, and even jealousy.
When the water's boiling would you make the tea?
Absolutely.
I mean, that's the least you could do!
Make the tea and then photograph us!
OK. It is a deal!
Philip's practice is private, it's personal and,
I think, he has a bigger fear of pushing it on people
than sharing it with people.
I wish he would share it a little more
because it's so interesting.
But he doesn't. He's not like that.
Actually it's nothing more than developing compassion.
And not only compassion for yourself,
but a compassion to your families and your relations.
And wisdom.
Wisdom that really cuts through the ego.
Along the way as you get certain teachings
and you are initiated into certain practices,
they become part of commitments that you have.
I think, Philip's taken a certain amount of commitments
that require a certain amount of time.
So, this is what he does everyday.
But the kids can come down and see him standing on his head.
He has a sitting room and in that room are offerings.
There are certain offerings that are made on a daily basis
and they can participate in that.
So, in the morning they say, "l want to give water to Buddha."
And Philip helps them fill some water bowls
and at the end they get a chocolate.
And, I think, this is a beautiful thing they do with their dad.
I met the Dalai Lama for the first time in the '70s.
I went to Dharamshala -
that is the residence in exile of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama.
I had painstakingly learned to say a formal greeting in Tibetan to him.
I said,
"When I see your face happiness comes into my mind."
That was what I said!
So, I went to see him and I said this thing
and he looked at me and he burst out laughing.
He thought I was so funny.
It's probably, what would be called,
an inconceivable mansion.
People often like to focus on the Buddhist part of it,
but it's actually just part of it.
It's not been an exclusive interest of mine.
It's been one of many.
I met my first teacher when I was twenty.
I'm seventy, so, that's fifty years I've been knocking
around meeting all kinds of people
wearing all kinds of clothing
and speaking all kinds of languages
in all kinds of parts of the world.
And I've come to see that no particular culture
seems to have a copyright on profound ideas about the world.
Many people imagine spiritual work
Iike something you do with your mind and your head.
But the real Shamanism has to do with really
putting your body
-the entirety of what you are - out there in nature.
Because the connection with nature is
one of the primary sources from which you learn.
Victor was willing to take Philip on because Philip was...
... Open, had knowledge, was willing to learn.
He wasn't just somebody looking to get high
and have some crazy experience -
Victor doesn't advocate drug use at all.
He took him on a little sojourn, the first time,
out into the desert and they did some interesting things out there.
Very interesting things.
I couldn't tell you what they are because it's very private.
What Victor will do will put you in front of something
and leave you alone with it.
And you have to figure it out.
And it can be completely frightening!
There's one beautiful thing about the mountain.
There's a beautiful thing about the desert.
The mountain, the desert,
nature does not recognize your career,
your accomplishment.
You can be the president of the biggest company.
And yet, when you get to that mountain,
the slope is not going to be easier for you.
Nature treats you just as another human being.
As another living being, who is going to die.
At sixty-five, I took on a big commitment with his work.
Most people are retiring
to the Bahamas and playing golf.
And I started to do something I never did before.
Living in the wilderness and climbing mountains
and all kinds of things.
I was climbing up a mountain,
Victor had gone way ahead of me.
Actually I saw him, he was way up there,
and I see him and he's waiting, looking down at me.
And I looked up at him and I waved
and I continued to climb.
It took me another forty minutes to get to where he was.
He was just sitting there.
I said, "What were you doing Victor? "
He said, "l was watching you."
I said, "lt was a very hard climb for me.
I'm twenty-five years older than you Victor, it's a hard climb."
And he said, "l had no intention of coming and saving you."
What would you do Scott?
I have no idea.
I hope I would have the nerve to
put myself in that position of trust in someone.
Victor wasn't there to help me.
I couldn't trust Victor.
He wasn't going to come and save me.
Yeah.
What about when he buried you?
Oh, we don't talk about that.
All of these people,
they each speak to something that works in his life really well.
Philip has incorporated all these ideas to enrich his life.
In a way that, something was missing from a certain practice
that he was craving and he slowly found it in another practice.
The Qi Gong master will say, "Balance your whole life."
Looking for the otherness
it's looking for the completion of what we are.
It doesn't mean you want to reject the everyday consciousness.
It doesn't mean you don't care about the everyday world.
It doesn't mean you don't care about your business.
No. You keep holding this part,
actually by putting attention in the two sides,
that brings balance and empowers both sides,
including what you do in your everyday life.
Hello.
Some people completely ignore the material world.
And put everything in the spiritual world.
And that's great... for them!
But we live in the twenty-first century.
So, the art is now to balance the material
and the spiritual work together.
In my opinion, he's a perfect spiritual person
and very humble person.
No matter how famous,
how successful whatever he might be.
He is one person.
Just Philip.
Ummm.
Where does the G come?
The five I would like to have would be the G,
going from the bottom,
the G, theC, D, theG and the C.
G, C, D, G, D...
B flat, B, D, C, C, C...
Just don't play the G...
It does have the G.
Oh, you're right, it doesn't.
You could add the double bases there,
but that's too heavy, I think.
Because I'm going up to.
I'm up there.
Oh I found another place for the E flat trumpet at the end!
"Barbarians!"
We're getting down to the crunch.
There's no question that the opera house
belongs to the composer.
In the same way that you can say that
the ballet belongs to the choreographer.
It belongs!
Generally speaking, the idea begins with the composer.
There's an opera that you want to do.
And it's because of that,
that you simply keep knocking on doors
until you get someone to do it.
And I've been doing that for thirty years.
In the case of "Barbarians,"
I read the book maybe fifteen years ago.
At the time it didn't seem
to be a current subject -it became one.
In one of the lines of the opera it says,
"We need a short quick war to preserve the peace."
The first thing I had to do was
to find someone who would build the piece.
Guy Montavon, I'd met a number of times before,
he came to see me when I was playing in Germany somewhere.
He said "l have this new opera house,
and I plan to do a new opera every year,
and I would like you to be on the third year."
A number of people have asked me,
"Well why did you go to Erfurt? "
Well, they're the people who wanted to do it!
It's a very simple answer!
It's not like the Berlin Opera or the Hamburg Opera
or the Paris Opera were banging down my door to get me to do
"Waiting For The Barbarians." No!
There are an awful lot of people who did not want to do this opera.
I didn't know they were musicians!
The first person that I talked to was Dennis Davies,
who would be the music director.
What he does in the pit is going to determine
what we to hear.
Right now, I'm just basically looking for things
that the orchestra might question at the first rehearsal.
Pretty much, I hear what I see on the page.
My job is to see that the singers are
supported by the orchestra, at the same time,
not ever covered by the orchestra.
Philip has become more
and more adept at scoring his work so,
that the singers have more of a fighting chance to be heard.
There's nothing more frustrating than having interesting things to play
and then have the conductor have to say,
"But it's too loud. But it's too loud.
But it's too loud."
There's always a little space between what you think you hear,
and what you are going to hear.
No. No, it won't work.
With the oboes it will be honky.
I wouldn't do it.
Yeah.
It's very exposed.
I think, the oboes and the first the flute,
And the first bassoon will cover it for me.
We could do that tomorrow night.
-Did you order? -I forgot to order a sandwich.
And I am starving!
Each opera should inhabit a sound universe
that's unique to it.
With "Waiting For The Barbarians,"
I wanted a dark sound to go with the dark story.
I only need to change a few instruments to define a palette of sound.
It would be as if a painter said,
"Well OK, I'm going to go and paint this field over here
and these are the colors I'm going to take with me."
Implicit in the piece is the idea of the world as a dream.
As soon as I saw a model, I saw that,
This was a set in which a dream could be quite comfortable.
The way it moves.
The way it moves with the music.
It's even more interesting than it was conceived.
Collaboration with Guy was good because
he knows the music, he understands music,
he was able to play the set as a musical instrument.
And that's exactly what I wanted because
with Phil's music it's important that the set
becomes part of the music.
Dennis, how does the second act look?
How's it coming along?
Well it sounds very good.
The one issue we're going to have is
the pronunciation of the word "Barbarian."
You have to decide whether you want
the word to be "ba-BAR-ian" or "bar-BER-ian"?
"bar-BER-ian"
OK. Then, I think, for the chorus
we're going to change the spelling of the word.
OK. To what?
We'll put it, "bar-(BER)," in parentheses.
Because when they see it, especially Europeans,
they'll see "bar-BAR-ians."
When you start this rhythmical repetition of the word,
I don't think there's any point in
trying to have them say "ba ba barr," "ba ba barr."
I would just keep it "ba ba ba ba"
-until the word "Barbarian" -comes out. OK.
I would get rid of the "r" you know what I'm saying?
Yeah.
You're making something -I don't think frankly
-is going to be heard.
There's Daddy. Hi Daddy!
Hi.
Dada.
Can I see the key-ano?
Yeah, you want to see the piano?
That's it.
That's it! The key-ano!
Can I hear the key-ano?
Can he hear the key-ano?
OK, I'll go play it.
Scott will hold it.
OK.
Can you hear it?
Thank you Daddy.
You're welcome.
Want to hear my key-ano?
Yeah, let me hear your piano.
Very good.
What did you think Daddy?
Shall we say goodbye?
Let's say goodbye. And I'm going to call you tonight.
-No. No. No! -OK.
Yes, it's time to go.
Say goodbye to Daddy.
Say goodbye.
Daddy!
I'll see you later!
See you later.
I think, that people are attracted to the piece
because it appears to be about a very good
man and a very bad man.
This humanitarian, the compassionate person.
And then there's the person
who represents the state and state terrorism.
He laid three girls in two hours.
Yes. He's so weak. He's so weak.
And you didn't even have a drink!
-I didn't. -He had a coffee!
It's very easy to get the enthusiasm of an audience
when you provide them
with the alternatives of the good and the bad.
We all know what side we pick.
The good things or the bad things we invent those.
The more enduring and the harder reality is
between what we imagine and what is real.
Good and bad are constructions -
they're fabrications.
Dreaming and the quality of being awake
aren't fabrications those are the conditions of our life.
No! No, no, no, no! No!
Silence!
I remain the Magistrate responsible for justice in this town.
No one imagined in the fifties that
1984 would actually come about more quickly
than the title suggested.
And in a funny way, I think, John Coetzee did a similar thing.
In 1990, a book about an empire which begins a pre-emptive war -
who had ever heard of such a thing!
By 2001, Coetzee seemed to have written a book about
the world that we lived in.
Vacations are hard.
Philip doesn't really vacation. He works.
They're always working vacations.
And for him it's not work, it's what he does.
Simply, what he does.
Each one of his teachers, I think,
has told him that music is an extremely high form of an offering.
So, I think, it has given him permission
to spend a lot of time doing what he does.
I'm still going to be writing the Symphony.
It's never been viewed that way by me.
My interest in music has been more personal,
and I would say obsessive.
My motivation is for personal reasons.
I'm not thinking of bringing happiness to humanity,
or anything like that, or peace of mind.
It never occurs to me.
I'm just trying write a piece of music and play it.
I'm a wife with a new,
young family and it's hard to live with someone
who's writing three scores at the same time.
But, at the same time,
you love this person and they're thriving.
So, you want what's best for them,
but you also want what is best for you. You know.
My older son is four-and-a-half and,
I think, for about four years
I haven't been so pleasant to be around.
So, our paths have diverged.
Which is hard to talk about.
It's new. It's fresh.
We have a lot of love for each other,
but we are wanting different things out of
our lives at this point.
He has so many different aspects of his life.
But I see now, more profoundly than ever before,
that music is his underlying passion for absolutely everything he does.
I think, for Philip music is his therapy,
His conversation,
his place to be when he can't talk about what it is he's feeling.
You can listen to it and get what you want,
but I get everything he's unable to say
or or can't communicate.
It's all there in the music.
It's his language.
I think, this is his finest communication.
So, it worked for a while.
I think, Philip needs a lot of support.
He's happy to have support.
I'm sure it is a very lonely world
writing as much music as he does.
I think, he enjoyed sharing it with somebody.
Come in. I need to know your email password
and your computer password.
I have no idea.
OK. There's someone downstairs.
Frankie.
What?
Frankie is one.
That's my computer password.
OK.
And I don't know my email password.
It might be Frankie also.
That may be. OK, I'll try that.
OK.
Now you all know my computer password!
Show us where the bridges are.
Wait for me! Wait for me!
Oh! It's rough out there.
I thank you.
That's for you, if you like it.
And this is Christopher Hampton.
Yes.
Hello.
That's not real!
I know! I'm not ready.
Here.
Thank you.
Oh, look at this.
It's a ladybug for good luck!
Yeah, it is a ladybug.
Thank you very much.
Have a good show.
OK, I will.
-It's great to have you here. -Have fun.
Hey, here's everybody!
Good. Let's go into the theatre.
OK. Have fun.
-It's a great piece. -OK. Good. Thank you.
You're welcome. Enjoy.
Good. I will.
Someone asked me recently,
what is the most interesting scene in the opera?
And, I think, the most interesting scene is
the very last scene.
He says,
"Now that the Barbarians are at the gate,
maybe it's time for me to tell the truth."
Well, what is the truth?
And he doesn't make you wait so long,
he says, "l am a man walking down a road,
a road that goes nowhere."
And then he says...
Oh, I'm sorry. Is that me?
You can answer it.
Let me turn it off.
You can take it if you want to.
No! That's someone from Hollywood.
I don't want to talk to her!
And he says, this other astonishing thing,
"I'm a man on a road that goes nowhere."
And then a few minutes later-
and this is the very last line in the opera he says,
"I'm a man caught in an ugly and stupid dream."
Is that what the opera's about?
And, I think, that's what the opera's about!
The reason he feels he's caught in a dream
is because he is caught in a dream!
And when people say, "l feel like I'm dreaming."
The reason they feel like they're dreaming
is that they are dreaming!
It's a very simple thing.
Dreaming can be a fact of our life.
I am a man travelling down a road,
which may lead nowhere.
A man lost in a cruel and stupid dream.
And still I keep walking.
Walking...
I have a friend who's a writer,
and he says his writing is the antidote to
the chaos of the world around him.
And, I think, that's a good description.
He retreats into that world.
That becomes more important than the world he sees.
I suppose some people might not think
that's such a great thing,
but he thinks it is.
It's all real -
it's just what you choose to establish as the core of your being.
He makes the core of his life an act of imagination.
Is it escape, or is it liberation?
I don't know.
You tell me I don't know. I have no idea.
I don't know anything about these things.
For him, that person, writing is the...
is the resolution of his life.
It makes his life solid and real.
Without that the world would overwhelm him with its chaos.
So, is it escape to become sane?
Or, is the insanity of the world...
So, which is the escape? I don't know!
They seemed not to have minded it too much!
Yeah.
I mean, I can't tell.
They seemed to like it.
Oh they, they were into it.
You can tell.
I can feel it on the back of my neck.