Philip Glass Interview

Huge honour to interview Philip Glass. A towering influence while studying music, Glass delivered truly insightful thoughts about technique and practice.

In this conversation, Glass reflects on the practical realities of art, music, and culture-how space and time shape performance, why technology is simply another extension of human creativity, and why independence is key to innovation. He reminds us that the best time for learning is when you don’t yet know what’s happening because that’s when discovery becomes possible.

FULL TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW

You know, there are very practical things about space and time. I remember going out on tour in 1979 with a piece I did with Lucinda Childs called Dance. Every stage was a different size. If the hall was larger, the dancers had to move faster and the music had to be played more quickly. If the hall was smaller, you slowed the music down. This is not theory—I’m talking about the practical realities of moving around a stage.

I’ve written 26 operas, I’ve done 40 films, 30 ballets—that’s what I do. I play the piano—that’s a technique. My son uses the computer—that’s a technique too.

These are extensions of the human brain. It’s through these extensions that we can handle things: we can understand our history, we can talk about the future, and we can even reflect on the past. But we also have to learn the new languages. The new languages are going to help us live in a different kind of world.

One of the questions that doesn’t surprise me is: what do we do with the waste materials? What do we do with the jobs that are lost? These realities force us to change and to think about how we live. Nothing is more essential to a culture than its art—its painting, its poetry, the things that express the human spirit.

Through art, we comment on our own society. We talk about how people live together, how we use the materials of life, whether we save the environment or destroy it, how we deal with education. These are the most interesting questions; they are the proper subjects of dialogue and investigation. And these things, ultimately, affect how we live.

There’s also the question of legacy: what can our culture leave for future generations? And in fact, we do this all the time. The pyramids of Mexico, the pyramids of Egypt, the architecture of ancient places—they tell us a tremendous amount about what life was like.

A very interesting topic is the life of the city. By studying it, you learn about many other things—practical details that aren’t always obvious at first glance, but which shaped daily life. Music can be thought of in the same way. The idea that music is something only modern, or only ancient, is not correct. There may have been music 70,000 years ago. What do we have left? Bird bones made into flutes, fragments of evidence. It doesn’t tell us much, but it tells us something: someone was playing, someone else was listening. That means the elements of society were already in place.

So we have to keep moving the dates back. When does “modern life” really begin? That question keeps shifting. The further we look into history, the further back those beginnings seem to go.

The secret of being radical is being independent. That’s the hardest thing. It may mean not taking an easy job, not becoming a teacher, but instead finding another way of working. The more you tie yourself to existing systems, the less chance you have of doing something new. That’s my feeling. Of course, I have a predilection for working this way—I like it, I want it. But not everyone does. Some people can’t, and yet they still produce beautiful, wonderful work. It just may not be at the edge of the future.

The best time for learning is when you don’t know what’s happening. If you already know, then there’s nothing left to learn.