Philip Glass & Arturo Bejar | Talks at Google - VoiceTube: Learn English through videos!

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BRADLEY HOROWITZ: Hello, and welcome
to this Talks at Google event.
My name is Bradley Horowitz.
I'm Vice President of Streams, Photos, and Sharing
here at Google.
It's my pleasure to welcome you all for this very
special afternoon together.
How many of you got to attend yesterday's event?
Oh, good.
It looks like about half.
We had a tremendous amount of fun.
We had four world-class musicians
sitting up here talking, jamming,
talking about their craft, laughing.
I laughed.
I cried.
It was beautiful.
And more today.
Today we're going to have a conversation
between two old friends, Arturo Bejar Philip Glass.
And Arturo I've known for quite a long time.
He's a bit of a Silicon Valley institution.
And in fact, yesterday I learned that it was Steve Wozniak who
actually brought Arturo from Mexico to Silicon
Valley for the first time.
He later went on to found a team called the Paranoids at Yahoo,
which was the first of its kind, really,
in the Valley that really focused on issues of spam
and abuse, and he carried forward that work
to Facebook, where he was at for many years,
building the product infrastructure team there
and then working on issues of compassion
and bullying and making that a safe and comfortable place
for all of its users.
He's since moved on from Facebook
and is now focusing on being a father and a photographer,
and one of the subjects of his photography
is, in fact, Philip Glass.
Philip Glass is a world renowned composer and pianist
whose work spans generations.
He has composed over the last 25 years more than 20 operas,
8 symphonies, two piano concertos,
and numerous soundtracks to films
and all the while maintains his extensive solo creations
on piano and organ.
He grew up in Baltimore, studied at Juilliard,
moved to Europe, where he trained with Nadia Boulanger
and closely worked with sitar composer Ravi Shankar.
When he returned to the States in the 60s,
he formed the Philip Glass Ensemble
and still performs with that group to date.
At almost 80, he's collaborated with folks from Paul Simon
to Yo-Yo Ma and presents and performs solo keyboard concerts
around the world.
In 2011, he founded the Philip Glass Center,
a home for artists, scientists, and conservationists
to collaborate and produce a culture of renewal
for our time.
So I want to invite these two friends up here
to have a conversation and maybe even a bit of performance.
Philip, Arturo, welcome.
ARTURO BEJAR: Thank you.
PHILIP GLASS: Thank you, Bradley.
Thank you.
ARTURO BEJAR: Thank you so much.
So I wanted to start, maybe, a little bit
seeing how I ended up here next to you.
When I was in college, the weirdest thing I had ever heard
came on the radio.
It was "Knee Play Number 5."
And I couldn't leave there.
I needed to go to school, and I couldn't
leave to go to school because I had to listen to it.
And then I listened to "Einstein"
for God knows how many times.
And fast-forward 20 something years.
And I mean, there is a little place called Carmel Valley
that's near Carmel-by-the-Sea, and I go into the video store,
and there's a flyer there that says,
Philip Glass presents the Days and Nights Festival.
And I pick it up, and I'm like, well,
it can't be that Philip Glass.
Is there another Philip Glass that's doing this?
And I went to the first festival,
and I sat down to watch this dance piece,
and right behind me, he was sitting there.
And during the break, I went up and said hello,
and he was very kind with attention and conversation.
And ever since then, I have been photographing for the festival,
and in the process of doing that,
I have seen a collaboration that is extraordinary
because it spans from young people-- like, from 20 to 80--
from Africa to Japan, across cultures, across disciplines.
And being able to be a part of that has been an amazing gift.
And so what we'll hope to talk about today
is a lot about that process and collaboration.
And I wanted to start off by asking you about your journey,
how you ended up in Big Sur.
PHILIP GLASS: I was just thinking about that.
The festival we have at the-- it's
the last week of September, Big Sur this year,
at the Henry Miller Library.
It seems to be-- it was a destination which--
I didn't know what it was, but it became that.
When I was just beginning writing music-- and then
shortly after that I went study at Juilliard--
I would spend my time practicing the piano
and working like everybody else, and I felt so
cut off from everybody because that's all we did.
And not just me.
Everybody did that.
And I thought, well, if this is going to be my life,
to be this isolated, this is not going to happen for me.
So I began immediately-- I was 19
at the time-- I began working with dancers
who were the same age as me.
And that's always a good idea for anybody
who wants to know, where do you start?
You start with people your age, and with luck, they
stick around for a while.
And I began working with theater companies, with dancers,
and I began immediately-- I wanted
to get out of the practice room, and I also
wanted to be able to perform.
And I found that dancers always knew the music.
Theaters often needed music.
And so I didn't have to create a concert
career at the beginning.
I just started playing music with other people,
and that just continued.
And then the other thing that was really interesting
was I was concerned very much that the music that I
was doing-- I guess you could say
it was modernistic music of a certain kind.
But I felt that I wanted to see, how does that
fit into the world that I live in, into the everyday world?
And I began to think of all of the social issues,
political issues, and by the time I was in my 30s,
I was writing operas about people
who changed the world through their ideas,
like a opera about Gandhi, an opera about Einstein.
I began using music and theater music particularly
as a way of addressing the issues of life,
of what we are living.
I didn't really want an abstract music, and though in many ways
you can hear it as abstract, music has that quality.
It always has the quality of-- it
is emotional and abstract at the same time.
So we'll always have that.
But I wanted to connect the music with the power of ideas.
So I got involved with scientists.
The other thing when I was a kid-- so I was born in '37.
So by 1945, '46 people began knowing who Einstein
was because of the atomic bomb.
But suddenly, this scientist became-- he was actually
our first science superstar.
Everybody knew who Einstein was.
And what we used to say in that time
was that everyone knew who Einstein
was but no one understood the theory of relativity.
They said six people in the world understood it,
which is-- I don't think that was an exaggeration.
Well, actually, I think there are many more people who
know it, but that was the idea.
But I got very interested in scientists,
and I began to see-- before I was at Juilliard,
I was at the University of Chicago,
and I was studying mathematics and physics,
and I wasn't particularly good at it.
I loved it, but I realized that I was never
going to be very good at that.
What I could do-- I was writing music.
I knew that it was going to be music.
I became very interested in scientists
and environmentalists and anybody
who was connected to the living, organic world that we live in,
and in a funny way, I became the scientist composer.
I've written an opera about Einstein, Galileo, Kepler,
Stephen Hawking.
I did a movie about him.
Just a couple years ago, Brian Greene, who is a string theory
physicist-- I did a piece with him.
So I began writing music for sciences.
And then, in fact, this year, one of the people
who's going to come at the-- the center is about music.
It's about dance.
It's about film.
It's about poetry.
All those things are in this festival this year.
But I have these other issues, too.
So someone I know has written a book called
"The Well-Tempered City," and it's about-- his name
was Jonathan Rose.
He does a very interesting study of cities from Ur.
We call that the first city.
He compares it to Baltimore and Dayton,
and he talks about the issues of what
a city needs to do to be successful or to survive.
You know, there are cities around the world that
have suddenly disappeared, and we don't know why.
They become ghost towns.
We think maybe the water supply disappeared,
or there was a disease or something.
But you can visit these cities.
So there are cities that have been successful.
Paris, London-- they've been around a long time.
We don't know what San Francisco or Los Angeles-- I
don't know if they've been around that long yet, but any
of the New World cities-- well, Mexico City.
My god, that's an amazing city.
When Cortes arrived and they saw Mexico City, at that time
it was in the Valley of Mexico.
You know this-- because he's from Mexico.
There were a million people living there.
Now at that time, we're talking about the 15th century.
The European cities were 30,000, 40,000.
London was 40, 50,000.
Mexico City was a million people.
Now they had already mastered some-- of course,
you know all this.
It was a city that was built on water,
and so there were-- and it's all very interesting.
But I got interested in all this stuff.
And so this year, Johnson Rose is
going to be giving talks about the well-tempered city.
And he uses the well-tempered-- from the Bach idea,
the well-tempered clavier.
It has to do about tuning, and it's
a subtle and extremely intriguing
idea about perfect tuning, about relative tuning.
Actually, this is relative tuning.
And besides that, Jonathan also plays electric bass,
which you know, and he's going to be playing electric bass one
night of the concert.
So I've got my scientist playing bass
in the orchestra, which is-- so these kinds of things that
interest me, where you have a meeting of cultures.
And here's the interesting thing, I think.
That people that are interested in science
are very often interested in music and in dance.
It's the same people.
And the other thing that I began to realize
is the more I knew about science,
I began to think of science as a kind of poetry.
ARTURO BEJAR: Yeah, and so that's
one of the things I wanted to ask you about--
was to talk a little bit about the piece for Brian
Greene around the black holes.
Like, you take a concept around physics concepts.
And how do you match those to musical language?
PHILIP GLASS: Well, now I did the black hole-- of course,
everybody knows this.
I'll tell you anyway.
If you get too near a black hole, you get sucked into it,
and you can't get out.
But it has other property of-- time
slows down so that when you get into the black hole,
time is actually stopped.
So when I was writing this piece with-- Brian
would call me and say, have you got to the part
where the time slows down?
I said, yeah, I'm working on it now.
He said, can I come down and hear it?
I said OK.
So he came down to the studio, and I played this piece
where the music was very high and moving very fast,
and as it goes lower and lower, it gets slower and slower,
and finally, it just stops.
And Brian said, yeah, that's it.
And he said, you know, I insist that this is accurate.
Again, I was turning science into poetry, actually.
But now getting back to this idea about poetry--
and I'm very serious about this-- Einstein was
asked-- once he was describing where he got his ideas.
A lot of times it would be the idea of relativity.
He said, well-- this is what he said.
I imagine myself sitting on a beam of light,
and the beam of light is rushing through the universe
at the speed of light.
And I look around me, I saw everything rushing past me,
and I was standing still.
He said, after that, it was just a question of figuring out
the mathematics, which he said was hard for him.
What?
Evidently, it was not hard-- I mean, not that hard for him.
But so I began to see-- not only him,
but you look at someone like Darwin.
The biological sciences are very different
from the physical sciences.
The physical sciences-- we do a lot
of deduction and mathematics.
Biological science-- there's induction.
That means a lot of observation.
He went on the famous voyage of the Beagle.
He was, I think, out for about two years in a boat and just
looking at species and how they change from island--
he was out in the south seas, and he went from island
to island.
He would see that almost the same species
would be on another island but had changed a little bit.
He began to see how biological entities like this
could change, and he didn't think very much about it.
He just collected information, collected information.
And he finally came up with this astonishing idea of mutation,
that things change because of sunspots or whatever
for natural reasons, and then what
he called natural selection, which
is that after the mutation change,
this new entity, if it has survivability,
would then replace the non-mutated one so
that natural selection became a form-- that's
where the idea of evolution came from.
And this is also an astonishing--
if you think about it.
I mean, can you imagine if you had been doing this
and you had been on a boat for two years
just looking at flowers?
Would you have come up with this idea?
ARTURO BEJAR: I don't think so.
PHILIP GLASS: I don't know about that.
I just find that these amazing scientists
have the dreams of poets.
And then they have to find the science to explain it.
But without the vision, there is no theory.
So in a way, I began to see-- I came to this as a very
young man, and I began to see science
as a form of poetry, a poetry which has the ability
to create technology which then really changes
things even more rapidly.
So I got very involved with the idea of science in music,
and then of course, because as a modern person--
I began to think about climate change and things like that.
And so the concerts that we do and what I try to do-- I'm
trying to bring them all together,
and we are actually kind of succeeding.
And this time, Jonathan is going to come and give
a talk about the city.
I've got the copy of the final draft.
It's not been printed yet.
It's so interesting to read.
It is kind of like poetry, but it
took someone who was willing to sit down and think about this
and to come up with the-- you know Jonathan.
ARTURO BEJAR: Yeah.
PHILIP GLASS: At any rate-- so anyway, what was the question?
ARTURO BEJAR: No, you talked about it.
It was about how you set black holes to music or the theory
behind it to music.
PHILIP GLASS: You know, what I find
is that it's not just my ideas.
I find many people are interested in science
and art and dance and theater.
Poetry.
It goes together very well.
ARTURO BEJAR: Which takes me to another thing
that I got to watch, which was the concept around language
and collaboration.
So I was wondering if you could talk
a little bit about when you began
collaborating with Foday Suso.
PHILIP GLASS: Oh, that's interesting.
That's a different thing.
I was cooperating with dancers and filmmakers
at the center over there, and then I
began collaborating with composers, first just people
that I knew-- but then I began working with composers
from completely different traditions,
and that really changed my ideas about music more than anything
else.
I just played Arturo some music that I
had made with some indigenous people from Mexico.
Indians, actually, who live in the mountains.
They didn't even speak Spanish.
I certainly didn't speak Indian languages.
And we managed to put a record together.
And with Foday Suso-- he's a griot.
He's from the Mandinka people in West Africa, the Gambia.
That's near Senegal and Mali, kind of right in between them.
And he tells a story of the Mandinka people and music.
The griots do that.
They have something like 107, 106 songs
that they have to learn.
I know him very well.
I met him more than 35 years ago.
We do concerts quite a lot together since then.
But let me tell you a story, a funny story.
Then maybe we will go on to something else
because I can tell funny stories all night without getting
to the point that we're maybe trying to get to, which--
I'm not even sure what it is.
So the first time I saw Foday, he
has a big kora, which is a gourd, and there are 17--
or is it-- 17, 18 strings.
And he plays the strings.
It's like a harp.
And the gourd takes the sound, and it comes out that way.
Of course, we also amplify it, too.
I was asked to do music for a play
by Jean Genet called "Les Paravents," "The Screens."
Now, it was a story about the French in North Africa.
So I thought, well, maybe I should
do a piece with an African composer,
and I would be the European-based-- I'm not
European, but the music is based on Central European art music,
so that goes with that.
And so I asked Foday-- I had gone on a trip with him
to Africa working with Godfrey Reggio in a movie called
"Powaqqatsi," and he had taken me to hear music,
but I hadn't thought that much about the music itself.
I mean, I liked it, but I didn't really
think about how it was made.
And so then I called Foday.
I said, I have to do this piece.
We have to do African and European music
sometimes together but sometimes separate.
OK.
So we came to the studio.
And now I knew this from my experiences--
the first thing we had to do was to tune the instruments.
I mean, without that, we can't even play.
This is basic stuff.
The piano was a little too complicated.
So we kept the piano, and he would tune to the piano.
Now, the scale in the African music
is a little bit different.
The fourth-- I don't know.
So not to get too technical, but the fourth note of the scale
is a little more flat than ours is,
and the third is a little more sharp.
So if you listen to-- if he played with the piano,
somebody would sound out of tune.
It probably would have been him because I can play louder
than him, but not necessarily.
So he had lived in the States for a while.
He traveled back and forth to Africa,
but he came, and he had learned to retune.
He was retuning his instrument.
He was playing with Herbie Hancock and people like that
and playing at jazz, and he had to tune with them,
so he knew how to do it.
I didn't know anything about that.
So we sat down, and he played a note which was similar to an A,
very close to an A, and he said, this is the first note.
I said, OK, so here's the A. Here's my piano note.
And he tuned it, got it right, and he nodded and said--
and I go to the B flat above that,
and he played-- well, actually, I went to the B natural
because we were kind of in D.
And he played the B, and I said, wait a second.
What do you call the first note?
He said, well, that's the first note.
I said OK, did the second note, and I said,
what do you call this?
And he said, I call that the second note.
And then we got to the third note, which is C sharp.
I tuned it, and he said-- I knew what was coming.
And he said, that's the one that's the one that
comes after the one before.
And then I suddenly had the realization
that his notes didn't have names.
And when I was a kid, I took my first flute lesson
with a flutist from the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore.
And he gave me a flute.
You hold it like this.
He said, OK, put your thumb here and the finger there.
And I had the position, and I blow through the hole here.
And he's pointing on the page.
He said, that's a B. He showed me
what it looked like, he showed what it sounded like,
and he showed me how to finger it.
So at that moment, I identified the name of the note,
the position of the hand, and the intonation of the note.
There was the sound of the note, the key of the note.
This was now-- oh, I would guess 25 years later, 20 years later.
I'm sitting with this guy, and he tells me there
are no names to the notes.
And I almost fainted.
I was so shocked.
I felt like the floor had opened up
and I was floating in the air.
I said, Foday, I have to stop.
And I got up, and I had to walk out and walked around.
I said this is-- I couldn't fathom this,
that he could play music without knowing the names of the notes.
So we got over that.
We ended up being collaborators, and we've
done many, many concerts together.
He knows the names of the notes now, by the way.
But he never bothered to know them before that.
So when I began working with people from other traditions,
the way we understand music not emotionally
but structurally and intellectually--
it was very different.
Emotionally, I could understand it very quickly,
but how he thought about it I didn't.
This happened some years before.
It happened when I had been working with Ravi Shankar
and I was working with Alla Rahka.
I was learning the rhythmic system of Indian music.
That's the end of the story.
I won't get into it.
Anyway, that was another good story which
I'm not going to tell now.
But the point was that I began to see that in order
for musicians to play together who
come from-- we have to start to make some accommodation.
And when he went back to Africa, by the way,
and his friends found out he had retuned the instruments,
they were very upset.
They said, you can't retune the kora.
He said, well, if you want to play in Europe or America,
you've got to retune.
And they said, no, no, no.
We're not going to retune.
He said, well, then you're not going to play out.
You're not going to play there.
And so he said, well, let me hear you play.
And then he had retuned the kora,
and he was playing the kora.
And he said, it sounded perfect.
Same thing happened Ravi Shankar.
When he came to America and Europe
in person to some big concerts, back in India
they thought he had betrayed the raga,
and he had to go back to India and do it at a big concert.
He told me this.
He did a big concert in Bombay and one in Delhi,
and he had to prove to people he could still play the sitar.
They thought he had forgotten how to play it.
ARTURO BEJAR: Wow.
PHILIP GLASS: So the tuning thing is a big deal.
But what was interesting was I began
to understand that there's a relative truth to music,
and there's an absolute truth.
The absolute truth we have no problem with.
It's the relative truth that we have the problem
with, the tuning.
But when I don't have to do the tuning,
I can totally get-- working with the Mexican musicians,
I could not figure out how they counted.
They were doing it in a rhythmic cycle,
but it sounded to me like there would be a cycle of 15,
then a cycle of 15, a cycle of 15.
Then it'd be cycle of 14.
And I counted again, and every third time it would be 14.
I said, OK, I got it.
And then the next time they did it, it was 16.
I couldn't figure-- well, how do they--
do they just remember that?
And were they counting at all?
I think they weren't counting.
And I was playing with this one guy.
He was playing the-- we called it a guitar.
It looks like a guitar, but he built it himself.
We had someone translating into Spanish for me.
And I was playing with him a while,
and I was trying just to play with him, and after a while,
he said, you got it.
You got it.
And I began playing with them, and I missed it again.
I never figured out how to do it,
but what I figured out-- another thing.
A different thing.
I found out, if I played in a cycle
long enough, that the inconsistencies didn't matter.
Everything would add up to maybe 86 or something like that.
I had to work in a very big cycle,
and then we could be together.
ARTURO BEJAR: And that takes me to the-- he's
going to play a little bit, but there's one more question
before we play for a little bit and come back to talking later,
which is-- so you take these rooms that
have Jaron Lanier, Jonathan Rose,
the guy that comes from a technology background.
You've got Suso.
You've got all of these people from
different artistic sensibilities, instruments,
musical language.
They're all talented, strong-minded.
How do you get--
PHILIP GLASS: Well, at the beginning, in the early 60s,
we used to get together, and we'd have
what we called a world band.
And you'd find someone from Africa.
You'd get someone from India.
And you all get together, and it sounded terrible
because everybody was in a different key--
slightly different.
It's not that you were in a different key,
but the fourths were different, the thirds were different,
the sixths were different so that someone was always
out of tune, and we never sat down and retuned.
Basically, these world bands just dissolved,
and then after a while, no one did it anymore.
It didn't start up again until I began playing with people,
and we actually addressed the issue of tuning.
That's why it was so-- since we were in North America,
we used the European tuning.
Now there are certain instruments you can't use.
A Balaton, which is like a xylophone-- you can't return
it, so you won't find that instrument in any of the-- you
won't find the African balafon, but you'll
find in my music an American xylophone.
I have to pick one that's-- some things you can't tune.
In Australia, the didgeridoo player--
you know what a didgeridoo is?
A long-- I had one guy I played--
I love this guy, Mark Atkins.
And I said, Mark, how do you make-- where did you
get that instrument?
He said, well, I get a limb off a tree,
and then I put the ants in, and the ants eat their way
through the center.
He said, I have to come back in about maybe four, five weeks,
and then knock it out, and all the inside of it goes out,
and I have a long tube.
And he said, and that's what I play.
And I had this fantastic conversation, and I said, OK.
Now I was playing with him, and I said, how do you play that?
What are you thinking about when you're playing it?
He said, well-- and we're doing a piece called "Orion."
I did it with musicians from Brazil, from Africa,
from China.
I had five or six-- a guy, Ashton McIsaac
from Cape Breton, who played violin.
And so I began asking people where their music came from.
This was the most interesting thing.
I said, where does the music come from?
It's a very simple question.
And most said, oh, I'll tell you.
I get to this place in the music, and I close my eyes
and I see a kangaroo running across the outback,
and I play the music that goes with him.
I asked Ravi Shankar.
I ask everybody.
I ask everybody this question.
You get the most-- it's a very simple question,
and if you ask it not knowing what the answer is,
you'll get the answer.
They'll tell you what they think.
I asked Ravi Shankar once.
I said, Ravi, where does this music come from?
I was sitting with him in his hotel room in London.
It was years and years ago.
And he turned-- this is a great story.
He was sitting on the bed crossed legged,
and I was sitting in a chair, and on the table
was a picture of an Indian gentleman
in a narrow kind of coat.
He turned to the picture, and he did a full prostration,
bowed to the picture, and he said,
the grace of the guru, the music is coming to me.
That beautiful?
Now let me tell you one more because you'll like this one.
This is from the Indian Mexican guy.
I like to tell Mexican stories.
So we had done a concert together.
We had just done a concert together
in a little place called Real de Catorce with these two
musicians, and there was one guy who was our translator.
And we went on afterwards to have a nice fire.
And they like to do that.
Nice big fire outside.
Concert was over.
We all went out to do the fire.
[INAUDIBLE] was standing there, and I say, [INAUDIBLE], where
does that music come from?
The same question.
You'll never-- you can't imagine what people say.
Unimaginable things.
He said, well, I looked at my father--
my grandfather, the fire.
My grandfather, the fire, has no mouth,
so when he wants to sing, he has to use mine.
ARTURO BEJAR: Oh, wow.
PHILIP GLASS: I mean, these are revelations that are profound,
and I must say that I've gone through my life in music
talking to people very simply about music
and asking what-- and then people ask me the same thing.
I say-- I had even better-- I don't
know if I'll go into that.
Shall we go onto something else?
ARTURO BEJAR: Yes.
The piano, and then I'll ask you where that music came from.
PHILIP GLASS: Oh, OK.
OK.
I said I was going to play.
We had a wonderful concert yesterday,
and I thought I couldn't come here and not play tonight.
So it's going to be one piece called "Mad Rush."
I'm playing it because he likes that piece.
I hope you like it, too.
It's a piece originally written for the organ of St. John
the Divine, the cathedral in New York.
It was the occasion of the Dalai Lama's first visit
to New York in '78, and they were going to give a talk.
And the people who organized the event weren't sure
when he was going to arrive exactly, so they said, well,
why don't you-- could you play, just play some music until he
comes?
Oh, I didn't know when he was going to come, either.
So I had composed-- I composed the music for that,
and that occasion, I played for about half an--
I'm not gong to play for half an hour.
I'll play about 14 minutes.
So I made a piece of indefinite length.
Actually, not a problem.
On that occasion, it was half an hour,
but I'm going to play about half that version right now.
So this is-- oh, the piece is called "Mad Rush."
[APPLAUSE]
[PLAYING "MAD RUSH"]
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
Thank you.
ARTURO BEJAR: I love you, man.
PHILIP GLASS: What was that?
ARTURO BEJAR: I love you, man.
So where did that come from?
PHILIP GLASS: You know, I ask myself the same question.
I could never come up with the right answer.
But something-- I come up with an answer for a while.
I first say, well, music is a kind of language.
But you know, that's like saying a chicken is
kind of like a bird.
It doesn't tell you anything.
It doesn't tell you something you already don't know.
It didn't reveal anything to me, and I was very dissatisfied
with that, but for a long while, I had no answer.
So I would continue asking people.
And then about four or five years ago,
I was giving a talk, kind of like we're doing right now,
and someone in the audience said, well,
where does music come from?
And here's what I did.
I answered.
I said something I wasn't prepared to say.
It was almost like someone else had said it.
I said, well, music is a place.
It's as real as Chicago or Atlanta or Boston.
It's a place, and when you go to listen to music,
you go to that place.
I thought, OK.
I hadn't heard that one before, and I
thought that was-- that seems right to me.
ARTURO BEJAR: So one of the things
that I appreciate the most about your career
is that you have these collaborations,
like with Godfrey-- began with "Powaqqatsi,"
and made a movie a couple of years ago, a year or two ago.
You have Suso.
You have the ensemble that's been together
for a really long time.
And so how you manage to have all
of these great collaborative friendships
over that long a period of time and have them sustained?
PHILIP GLASS: You know, I'm-- music is,
above everything else, a social activity.
It's not only between myself and the audience.
It's between the people that play.
I accepted that very early.
As a boy, I played a flute in an orchestra.
I was 10 years old.
I was playing in the orchestra then.
Music to me was always something that people did together.
It wasn't a problem.
I've met now-- because of the-- I've
met several players, musicians here, on this trip here,
and I'm going to be playing with them at some point.
As soon as I hear somebody or I meet them, if I like them,
I want to play music with them, and then I find a way to do it.
Then I have to look and say, do I really have time to do this?
And I look, and it goes, yeah, there is a state.
And I find it, and I just put the date in.
Yeah.
It's like I kind of, I would say-- not an obsession,
because it has a negative sound to it.
It's an attraction that is very strong for me.
And so all playing with other people-- I do do concerts.
I do solo concerts, and I like to do them in a certain way
because when I do solo concerts, I can often
play pieces differently.
If I play with other people, then I have to play the way
I wrote it.
Well, that's pretty much the way I wrote it.
But I'd like to do solo concerts also
because that's something different.
It is not so much about playing with another person
but playing in front of people.
Now this is the most interesting thing.
Music is a transaction between-- that's what we say in language.
But it's something that passes between us.
You know, they found-- I read this a year or so ago.
They found in some caves-- these caves are always
in France for some reason.
They found-- they think it's an instrument.
They found wings of a pigeon that were hollowed out,
and they just thought that these were
very early versions of flute.
70,000 years ago.
You know, I think that was the first language.
Maybe people picked it up, and they made a song.
Do you go to-- you know, I also never miss
going to one of these natural history museums
and going-- I find them extremely--
not only to hear, to see what contemporary people are like
but to go back in time.
That's why I really-- Jonathan spoke about the first city, Ur.
So interesting for me.
The thing is that our humanness, the thing that
makes us distinct from-- it seems unique, in a way.
Of course, it's probably maybe not unique,
but it strikes us that way.
It's not just our attachment.
Even our-- what is the opposite of attachment?
We're repelled by certain activities, certain people.
Whatever it is, whether we're attracted to it
or repelled by it, it's so strong.
You know, this is an interesting thing.
We talk about the art of ancient times,
and we look at-- we can see the vases from Egypt
or the pyramids in Mexico or the clothing
they find that's left over from some nomadic people living
in Siberia or someplace like that.
Everything-- I find that extremely interesting
and deeply moving, and I'm not sure why,
because I don't need to read about it.
I just need to be in the presence of it.
So in a way, you say, how do I do it?
I'm drawn to do it.
It's my nature to play music, and I've played it all my life.
And if I meet someone, if I have any connection to them
at all-- they can play music?
I'll play music with them, because something happens.
Isn't that so?
ARTURO BEJAR: Yeah.
I've seen that.
And so coming back to the festival, what would
be your vision or your hope?
PHILIP GLASS: My what?
ARTURO BEJAR: Vision or hope around the--
PHILIP GLASS: I would like-- we're building the festival up.
This year, Victor Sanchez has come from Mexico.
He works in the field of what we call human development,
human behavior.
He has amazing things that he does.
He takes people into the desert or-- and there, we're
going to go into a number of national forests in the area.
Pfeiffer Forest is right there down there in Big Sur.
And he goes into-- he goes in with 10, 20, sometimes
30 people, and they can go for a week.
I think what we're going to do there-- he'll
work in the daytime with a group of people.
And these are actually transforming experiences
because he's spent his life doing this.
And he's found out things in nature
which you have no idea what they are.
I've seen them, because I've been with him.
So his coming, he'll be in the daytime.
Then we have the concerts at night.
And it will be, or they'll be-- in this case,
we have a movie of Laurie Anderson called-- her dog
movie, wonderful movie.
And she just made it.
And then the second night, I'm doing an evening
of poetry and music with her.
Then we have the Club Diamond, which
is a small but very intense and beautiful
theater piece for one performer and a musician,
and based on the activity of street performers
in Tokyo who go around and entertain children,
and they give them candy, and they-- they just go from place
to place and do that.
And this character is the character of this piece.
You have to see it.
It's really beautiful.
We're going to have some music before then,
but I'm going to get some music, some younger composers.
Then the next night, we have this piece by Jerry Quickley.
It's called "The Whistleblower."
It's about--
ARTURO BEJAR: Edward Snowden--
PHILIP GLASS: Yeah.
ARTURO BEJAR: --and the surveillance state and--
PHILIP GLASS: Yeah, the whole thing.
And it's wildly funny and touching.
And it's mixed in with parts about Allen Ginsberg.
And now how he did that, I don't know.
But he's got Allen in there too.
ARTURO BEJAR: Yeah, I'll expand on that a little bit.
The Allen Ginsberg piece is written
from the perspective of the agent that
is signed to surveil him.
And it's derived from the papers that they
got published about this agent that was surveilling Ginsberg.
And it's amazing.
PHILIP GLASS: Yeah, he got the papers
from the Freedom of Information Act.
He got these papers.
And it becomes the thing.
And so we have that one.
So then we'll have some-- and then Foday Suso will playing.
I'll be in front.
We'll be doing a musical.
We'll be doing-- I think that's one where I think that our bass
player will be playing with.
That's with a string quartet with Jerry Quickley.
But I think it will just be Foday and myself.
ARTURO BEJAR: Yeah.
PHILIP GLASS: So it's-- with a very few handful of people,
we cover a huge, a very big area of activity.
ARTURO BEJAR: Yeah.
And so, like, if the festival sounds really cool--
and I wanted-- if you have any questions that you want
to ask him, part of the goal of coming here today
is feel free to ask him anything.
We still have some time, and I wanted
to allow enough time for that.
But if the idea of the festival sounds like really interesting
to you and you want to be involved or engaged
in some way, just grab me when we're done here.
PHILIP GLASS: You have some information, yeah.
ARTURO BEJAR: And we can take it from there.
Because I think it's extraordinary
that-- like you were anywhere else in the world,
you would go to New York.
And you would perform at Carnegie Hall, or the Met,
and you'd come out, do your thing, and then you'd be out.
And they'll be waving from the audience,
but it would be about it.
And here there's an opportunity to be with 100, 200 people,
and--
PHILIP GLASS: Maybe 300 of them.
We're at the Henry Miller Library,
which is an outdoor venue in the Redwoods.
And it's just very intimate.
And it probably could be 300 people.
He is-- it's legal now for him to do these concerts.
But he had to get some kind of permit
through the state or something.
And they're allowing him 300 people.
ARTURO BEJAR: OK.
So does anybody have any questions
that they would like to ask Phil?
And please, come up to the microphone.
AUDIENCE: Hi, how are you?
Actually, first question would be,
when is the Henry Miller show?
ARTURO BEJAR: The Henry Miller Memorial Library--
AUDIENCE: Ah.
ARTURO BEJAR: --last weekend of September.
PHILIP GLASS: It's in Big Sur.
ARTURO BEJAR: In Big Sur.
AUDIENCE: Last weekend-- OK, great.
I had a question.
I play music most of my life.
And it's great to see someone with such a library
and done so much.
And one thing I've seen, including myself,
is a lot of people who play music do it out of passion.
And then they lose that passion, or they become uninspired.
And you spoke a little earlier about, like,
someone being inspired is as simple as a imagining
a kangaroo running.
And I was just wondering, what is your inspiration,
or how do you continue to find inspiration in writing music
throughout your entire life?
PHILIP GLASS: I didn't completely hear.
ARTURO BEJAR: Yeah, so how do find and keep inspiration
throughout your life?
What feeds your creative--
PHILIP GLASS: Oh, it's my insane, intense curiosity
really.
I find it all so interesting.
I have no trouble-- I have trouble sleeping
in the morning.
I get up early and start thinking about this stuff.
Right now, I'm working on the music
for Jerry's piece, which we're going to be
starting to rehearse in May.
So I get up for that.
And then I'm working on a new symphony later in the day.
I don't know.
I find it very interesting.
And right now, there's a movement
in the world of performance and music of younger people,
people in their 20s and early 30s, that's
extremely interesting.
And it's happening-- this happened--
OK, I can tell you that many of you don't know this.
But 60 year ago, when the McCarthy communist trials
were going on, at that time, it was a terrible time.
It was even as-- it was as bad as Trump.
It was really that bad.
[LAUGHTER]
I mean, Trump-- McCarthy was a real-- anyway--
[LAUGHTER]
And at that time, what happened--
you had Allen Ginsberg coming around then.
And then you had William Burroughs.
And you had all this-- there was a sudden explosion of the art,
of creativity.
And I began to think, that's mother nature balancing it.
You know, you get some insanity here.
Then you have to have some art over here to make it bearable.
I really believe that's true.
Now we're in the-- I don't have to tell you.
The news, you can barely watch it.
It's gotten horrific.
It's terrible.
And yet at the same time, I find young people
as more idealistic and committed to self-expression
and exploration of their humanity
than I have seen in 30 or 40 years.
It's very, very-- if you-- it's a very, very rich time
right now for poets, for musicians, for artists.
So if you get tired of watching this junk on television,
go out and see some of the stuff.
It's really-- I'm sure that you can find it.
It's all over the place.
AUDIENCE: I try to fill my life with that on a daily basis.
Thank you.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
About five years ago, a friend of mine
said that she had just released an album
of her own compositions.
And I said, oh, that's nice.
I've never been able to compose music.
And she said, your best friend just died.
Go over to the piano and play something.
OK.
And I went over and started at A minor and something.
And then it kind of worked into another key.
And then it finished.
And I-- I never experienced anything like that.
And since then-- then my first thought is,
well, is this really music?
You know, because I did it.
But it was, you know, now--
PHILIP GLASS: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: --I can play some things.
PHILIP GLASS: By the way, you're the piano tuner right?
AUDIENCE: Yes.
PHILIP GLASS: This is the guy that tuned the piano.
[APPLAUSE]
And he told me just before the concert,
he said, yeah, I've been tuning the piano all my life.
And I've just started to write music now.
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]
PHILIP GLASS: So maybe he'll--
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
PHILIP GLASS: Thank you for your thoughts.
AUDIENCE: Well, first I want to thank you for being here.
You've been sort of one of the gods of my musical pantheon
since I first saw [INAUDIBLE] back in the early '80s
when it first came out.
I wanted to know if you thought about
or if you've talked about how the internet
and the communication technology we have now and sort
of the democratizing out elements of that
are part of that explosion of creativity and self-expression
you had just mentioned.
PHILIP GLASS: I didn't quite hear.
ARTURO BEJAR: So how does the-- how do
you think the internet has democratized and opened up
creativity?
PHILIP GLASS: It's helped me a lot.
I was writing music for a play recently.
I was in the theater.
And the director said, I need a song for the end of the play.
So I-- I was watching-- I wrote the song.
And I took a picture of it was my camera, my little, you know,
iPhone.
And I sent it on the internet to my office downtown.
They took it.
They turned it into-- a person down there made a demo from it.
And a few minutes later, he sent it up by internet.
I had a version of the piece done within about an hour.
That's the internet for you.
I mean, you can't knock that.
And I said, oh, here's-- I got the song.
Do you want to give a-- he said, when did you write it?
I said, while you were rehearsing,
so I just decided to write it.
[LAUGHTER]
And he said, do you want to give it to Ed now?
He said, well, yeah, yeah.
We'll give it to-- so that song ended up--
so the internet's amazing.
[LAUGHTER]
You know, when I find out-- first
I thought I had to scan things.
Then I realized I could just take a picture
and send the picture to the-- and someone would put it
into the computer.
And amazing, huh?
So how does it-- I find it mainly helpful.
It helps me to-- years ago when I
was working on a-- I was working on a,
I think it was "The Hours" or something like that.
It was a movie.
But it was being recorded in London.
And the director called me up-- I
was living in-- I was in Nova Scotia.
He said, I need some changes.
I need it by tomorrow afternoon.
I said, Scott, you're not going to get tomorrow afternoon.
He said, yes I will.
I said, what are you going to do?
He said, someone's flying to Halifax right now.
They'll be at your door in six hours.
Do the rewrite.
Give it to him.
He'll get back on the plane.
And I'll have it by tomorrow afternoon.
And he did.
So that was the old days.
Today, he would just called me and said, hey send the piece.
And I would send it by internet.
It's amazing, huh?
I was asked, are there any bad-- I guess there are bad things.
But I tend to--
[LAUGHTER]
I tend to look at the positive stuff.
And you've probably gathered that already.
I tend to look at the positive sides of things.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: Good afternoon.
My name is Rick.
I assume decades ago when you started composing,
you used paper, pencil, score sheet, and piano.
As the decades go by, technology became available.
Have you changed your process to use software?
PHILIP GLASS: Well, no.
I still use-- now what I have to do,
the people that make the music paper don't do it anymore.
But what I found is that their printers, if you give them
a sample of what you want, they'll print it for you.
I'm still running with pencil and paper.
AUDIENCE: You are.
PHILIP GLASS: I am.
And then what I have, I have some young fellows
that work in the studio for me.
And they put it into the computer.
Once it gets in the computer, now anybody can deal with it.
But that the manuscript, no one can deal with that anymore.
AUDIENCE: Because I use software.
I use technology devices.
Sometimes I use my phone for an idea.
And then I go to the paper, and you know.
I'm wondering iff--
PHILIP GLASS: Well, you're using both.
I find that, you know, at this point,
my friends say, well, why don't you just
learn to write it into a computer?
And I-- you know, I say, well, how long will
it take me to really learn to do it?
They say about six weeks.
And I said, six weeks-- I can write a string
quartet in six weeks.
[LAUGHTER]
I said, well, what would you rather me do, write
a string quartet or to learn how-- he said,
no you go write the string quartet.
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]
AUDIENCE: Thank you very much.
PHILIP GLASS: But, you know, there's
another thing about the manuscript, by the way.
I've got-- I don't want to tell you how many thousands of pages
I've got of manuscript.
If you write music-- and you have files, right?
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
PHILIP GLASS: I can sell my manuscripts.
You can sell your files.
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: But I can print and become files, right?
PHILIP GLASS: Well, OK.
OK, I'll give you that.
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: Hi, thank you so much for coming, Philip,
and amazing performance of "Mad Rush."
So Bradley was mentioning in the beginning of
to talk about how touched he was yesterday by the performance.
And I was very touched by your performance as well.
I'm going to treasure it forever.
I think we all have these performances
that we get to see-- and it can be something very
formal like at Carnegie Hall, or it
can be somebody playing the guitar in front of you--
that we treasure very much.
And I would like to ask you, do you
have one or a few specific things
that you witnessed in music that you would like
to take with you to eternity?
PHILIP GLASS: There are two things
I saw that were really amazing.
When I was about 18 or 17 or 18, I was in New York
and Segovia came to play at Carnegie Hall.
Carnegie Hall is a pretty big hall.
He sat at the front of the stage in a chair.
And he's kind of a little guy.
He leaned over with the guitar-- the place was packed--
and began playing very quietly.
After about a few minutes, it filled the room.
You could hear every note he did.
And he sat and just played for maybe, maybe 75, 80 minutes.
It was a memorable concert.
Then I had another memorable concert about the same time.
I was at the Village Vanguard in New York.
And John Coltrane was playing with a band.
And he was playing insanely good, beautiful music.
But you know how a band will come.
They'll come-- it was break time.
So the band stopped, and they went to the bar.
John Coltrane just kept playing.
He played straight through the break.
He was still playing-- he was still playing
the changes in everything.
They came back from the break.
They picked up their instruments.
And they just started playing again.
[LAUGHTER]
He never stopped, I said, oh boy,
that's-- that's a monster--
[LAUGHTER]
PHILIP GLASS: --a monster talent.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
ARTURO BEJAR: Thank you.
Yes?
AUDIENCE: Hi there.
So you told a story earlier about
when you were playing with a musician who
played the gourd harp, and how the tuning was
very different from your piano and sort of the consonances
that you're used to, and that you didn't tune your piano
to adjust to him.
And he adjusted to you.
Have you ever had to adjust to another tuning
system in a collaboration and really
had to internalize what they consider consonances
as we might consider dissonances?
And if so, what was your experience with that?
PHILIP GLASS: Well, I haven't.
When I work with people, mostly the people who
have been-- they might be Indian,
or from Africa, or maybe from Australia-- the Australian,
that guy, in order to change keys,
he had a-- he had another instrument with him.
He couldn't just cut off part of it, or he wasn't willing to.
Mostly, it's just the way it is.
I mean, we have all-- they're over here where we are.
We've got all these instruments playing.
So for six or eight of us to change our tuning
and there's one guy who's out of tune-- well,
he's not really out of tune.
He's playing in his own tuning.
It's easier for him to change than for us.
And we usually do it that way.
I haven't had to do that.
ARTURO BEJAR: Yeah, but separate from tuning,
like I thought when I've heard you
talk about when you first got exposed to [INAUDIBLE] music.
PHILIP GLASS: Yeah.
ARTURO BEJAR: And you were trying to notate,
and you kept getting it-- they--
PHILIP GLASS: Well, that's different.
I had problems with the rhythmic structure.
This wasn't about the tuning.
I could write them.
Because [INAUDIBLE], he-- I asked him
what he was going to do.
He said, well, I'm going to play [INAUDIBLE] which is usually
in F sharp.
But I'm going to play it down half a step enough
for everybody else.
And that's what he did.
So it made it very easy for us.
But I was writing down the music.
And Alla Rahka, the tabla player said, no, the accents
are in the wrong place, the wrong place,
they're in the wrong place.
And I didn't know what he meant.
So I would try and write it out again in a different way.
And he said, no.
And he says, the notes are the same.
Well, the notes are the same.
I don't know what the hell he was talking about.
It was the first morning of our collab.
You know, I was hired for that morning.
And I couldn't afford to get fired.
I was living on a very small fellowship in Paris.
And I knew I was-- I had to solve this problem.
And it's nothing like-- it was like, I say,
I think I've got an execution to focus the mind.
So my execution would have been if I got fired.
And I looked at the music paper.
And I did an inspiring thing.
I took my eraser, and I erased all the bar lines.
And I looked at it again.
And I saw a string of notes.
And I looked at it, and now I saw groups of twos and threes.
I didn't see the bar lines anymore.
I saw three, three, two, two, two, three, three, two, two.
And I realized, just by looking at it.
And I saw that-- I don't know how
I did this very, very quickly.
I saw that the first four or five notes,
they would add up to 16.
The second was 16.
The third one was 16.
And I saw that there was a larger group of 16
that all the threes and twos fit into.
And so I just put the bar line there.
And I said, what's this?
And he said, oh, that's called the tal.
And the tal just means the length, the length of the--
and I found out later that it could be 14 beats.
It could be 17 beats.
It could be 8 beats.
But the music have to follow that all the way through.
And then I found out also later--
I didn't know this at the time-- that when
they play the first beat, they call that the som.
Now when the sitar player was playing with the tabla player,
sometimes they would be together at the som.
But sometimes they would purposely
miss the som for two or three cycles.
And if you were in the audience, the audience was like this.
They're getting very nervous.
And finally, they came to the som.
And they go, [SIGH].
[LAUGHTER]
It was the most amazing thing.
This was in China.
It was a madras at the time when I first saw this happen.
And the whole audience just went-- when everyone hit.
But so the play of the music had to do
with the length of the rhythm, not with the key of the piece.
You know, in Western music, the tension
is between the tonality and the-- between the harmony
and the melody.
I'll put it that way.
For traditional rhythmic music, it's mostly just decorative,
really.
And in Indian music, the tension was completely
between the rhythm and the vocal line.
There was no harmony.
But I was really-- thinking back on it,
that probably changed my life, the fact that I figured that.
I don't even know how I did.
It was just luck in a certain way.
If I had got-- because after that,
I stayed with Ravi for the rest of that week.
And I began working with him.
And later on, I played music with him.
So it became-- it opened up a whole world of music for me.
Had I missed that moment, I would've been fired.
And I wouldn't be-- I'll be teaching counterpoint
in some jerk work conservatory in Ohio or someplace.
[LAUGHTER]
ARTURO BEJAR: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: That sounds awesome.
Thank you.
AUDIENCE: I'm trying to figure out how to phrase this.
So you write a piece of music, people perform it, right?
We have pieces of music.
And that's been going on for quite a long time.
But there's this modern phenomenon
of mashing up and re-mixing, which
seems to be throwing all of that for a loop.
People write lots of tiny pits of music.
People perform by--
PHILIP GLASS: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
AUDIENCE: What do you think of that?
It seems to be changing--
PHILIP GLASS: I actually encourage it.
When someone other-- we have a record that we put out
on our record company where we had people do
covers of pieces of mine.
AUDIENCE: Mhm.
PHILIP GLASS: They did exactly what you're saying.
AUDIENCE: Right.
PHILIP GLASS: They-- and I said, oh, you know,
I wrote it that way.
But let me hear what someone else thinks about it.
I was always interested in what they did.
Now, that's not always true.
I just had a conversation with a conductor who
was looking at a new piece of mine
for two pianos and an orchestra.
It's a double piano concerto.
He said, well, I'm going to the rehearsal tomorrow.
But I have to tell you that I think the writing is much too
thick for the orchestra.
I said, yeah-- I said, Dennis, that's
what I'm writing these days.
I'm writing very dense music.
I said, look, if you want to, just thin it out if you want.
You can play it any way you want to.
It's not going to bother me.
Of course, when I was thinking to myself,
I'll just put the music right back afterwards anyway.
[LAUGHTER]
It wasn't going to change it.
But I said, if it makes you happy to do it that way,
just go ahead and do it.
And he called me up the next day.
And he said, well, we tried it out.
I tried it out with your orchestration,
and it sounded great.
He said-- it was the first time this guy had ever said to me--
he said, I was wrong, and you were right.
He never had said that.
He's been playing music of mine for 30 years-- first time
he said, no, you were right.
And I said-- I said this before, maybe yesterday-- what happens
is that you begin to hear music differently.
Now if I can hear it differently,
so I hear-- what sounds right to me sounds different.
I'm not even sure why that is.
The neurologists say that the brain continues to evolve,
you know?
Or does it devolve?
I don't know.
But I find that I hear-- I'm actually hearing things
differently.
And I'm writing different music.
And I don't know why, except things sound right to me
that didn't sound right to me before.
And I write them down.
And I make everyone play it the way I wrote it.
[LAUGHTER]
And people who know the music very well
will try to correct it.
And I say-- they said, this is wrong.
And I said, no, it's not wrong.
Just play the way I wrote it.
But apart from that, a lot of people
make arrangements, like a flutist will make arrangements
of a violin concerto, because there
is no-- they haven't written a flute concerto.
Or someone will take a piece for orchestra
and they'll play it with a smaller orchestra.
And they'll say, what do you think?
And I say, well, I think, if you make an arrangement,
I want a copy of it.
And it will belong to my company.
And we'll rent it out to other people if it's good.
And if it isn't good, I won't use it.
Well, I don't really-- the same thing with dance companies,
and they want to take a piece of music.
They said, do you want to see our company dance?
I said, hell no.
Just take the music, and do the dance.
What am I going to do, tell them I don't like the dance?
[LAUGHTER]
What do I know about dance?
So I'm actually more interested in what other people think,
except when it's a new piece and I'm
worrying-- I'm working on language,
then I want to hear-- I'm very obsessed right
now with a different language in my music.
That's happened in the last two or three years.
I can see that is happening.
And a cellist friend of mine was playing a [INAUDIBLE]
I wrote for the solo cello.
And I went to hear the recording.
And it took them hours to record.
It took him really about an hour or two just to record it.
I said, what do you think?
I said, Matt, what do you think of this?
He said, well it's an amazing piece of music.
I said, yeah, but who the hell is going to play it?
He said, oh, people will play it.
He said, they'll learn to play it, and they'll play it.
And that's probably true.
Now, but is that a good idea?
I don't know.
I don't know the answer to these things.
In many ways, I'm-- in many ways,
after the moment of writing, I'm just another listener.
It depends whether I still got my composer hat on.
If my composer hat isn't on, I don't hear it that way anymore.
And I'm very open to different things.
I rarely tell people that they've
done it wrong unless they've actually done it wrong.
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
MALE SPEAKER: Unfortunately-- is this a yes/no question?
AUDIENCE: It's a little--
MALE SPEAKER: If it's a short question with a short answer,
we can do this.
PHILIP GLASS: The short answer is the hard part.
Sorry about that.
AUDIENCE: I'm not going to say that.
But the answer doesn't depend on me, I guess.
I'm just kind of curious about the creative process,
your creative process in general.
[LAUGHTER]
Can I?
MALE SPEAKER: The answer is yes.
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: So one thing I find amazing and fascinating
about music is how-- you know, I've heard analysis of pieces
by Chopin, Beethoven, where there's
this small motif of three, four notes that-- you know,
it's gradually generates the whole entirety of a piece.
And I find it absolutely incredible
how that process can come up, how the process works
to come up with that piece, yet you
have these little repetitive motifs from beginning to end.
And I wonder, how do you do it?
What your process?
Do you start with the whole?
Do you start with some melodies, with some small idea?
PHILIP GLASS: It can be anything, really.
But a lot of it is detail.
I was watching my-- I have a 14-year-old son that
was drawing a drawing the other day.
And he was doing the tiniest little lines.
He just took his time and just put all the lines
that he wanted to.
And he-- I could see he was getting
obsessed with some detail.
And that happens in music too.
And now, particularly, I'll write a piece.
And I'll write music.
And I'll hear it the next-- I'll go back and play it
the next day.
I'll play it on the piano or look at it.
And I'm not sure I got it right.
The problem is that I hear it right.
And the biggest problem is, am I writing down what I heard?
And once I write it down, I'm not sure anymore.
Because the evidence of the written music
can be compelling, but it might not be correct.
And one of the biggest problems that I have
is, am I writing down what I hear?
And I'm not sure.
I do my best.
I think everyone has a problem.
I hear-- I listen to the "Grosse Fuge" of Beethoven.
I'm not sure of some of those notes.
Maybe he didn't hear them either.
I don't know.
But you hear that in other people's music, don't you?
Or are you a musician?
AUDIENCE: I wish.
PHILIP GLASS: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: A very poor one.
PHILIP GLASS: But you can hear things.
And you say, I wonder if that-- I don't know.
OK, I'm sorry we ran out of time.
MALE SPEAKER: No, this was such a treat.
We really, on behalf of Google, really
want to thank both of you for the wisdom you shared,
the performance.
It was really special and meaningful for us.
Thank you so much.
PHILIP GLASS: Thank you.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
[APPLAUSE]