One of the most common misunderstandings was that the music just repeated all the time. What made it listenable were precisely the changes.

Chuck Close - Philip Glass, 1969

 

The Quaker philosophy is consistent with ideas that developed in me later. I never wanted to be a Quaker, but I did send my first two children to a Quaker school in Manhattan, Friends Seminary on Fifteenth Street off Second Avenue. I liked their philosophy of life, work, and spirit. Bedrock ideas of social responsibility and change through nonviolence came to me through the Quakers. When people’s lives reflect ideas like that, their behavior becomes automatically part of a bigger picture. (pp. 22-23*)

I sometimes hear about work described in terms of “originality,” or “breakthrough,” but my personal experience is quite different. For me music has always been about lineage. The past is reinvented and becomes the future. But the lineage is everything. (p. 46*)

Dissonance and beauty are, of course, not actually very different from each other. (p. 51*)

The next moment I had a deeper realization: the rate of change in the visual arts world was far, far quicker than could ever happen in the music world. The world of painting expected innovation and new ideas, but in the world of music, which was a much more conservative environment, there was no cachet at all in having new ideas. The music world was still obsessed with “new music” that was more than fifty years old. This was a liberating moment for me. (p. 78*)

The activity of the listener is to listen. But it’s also the activity of the composer. If you apply that to the performer, what is the performer actually doing? What is the proper attitude for the performer when he is playing? The proper attitude is this: the performer must be listening to what he’s playing. And this is far from automatic. You can be playing and not pay attention to listening. It’s only when you’re engaged with the listening while you’re playing that the music takes on the creative unfolding, the moment of creativity, which is actually every moment. That moment becomes framed, as it were, in a performance. A performance becomes a formal framing of the activity of listening, and that would be true for the player as well.
When I’m playing a concert now, I know that what I must do is to listen to the music. Now, here are some curious questions: When does that listening take place? Does it take place in the present? Do you listen to what you’re playing, or do you listen to what you’re about to play? (p. 92*)

Albert’s death was a personal tragedy for all his friends. It was also part of what was really a worldwide tragedy. The world I knew well and lived in and worked in—the world of dance and music theater, as well as the world of painters, composers, writers, and performers of all kinds—was decimated. During the 1980s it was as if the loss of life and talent were an unrelenting wave of pain and death to a degree that was literally unimaginable to most of us. (p. 93*)

The amount and depth of the talent lost was continuous throughout every day, week, and month of that decade. It was as if a reign of terror had been inflicted on a generation—really, it was cross-generational—of performers and art makers. It was a catastrophic time, for sure. (p. 94*)

Progressive art-making has always been the haven for non-conformists and innovators, and not surprisingly the gay community has contributed splendidly and with terrific commitment to the arts. (p. 94*)

It was a time of awakening. The culture encouraged you to make a profound change in your life through the way you saw the world. (p. 98*)

In spite of my constant reading, I wasn’t a literary person. I didn’t study books and I didn’t take courses in literature. I pursued literature as a personal refreshment. My opinions didn’t need to be authenticated or verified by anyone else. I read books for pleasure and their transformative power. (p. 99*)

Years later, in 1987, I wrote a violin concerto for Ben. I knew he loved the Mendelssohn violin concerto, so I wrote it in a way that he would have liked. In his actual lifetime I didn’t have the knowledge, skill, or inclination to compose such a work. I missed that chance by at least fifteen years. But when I could, I wrote it for him anyway. (pp. 114-115*)

That was one of the things I loved about France and the French. As an artist in that country, one was respected and routinely well treated. (p. 116*)

Once you get into the world of theater and you’re referencing all its elements—movement, image, text, and music—unexpected things can take place. The composer then finds himself unprepared—in a situation where he doesn’t know what to do. If you don’t know what to do, there’s actually a chance of doing something new. As long as you know what you’re doing, nothing much of interest is going to happen. (p. 119*)

[...] there could be many correct solutions to a musical problem. Those many correct solutions came under the rubric of technique. However, the particular way a composer solved the problem, or (to put it another way) his or her predilection for one solution over several others, became the audible style of the composer. Almost like a fingerprint. Finally, to sum this all up, a personal style in a composer’s work makes it a simple matter for us to distinguish, almost instantly, one composer from another. (p. 136*)

We understand the world because of the way we were taught to see. That’s why we become Americans, we become Indians, we become Eskimos. We see that world because that’s what was installed, almost banged, into our heads when we were very, very young. But it’s also possible to step out of that world. (p. 185*)

At first, it wasn’t easy for me to accept the idea that my pursuits of these various paths had anything to do with music. But my friends who are professionals in this business all said, “No, no, no, it’s the same thing.”
I finally arrived at that conclusion, but with some difficulty. Still, even today it’s an idea that does not come to me easily. However, the mental concentration and physical stamina that result from these disciplines is virtually identical to that needed in music making and performing. To this point, I can’t even say which comes first. My personal experience is that they nourish and support each other. (p. 185*)

Because of the artists like Cage and Beckett who came before us, we didn’t have to take everything apart, since it had already been taken apart. We didn’t have to destroy the idea of the novel—Beckett’s Molloy and Malone Dies had done that. In many ways, Cage and Beckett cleared the playing field and gave us permission to start playing again. We were the beneficiaries. (p. 196*)

Glassworks. II. Floe (1981) [2 flutes, 2 sopranos, 2 tenors, 2 horns, DX7 synthetizer]

 

[...] music that probably sounded like the needle was stuck in the groove—that’s what people used to say. (p. 203*)

[...] the process was based on repetition and change. This made the language easier to understand, because the listener would have time to contemplate it at the same time as it was moving so quickly. It was a way of paying attention to the music, rather than to the story the music might be telling. (p. 203*)

There is a psychology of listening involved in this. One of the most common misunderstandings of the music was that the music just repeated all the time. Actually, it never repeated all the time, for if it had, it would have been unlistenable. What made it listenable were precisely the changes. (p. 203*)

I must have been a big worry to her and Ben. They weren’t happy about my marriage to JoAnne, and my choice of a vocation—composing music—had never made them happy either. Once I had left for Chicago in 1952, I never again needed their permission. I didn’t ask for it, and I never got it. We just left it at that.
Though the concert was beautifully played and very rewarding for Dorothy, Jon, and myself, the fact of the matter was that there were only six (six!) people in the audience—one being my mother, Ida Glass herself. I don’t believe that she, unlike my dad, had any ear for music, but she could count, and the number of heads that made up the extremely small audience must have seemed a disaster. It had been an afternoon concert, and since Ida had never planned on spending the night in New York, I accompanied her back to Penn Station. The only comment she made was that my hair was too long. (p. 205*)

I came to understand that people in comas can hear things. You have to be careful what you say, and also, you can talk to them. Later on, I got used to talking to people that were dying, because that’s one of the things that life is about. Death becomes familiar. It doesn’t become a secret ritual. It becomes something that happens to your friends and your family. (p. 206*)

Effectively, I now had two systems: a closed system and an open system. “Music in Contrary Motion” represented the closed system, in which the compositional process reached a point where it was unable to offer any new musical development. This is like having a table filled with glasses and at a certain point, there would be no room for any more glasses. The open system, represented by “Music in Similar Motion,” would be like adding a new table when the first table is filled.
Interestingly, this description of open and closed systems does not exist in any book on theory that I’ve ever seen. In this way, it became evident to me that I was working with a new language of structure. (p. 221*)

I soon began picking up what Richard was doing. In fact, from the beginning he took over my art education quite seriously. He realized right away that for me to be useful he needed to talk to me and I had to understand what he was talking about. (p. 223*)

When I look back, the biggest influence on my music has been in fact the energy system known as New York City. The city is in the music, especially the early ensemble music. (p. 234*)

There was a huge explosion going on in New York in the 1960s when the art world, the theater world, the dance world, and the music world all came together. It was a party that never stopped, and I felt like I was in the middle of it. (p. 237*)

All I have to do after I have the vision is to find the language of music to describe what I have heard, which can take a certain amount of time. I’ve been working in the language of music all my life, and it’s within that language that I’ve learned how ideas can unfold. (p. 260*)

Something I have known from the beginning of my work in theater is that music is the unifying force that will take the viewer-spectator from the start through to the end, whether in opera, theater, dance, or film. This force doesn’t come from images, movement, or words. If you watch television and put on different records, with different music, the same images will look different. Now, try it the other way around. Keep the music the same and change the channels. The integrity of the energy remains in the music and changing the image doesn’t alter that fact. (p. 265*)

I knew right away that the image and the music could not be on top of each other, because then there would be no room for the spectators to invent a place for themselves. (p. 301*)

Piano was my instrument—that’s where I started—but I had come to see that it was just a small part of the world of music. It wasn’t the whole world. (p. 309*)

In other words, the artist has to gather up his ordinary ability to see or hear, and he has to see better, farther, and more clearly than he ever did before. With this we are now moving out of the ordinary perception into the extraordinary perception that the artist has when he is writing. (p. 343*)

In order to do that, a sacrifice has to be made, as Cocteau, speaking through Death/the Princess, says in Orphée. In fact, something has to be given up. What is given up is the last thing left that we are holding on to: the function of attention we use when watching ourselves. (p. 343*)

A lot of writing is the effort made in trying to hear. The question for me always is “Is that what I’m hearing?”
[...] But when composing, this new music doesn’t have the benefit of having had a prior existence of any kind at all. A particular piece has zero existence until the moment of its creation. Therefore, the question comes back to “Can I describe what I heard?” (p. 345*)

Openings and closings, beginnings and endings. Everything in between passes as quickly as the blink of an eye. An eternity precedes the opening and another, if not the same, follows the closing. Somehow everything that lies in between seems for a moment more vivid. What is real to us becomes forgotten, and what we don’t understand will be forgotten, too. (p. 351)

I’m not thinking about music, I’m thinking music. My brain thinks music. It doesn’t think words. If I were thinking words, then I would try to find music to fit the words. But I’m not doing that, either. (p. 352*)
*as indicated on my reader

Philip Glass - Words without Music (Liveright, 2015)