ARTicles vol. 1 i.4: Sounds and Voices

Composer Philip Glass has spent most of his adult life in the theater. And it’s obvious, when one listens to his music, that he has real dramatic instincts. He’s honed these instincts in his voluminous yet varied output for all kinds of drama: theater and dance, film and opera.

How did Glass get here? Well, he’s written theater music for years. His first work for theater was an hour-long piece composed for Lee Breuer’s production of Samuel Beckett’s Play, first performed at the American Cultural Center in Paris in 1965. The score was written in Glass’s nascent Minimalist style and proved to be a seminal work for him for several reasons. First, it created a large structure through “simple” means. Two soprano saxophones play two lines with two notes each in two different repeating rhythms. Together these rhythms produce a pulsing, shifting pattern of sound. Second, Glass was forcibly struck by the fact that he experienced an epiphany in a different place each time he saw the play. This happened, he came to understand, because Beckett had constructed Play in an open, abstract way so that each moment could be felt anew. Glass took the work in and personalized it. And this personal engagement with his material – whoever or whatever its author – explains why his music works theatrically.

Soon after Play, Glass and Breuer founded the experimental theater collective Mabou Mines with JoAnne Akalaitis, Ruth Maleczech, and David Warrilow. Glass subsequently scored several other Beckett works for the troupe – The Lost Ones (1974); Cascando (1975); Mercier and Camier (1979); and Company (1983). And there was, of course, Akalaitis’s 1984 A.R.T. production of Endgame, which so enraged the writer that he wanted it shut down.

Glass’s most famous collaborator is Robert Wilson. Einstein on the Beach (1976) came first. A seminal work for our age, it’s set to tour in 2004. This was followed by the CIVIL warS, for which Glass wrote some of the music for the Cologne section–seen at the A.R.T. in 1985–and all of the two-hour score for the Rome section. Wilson and Glass reunited in 1991 with the Lisbon commissioned White Raven, (O Corvo Branco, 1991; premiered 1998; revived 2001, Lincoln Center Festival), and Glass’s harmonic and coloristic imagination has seldom been more daring than in this piece.

Glass’s first piece with David Henry Hwang, 1000 Airplanes on the Roof, was seen as part of the A.R.T.’s 1989 Fall Festival. A spoken monologue, it derives its power from the ambiguity of its story: the lone character isn’t sure if he was abducted by aliens. This “science fiction music drama,” with evocative set and projections by Jerome Sirlin, created an hallucinatory atmosphere to explore anxiety, loneliness, and madness. Glass’s music for winds plus keyboards ensemble provides the emotional frame for the monodrama.

The composer’s second project with Hwang was the 1992 Metropolitan Opera commission, The Voyage. Though its obvious theme is exploration and discovery, its subtext, once again, is loneliness. The work questions the human cost of discovery. What is the price we pay when we see another person or group as other–alien–a binding thread in Hwang’s work from M. Butterfly (1988) to The Sound of a Voice. The characters in these pieces have a difficult time with reality. Or, as the alien’s voice says in Airplanes, “It is better to forget. It is pointless to remember. No one will believe you. You will have spoken a heresy. You will be outcast.”

Glass’s music for The Sound of a Voice continues his fascination with the exotic. He uses the Chinese lute pipa, which will be played by its most famous exponent in the West, Wu Man. There is a large percussion section–sixteen instruments in the first act and fourteen in the second; other instruments include the tar, a circular framed drum found throughout the Arab world, and the dumbeck, a goblet-shaped drum found throughout the Arab world. These choices show how Glass continues to blur boundaries between cultures. The composer’s decisions on instrumentation also heighten the emotion in the piece, thereby intensifying the theatrical experience.

Jean Cocteau, the French surrealist, has also attracted Glass. Orphée, directed by Francesca Zambello at the A.R.T. in 1993, is based on Cocteau’s 1950 film, a highly imaginative update on the myth of Orpheus and his journey to the underworld to reclaim his love. His La Belle et la Bête (1994) removed Georges Auric’s incidental score to Cocteau’s 1946 picture and replaced it with one of his own invention, played nonstop by his ensemble, while his singing actors, in business suits and dresses, enact their parts in front of the characters they’re impersonating in the projected film. But curiously enough there’s no disconnect between the film’s actors and the real-life singers. Instead, the original’s atmosphere is transformed by Glass’s new score, and each part enriches the other. He took an even more extreme tack in his 1996 recasting of Cocteau’s 1929 novel Les Enfants Terribles, which Jean-Pierre Melville made into a 1950 film. The composer did his revisioning with the gifted choreographer Susan Marshall and called their work “a dance-opera spectacle.” The brother-sister duo of Paul and Elisabeth–hints of incest and confused identity abound–are doubled by Marshall’s dancers, and the music, coming from three digital pianos in the pit, is baroque in both the size and delicacy of its gestures.

Michael McDonagh is a San Francisco-based poet and writer on the arts.