Philip Glass: et tomt lerret

Hvorfor lage en ballett til en pianokonsert? I større grad enn andre klassiske sjangre som sonaten eller symfonien, egner konserten seg til koreografisk behandling, selv om et teaterorkestergrav kan være en upraktisk arena for fremføringen. Fra Mozart og Brahms til 1900-tallskonsertene av Prokofjev og Rakhmaninov har kombinasjonen av piano og orkester inspirert komponister til å skape instrumentale dramaer om samarbeid og konkurranse, kamp og støtte. Slik ligner konserten, i sin grunnidé, de spesialskrevne ballettene som vokste frem gjennom kreative samarbeid mellom Petipa og Tsjajkovskij eller Balanchine og Stravinsky.

Det var Balanchine som skapte en av etterkrigstidens mest berømte balletter til en pianokonsert da han koreograferte Stravinskys Capriccio til Rubies, midtdelen i trilogien Jewels, som hadde premiere ved New York City Ballet i 1967. Allerede i 1941, i forbindelse med American Ballet Caravans turné i Sør-Amerika, hadde han hyllet både Petipa og Tsjajkovskij ved å skape Ballet Imperial til komponistens andre pianokonsert. 

Når Glass tar utgangspunkt i en klassisk sjanger som konserten, gjør han den imidlertid til sin egen og følger ikke alltid sjangerens formelle konvensjoner. Det ville trolig være en feil å tolke midtsatsen i Tirolkonserten i tradisjonen etter de berømte og følelsesladde langsomme satsene i pianokonserter av Mozart og Rakhmaninov, selv om de lange melodilinjene og mollstemningene kan gi inntrykk av likhet ved første øyekast. For det første varer satsen hele 18 minutter og utgjør dermed den klart største delen av Tirolkonserten, i en slik grad at yttersatsene snarere fungerer som en innledning og en rask avslutning. 

For det andre har Glass aldri hatt som mål å fortelle karakterdrevne historier i musikken sin, med en tydelig begynnelse, midtdel og slutt. Fortellere fra Sofokles til Shakespeare, fra Monteverdi til Britten, presenterer slike historier i en sterkt komprimert versjon av det Glass omtaler som «hverdagslig tid» (colloquial time), som han videre forklarer som «den tiden vi vanligvis lever i». Som han selv sier: «Noe av det første folk oppfatter i musikken min, er utstrakt tid, eller tap av tid, eller ingen tidsfølelse i det hele tatt. Hele den fortellende strukturen som finnes i Beethovens konserter, er borte fra musikken min.» 

Denne oppløsningen av tidsfølelsen får konsekvenser for kunstnere som arbeider med Glass’ musikk i andre uttrykksformer, inkludert koreografer som León og Lightfoot. Deres valg må nødvendigvis tilføre musikken en ny form eller struktur. De melodiske mønstrene, det langsomme harmoniske forløpet og den jevne pulsen i verk som Tirolkonserten samspiller naturlig med fysisk bevegelse. Samtidig fungerer musikkens uttrykksmessige nøytralitet som et klargjort lerret der koreografer kan stå friere til å projisere sin egen fortelling enn de ville gjort med musikk som allerede har en tydelig narrativ struktur. 

This loss of time bears consequences for artists working with Glass’s music in other media, including choreographers such as León and Lightfoot. Their choices must necessarily impose a new shape or order on the music. The melodic patterns, slow rate of harmonic change and regular pulse of pieces such as the Tirol Concerto bond sympathetically with physical movement. Their expressive neutrality also serves as a primed canvas on which choreographers may find themselves freer to project a new story of their own devising than they would be when working with music of predetermined narrative outlines.

In a related way, the frictionless momentum of Glass’s music invites us, on the other side of the stage, to find our own way of experiencing it, a way that may well resemble prayer and meditation more than the kinds of close observation and identification which we bring to Sleeping Beauty or La traviata. 

There is a melancholy irony to the fact that the appeal of Glass’s music has often been defined in opposition to the aesthetic imperatives of the Modernist movement which led innovation (in all art-forms) during the first half of the last century. Glass himself has explained how he rebelled from the doctrine of musical serialism exemplified by the sometimes angry and rebarbative work of Pierre Boulez. It is quite possible, of course, to appreciate the music of both Glass and Boulez according to their own lights, and the composers as masters of their own worlds. Many of us are temperamentally drawn to one of those worlds more than the other: to crudely paraphrase, simplicity over complexity, or vice versa. In favouring one over the other, we run the risk of overlooking a more fundamental antipathy, shared by both composers and many other angry young men and women of the time, to the Romantic-heroic ideals of a world that lay in ruins after 1945.  

Glass and Boulez wanted and needed to break the chains of time binding one event to another in predestined sequence. In doing so, they looked to art-forms and cultures beyond their own. French ‘New Wave’ cinema and Indian-classical ragas both exercised a formative influence on Glass as a student at New York’s Juilliard School of Music. So did experimental and progressive theatre, in the work of Bertolt Brecht, Jean Genet and others. At a time when the plays of Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller were holding up a mirror to contemporary America, Glass was looking abroad. ‘The kinds of theater which spin familiar stories, moralizing, sometimes satirizing, occasionally comforting us about our lives, have never meant much to me. What has always stirred me is theater which challenges one’s ideas of society, one’s notions of order.’ 

From the beginning of his career, Glass was writing music for the theatre. While he had composed classical and serial pieces as an inquisitive, prodigiously musical and well-trained teenager, Glass now acknowledges as an Opus 1 the score he produced in 1965 to accompany a staging of Samuel Beckett’s Play. Working with the director Robert Wilson and the dancer-choreographer Lucinda Childs, Glass composed Einstein on the Beach (1976), a five-hour piece of music theatre which fashioned a new relationship between foreground event and background structure through musical and physical gestures, intimately linked and masterfully prolonged. In Einstein, and subsequent Glass/Wilson works such as Satyagraha (1980) and Akhnaten (1983), it is not possible to talk of music accompanying text or movement. The three elements fuse into new rituals of action and contemplation, answering to the needs of an increasingly irreligious but spiritually inclined public.  

In 1983, Jerome Robbins’ Glass Pieces premiered at New York City Ballet, set to excerpts of Glass’s work. Twyla Tharp has frequently collaborated with Glass, beginning with In the Upper Room in 1986. The Tirol Concerto became the score for a second ballet, Nuit Blanche, in 2022, choreographed by Sebastian Bertaud for the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma. In its long-breathed melody, stable but minor-key harmony and rippling accompanimental figures, the slow movement of the Tirol Concerto shares an enigmatic pathos with the contemporary film-score which Glass wrote for The Hours (2002).  

Here again, and in the novel by Virginia Woolf (Mrs Dalloway) on which David Hare based his screenplay for The Hours, measurements of time and conventions of order are challenged. A life can flash by in a second; a wrist may turn over half an hour. Glass, like Woolf before him, taps into a stream of consciousness, and then directs that stream with a sure hand and a light touch, leaving us, and choreographers such as León and Lightfoot, to find in it meaning where we will.