Philip Glass: a blank canvas

Why make a ballet out of a piano concerto? More than other classical genres such as the sonata or symphony, the concerto lends itself to choreographic treatment, however impractical a theatre pit may be for its performance. From Mozart to Brahms, to the 20th-century concertos by Prokofiev and Rachmaninov, the combination of piano and orchestra has inspired composers to stage instrumental dramas of co-operation and competition, struggle and support, thus resembling in conception the purpose-made ballets that emerged from creative partnerships between Petipa and Tchaikovsky, or Balanchine and Stravinsky.  

It was Balanchine who made one of the most celebrated piano-concerto ballets of the postwar era, by choreographing the Capriccio of Stravinsky into ‘Rubies’, the central panel of his Jewels trilogy of 1967 for New York City Ballet. In 1941, for a tour of South America by the American Ballet Caravan, he had produced a homage to both Petipa and Tchaikovsky by making Ballet Imperial from the composer’s Second Piano Concerto.  

All that being said, when Glass adopts a classical genre such as the concerto, he makes it his own, and does not always observe its formal conventions. It would probably be a mistake to interpret the central movement of his Tirol Concerto in the tradition of celebrated and emotive piano-concerto slow movements by Mozart and Rachmaninov, however appealing the superficial resemblances in their long melodies and minor-key moods. For one thing, at 18 minutes in duration, the piece forms much the largest part of the Tirol Concerto, to the point that the outer panels of the concerto serve as introduction and up-tempo epilogue. 

For another, Glass has never sought to tell a character-driven story in his music, with a readily identifiable beginning, middle and end. Storytellers from Sophocles to Shakespeare, Monteverdi to Britten, present such stories in a highly compressed version of what Glass calls ‘colloquial time’, which he further explains as ‘the time that we normally live in’. As he remarks: ‘One of the first things that people perceive in my music is extended time, or loss of time, or no sense of time whatever. All that narrative structure of the Beethoven concerto is gone from my music.’ 

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.