Composer Philip Glass is one audacious man. For well over 35 years, he has steadfastly engaged in the same minimalist experiment: attempting to affect listeners’ mental, emotional, and spiritual states by writing music with repetitive structures. Glass’s music is often immediately identifiable by its similar patterns of rising and falling arpeggios, repeated chords, and single chords played over and over again. While his compositions are undeniably colorful and often emotive, he has produced many works that sound like nothing more than rehashed ideas. So why is Glass the world’s most famous living composer?

One reason is his penchant for attention-getting collaboration. Over the years, he’s created some of his best work in high-profile ventures with trendsetters as disparate as Paul Simon, Laurie Anderson, visionary theater director Robert Wilson, and choreographer Twyla Tharp. His antinuclear song cycle, Hydrogen Jukebox, used the poetry and voice of Allen Ginsberg. And you can’t get more hip and trendy than creating a full-length piece like Songs from Liquid Days, in which texts by David Byrne, Anderson, Simon, and Suzanne Vega are set to original music and performed by the Kronos Quartet, the Roches, Linda Ronstadt, and the Philip Glass Ensemble, the composer’s chamber orchestra. If Glass were to ask George W. Bush to narrate a new recording of Hydrogen Jukebox, then score the soundtrack to a movie about Barry Bonds, he’d pretty much have all his bases covered.

Another reason Glass is so famous is his film work. One thinks immediately of his hypnotic score for Godfrey Reggio’s emotionally devastating Koyaanisqatsi (1983), in which music and images perfectly mesh to convey the consequences of “life out of balance,” the Hopi term that serves as the film’s title. Just when you think you’ve heard about as many incessant doodle-
doodle-doodles masquerading as art as you can handle, you encounter a collaborative venture such as Koyaanisqatsi, where Glass’s increasingly frenetic, intentionally maddening repetition brilliantly drives the point home. Glass also has composed notable scores to films by such celebrated directors as Martin Scorsese (Kundun, 1997), Peter Weir (The Truman Show, 1998), Paul
Schrader (Mishima, 1985), Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line, 1988), and Stephen Daldry (The Hours, 2002). Fifty years after its release, he also scored Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931), performed live and on DVD by the Kronos Quartet.

To understand why Glass sticks to the same minimalist style, it helps to know where he’s coming from. Glass found his voice in Paris in his late 20s, when he was hired by a filmmaker to transcribe the music of Ravi Shankar into Western notation. While working with Shankar and tabla player Allah Rakha, and later while researching music in North Africa, India, and the Himalayas, Glass became hooked on the musical repe­tition central to spiritual rituals in Indian, African, Indonesian, Balinese, and Native American cultures. In those instances, the goal is trance or transcendence—an altered state in which mundane reality cedes to an exalted sense of connectedness with something greater than the isolated ego crying me, me, me.

Glass’s boldness lies in transposing the musical techniques of sacred ritual to secular contexts. Attempting to draw listeners in deep enough to achieve a shift of consciousness, he often creates multimedia and multidisciplinary theater works as a form of contemporary ritual. Sometimes he succeeds; sometimes he sends people running for the door.

Because Glass’s truest talent often seems to emerge in partnership, where his music serves to underscore the emotional underpinnings of the poetry, drama, or film, we are fortunate that the Bay Area’s celebration of his 70th birthday includes a first-class assortment of recent collaborative efforts. The fête does start with a concert of “pure” music featuring Glass himself on piano, but frankly, I look forward to the evening’s Bay Area premiere of his “Songs and Poems for Cello” far more than hearing the composer play two formulaic piano études that might as well be entitled Recycled Glass.

Two weeks later, we move into collaborative territory at a benefit that features the month’s only performance of his film scores: a beautiful two-piano arrangement of music composed for Jean Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles (1949), one of the trilogy of great Cocteau films that included La Belle et la Bête (1946).

In between come the two biggies. One is the West Coast premiere of Book of Longing. This genre-fusing work incorporates poetry and images by Leonard Cohen, the soulful, deep-voiced singer and poet who has been entrancing his fans since the ’60s. I can’t wait to see how successfully Glass blends a recording of Cohen reading some of his own verse with projections of Cohen’s paintings and illustrations (his artwork is also incorporated into the scenery), as four choreographed singers and eight instrumentalists perform Glass’s score.There’s quite a buzz around this work, which has been enthusiastically received in Toronto, Chicago, Charleston, and New York. My colleague Ken Smith, who reviewed the Toronto premiere, wrote that Glass follows the text of 22 poems from Cohen’s Book of Longing with almost religious reverence, creating an unclassifiable work that unfolds like a soul-gripping madrigal cycle.

The other major event is the world premiere of Appomattox, Glass’s much-anticipated 22nd opera, with libretto by British playwright Christopher Hampton. (A busy collaborator in his own right, Hampton is probably best known for his play and Oscar-winning screenplay based on the novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses. For better or worse, he also cowrote the lyrics for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Boulevard and adapted
it for the stage.) Ideally, Glass’s work with Hampton, director Robert Woodruff, and set designer Riccardo Hernandez will equal the brilliance of his work with Robert Wilson.

Those who saw The Black Rider here in 2004 know that Wilson is an incredibly inventive director and scene and lighting designer. Einstein on the Beach, Glass’s first mesmerizing collaboration with Wilson, caused a sensation when it arrived at the Metropolitan Opera via Europe in 1976. For music lovers who had persevered through the decades of cold, humorless, often spiky serial and cerebral music that preceded it, Einstein was like a five-hour be-in. You could wander in and out of the theater as Glass’s music and text—numbers, do-re-mi’s, and nonsense phrases—joined forces with Wilson’s equally unfathomable but compelling sets
and other imagery.
 

I still remember the thrill I experienced at the American premiere of White Raven, the Glass/Wilson opera about Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama, in 2001. The work segued from one outrageous visual to another—fish darting through waves, a blond-wigged Miss Universe perched on a suspended crescent moon—while characters sang about Wilhelm Reich, the “blue,” and God knows what else. As Glass’s music pulsed through me, I simply surrendered to the cosmic absurdity of it all. I’m betting on something equally enveloping and far more profound from Appomattox.

Glass’s enlightened perspective on his new opera’s subject matter—the historic agreement between Grant and Lee ending a war that had cost half a million lives—is enough to impel me to see Appomattox. Glass considers his protagonists men of great integrity, who demonstrate that “it is possible for people of high moral character to exist in public life.” Looking at the world today, he proclaims, “We are a leaderless civilization.... We have a bunch of rascals running the world.... They have no sense of dignity—nothing at all.” Glass’s understanding of our collective predicament underscores just how vital and necessary his efforts to achieve transcendence through art really are.

Jason Victor Serinus is a music critic and musician who lives in Oakland. He is a frequent contributor to San Francisco.