Discovering Philip Glass through film

At 80, Philip Glass has become a symbol of artistic commitment. He represents an ideal model of artistic craft — challenging, well-respected, occupationally secure. He's made a living and made a life committing to the ideas that most engage him. Instead of retiring, he seems keen on challenging the notion that it's time to call it quits, creating some of his greatest works in the last few years with a continued commitment to undoing what people have come to define as his style.

With tendrils deep in varied styles and archetypes, his listeners often hate him as much as love him depending on what piece is being discussed. Yet, this is perhaps his most important quality. As Tom Service wrote in The Guardian "Whatever you think of what Glass did next with his musical language...you can't doubt his influence on musicians from Brian Eno to Nico Muhly, from David Bowie to Hans Zimmer...can any of us imagine a musical world without Philip Glass?"

He's difficult, and that's the point. Unlike many who've been paying tribute in the lead-up to his birthday, I first encountered Glass's work through Errol Morris's film The Fog of War; a film that not only redefined what a documentary could and should do, but even for Morris redefined what kind of role music plays in defining the narrative. I was young at the time, but starting to shift from a composer to a filmmaker who also composed scores and designed sound for film. Philip Glass became a rabbit hole for me, and like Alice I fell down further than I knew was possible. I jumped from his miraculous interpretation of Dracula with the Kronos Quartet to Einstein on the Beach and Passages with Ravi Shankar; I recognized a powerful and flexible musical language.

As Glass discussed in a 2015 NPR interview, "India was the first place, but in the course of time I've worked with musicians from Africa, from all parts of South America, from Australia, from China, from Tibet...Finding my way into other people's music was a way of learning about music. And, of course, it had an impact on the way I compose music. It became the engine of change for me."

This was especially important as Glass began working in film, as it translated to less of the typical cue-driven scoring, and rather, extended ruminations on ideas from the narrative. He brought to film thematic identity. As David Lang points out in his reflection on Satyagraha, it's "the difference between music that takes you someplace and music that just is someplace."

Like many film composers, I was taken by this notion. It's a question of music having an identity in film, having agency to reframe the narrative. It's a difficult way to compose, being a creative pursuit versus a business one, and one that composers aren't always given time to achieve — as was seen in the hope-dashing collaboration of Marco Beltrami and Philip Glass for the recent Fantastic Four film. That score's failure was due less to Beltrami and Glass than to the filmmakers who didn't respect the composers' collaboration.

Films scored by Philip Glass often inhabit a space uniquely theirs. Glass's scores for films like Undertow, Candyman, Secret Window, and Cassandra's Dream upend their narratives and elevate the movies beyond what you might expect. Others, like The Hours and the Qatsi trilogy, feel as if without Glass there would be no film, his contribution is so key . They live uniquely within themselves.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7fcHnR7UF0&list=PLTUlTwlsdlFTK1re1lmQCeG-W4nhOOEcJ

In a 2015 interview with NPR, Glass said that "music is a place. As real as Chicago or New Delhi." Like many composers and filmmakers, I found Glass in film and found that way of discovering his work to be ideal. I found him in narrative and storytelling techniques, countering expectations. I realized that his true drive was to create music with its own space and time.

Listening to Glass's composition Music in 12 Parts, Andrew Porter from The New Yorker wrote, "a new sound and a new chord suddenly break in, with an effect as if one wall of a room has suddenly disappeared, to reveal a completely new view." Glass's life work has been to question what we know to be true in any form where he's found himself. One hopes the coming years will be as fruitful as the last and that through his many scores and symphonies he will continue to carry us out of darkness and into the light.

Garrett Tiedemann is a writer, filmmaker, and composer who owns the multimedia lab CyNar Pictures and its record label American Residue Records.