Music moves

I can’t really remember when I first heard Philip Glass’s music. Perhaps it was much earlier than I realise. His music is so deeply woven into film and theatre soundtracks that he must have been around, somewhere in the background. I only really immersed myself in his music when I already was a student. My uncle gave me the album ‘Glassworks’ as a present, and I was immediately fascinated. When I saw ‘Einstein on the Beach’ in Antwerp in 2008, everything fell into place. I realised then and there that Glass was so much more than what I had known.

Glass has a very distinctive and unique musical language. He has written so much over the years, and yet that DNA remains unmistakably audible. You recognise him immediately: in certain harmonic movements, in the way he builds patterns and allows them to shift. His music is not complicated, but it has an enormous precision and a very strong character. As a percussionist, I obviously feel a natural connection with it. Rhythm plays an important role, and the repetition of small patterns can become an almost physical experience. Perhaps that is also why so many percussionists are drawn to Glass. The music moves, it breathes. There is something almost motorial about it, while at the same time it can be deeply meditative.

The vibraphone is my instrument, and precisely for that reason I started wondering why Glass actually wrote so little music for it. In a way, that is strange, because his music feels very natural for the instrument. It was one of the thoughts that led me to start working on ‘Glass One’ and ‘Glass Two’. I wanted to explore what would happen when I put Glass’s music through the lens of my own instrument and my own musical background. For me, making an arrangement is also a way of listening: you have to understand very well how a piece is constructed before you can translate it to another instrument. And the more I work with his music, the more deeply I discover it.

In this concert, we will also perform four pieces of my own, which I wrote as tributes to important people in Glass’s life: the sculptor Richard Serra, the poet Allen Ginsberg, the choreographer Lucinda Childs and the director Robert Wilson. I wanted to make the universe surrounding Glass visible. For me, his story is not only about his own music, but also about the artists he collaborated with and who helped shape him. Their ideas, disciplines and personalities are part of the story. For the upcoming ‘Glass Three’, I have gone even further back, to three of his most important mentors: Nadia Boulanger, Darius Milhaud and Ravi Shankar. As I studied their role in his life, I started looking at Glass in a different way again. That is perhaps the most beautiful thing about this whole journey. The more you try to understand where his music comes from, the larger the world surrounding it becomes.

In the meantime, I have also noticed that Glass is increasingly finding his way into my own music. People used to tell me that some of my compositions had a strong ‘Glass vibe’. At the time, I found that interesting, but I could not always quite place it myself. Now I understand it better. I have spent so much time with his scores over the past few years that certain ideas have inevitably become part of my own musical thinking. His sense of form fascinates me in particular. In his early years, Glass worked extensively for theatre, and I think that was important in shaping the composer he would later become. Theatre gives you time. Time to try something out, to repeat it, to change it and to start again. Perhaps that is where part of his sense of form developed. Even a small detail such as his fascination with the number three has stayed with me. For a long time, I tended to work mainly with two, four or eight: repeating, doubling, structuring. With Glass, three constantly returns, both in small musical figures and in larger forms. It may seem like a small difference, but it can create a very different kind of tension. I have started experimenting with it myself, and sometimes I think: yes, this really works.

I have never met Philip Glass personally. Perhaps that will happen one day. For now, I actually like travelling through his music in my own way. I don’t necessarily need to meet the person behind the music in order to build a relationship with it. Perhaps that is even an advantage: I can keep listening, searching and interpreting without that personal encounter getting in the way. If I ever had the chance to ask him a question, I already know what it would be. In fact, there are two. Why does the vibraphone have such a small place in his musical universe? And what does he actually think about jazz? Glass has lived in New York for so many years and must have encountered countless jazz musicians. Yet I hear very little of that world explicitly reflected in his music. Perhaps I will never get those answers. But in the meantime, the journey continues. ‘Glass Three’ is the next chapter, and after that, I am sure Glass’s music will remain part of my life for a long time to come.

Some music lets you go after a while. Other music finds a place somewhere inside you. For me, Philip Glass’s music increasingly belongs to that second category.

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