Bang on a Can

I came to Indian music by accident, really. I was living in Paris, studying with Nadia Boulanger, and a friend of mine was a photographer working on a film. They needed a composer to notate the music on the film and my friend got me the job. I was asked to notate the music of Ravi Shankar, so I met Ravi and fell in love with Indian music and I've been in love ever since. One thing that was so disturbing to many composers of my generation was that we were being taught by composers who were out of touch with the performance of music. They were out of touch with audiences. Music had become an academic enterprise written for scholars and other composers, and the whole transaction of performance and interpretation had been lost. Suddenly, here I was in the presence of a composer and a performer who united both activities in one process and in one person. In western music, harmony and melody are the dominant elements and rhythm tags along; it doesn't really create a structure. In most nonwestern music, rhythmic structure is in fact the structure of the music. I saw that this could be the beginning of a new musical language for me. The problem that I faced in terms of incorporating a rhythmic structure into my music was a problem of notation. The first pieces that I wrote in 1968 were voluminous pieces--it took 50 or 60 pages to notate them. They were very awkward to play because the music was continuous--when someone had to stop and turn the page, it broke the whole rhythm of the performance. So I wrote a piece called One Plus One, which was really more of a process than a piece of music. It described a way of notating music through what I began to call "additive process"--taking a measure of music and adding one note to it and repeating it and then adding another note or subtracting a note. The very first piece that I applied that process to was Two Pages. And the reason it was called Two Pages was that I had managed to collapse the notation into two pages. It was a conceptual breakthrough. The listener was supposed to be aware of the process of what was happening. The outside and the inside were the same, very much in the way that when Jasper Johns painted a painting like "Flag," the American flag was both the object and the subject. That was the idea--that structure and content were in fact identical. -Philip Glass