Happy 75th Birthday Mr. Glass!
Caught some of the excerpts from this old interview when it aired this afternoon, and it was great. Here’s Philip Glass…
On style:
“In order to arrive at a personal style, you have to have a technique to begin with. In other words, when I say that style is a special case of technique, you have to have the technique — you have to have a place to make the choices from. If you don’t have a basis on which to make the choice, then you don’t have a style at all. You have a series of accidents.”
On repetition:
“I consider the first 20 performances just learning the piece. Think about it this way: If you think about a pianist who plays a Schubert sonata through his whole lifetime — if you listen to Rubenstein or Horowitz playing their repertoire later in their life, you understand the richness with which they play that music, and how differently they must have played it when they were younger. … I think it’s only after about 20 performances that we begin to understand what the dynamic structure of the piece is.”