By Caitlin McNamara
Brooklyn Daily Eagle

DUMBO -- Master storyteller Ira Glass took to the stage with illustrious composer Philip Glass at St. Ann’s Warehouse on Tuesday for an intimate evening of music and conversation. In a time when little is for certain at most not-for-profit institutions, the success of the “Glass on Glass� benefit has ensured the theater’s next season.

Ira Glass, host and producer of public radio show “This American Life,� asked questions of Philip Glass, who alternately riffed on a gleaming Yamaha and answered Ira’s questions about the method and processes that lead to his great musical successes.

And yes, there is something in a name — Philip is the first cousin of Ira’s father. The rapport between the two was congenial, and the result was casual but penetrating, much like a segment of “This American Life.� (Most weeks, the “This American Life� podcast is the most popular in America.)

“Sometimes I ask Philip what he’s hearing when he plays his own music, and he points out things that I as a non-musician would never notice,� Ira has said. “We thought it would make for a... special sort of evening to have that conversation onstage, with a piano, at St. Ann’s Warehouse.�

Philip is particularly acclaimed for his opera in four acts, Einstein on the Beach, and perhaps best known for his nominated and award-winning soundtracks of The Truman Show, Martin Scorsese’s Kundun, The Hours and Notes on a Scandal. Eight years after its world debut in 1976 at the Avignon Festival in France, Einstein was presented by BAM. A documentary about this production, titled “Einstein on the Beach: The Changing Image of Opera,� aired on public television.

Chord Experimentation

To hear him explain it, though, Philip’s work is not particularly innovative, nor necessarily ‘new.’ His compositions flow from natural, simple chord experimentation, he said, as he challenges himself to answer questions such as ‘How do you achieve coherency without formality?’ or ‘How do you make it sound as if you have three hands?’

Ira asked if Philip might play one of his shorter pieces — a prelude, for example. After illustrating the chord structure he said lightly, “I assure you, there is nothing else in the piece. But it’ll take me six minutes to convince you of that.�

“It only makes sense because I say it makes sense,� he said of the notes sprinkled above repeating chords. “The notes on top, telling you the key, don’t make any sense — except they work.�

Philip said that he didn’t realize in the beginning that he was following a “binary system.� “It’s either on the beat or off,� he said, demonstrating a series of twos and threes on the keyboard.

“It’s all similar,� he said. “But I’m good at making it sound different.�

Philip explained that his father taught him to appreciate music. Although he didn’t know what they were listening to, “He’d say, hey kid, listen to this,� and they’d sit together. As a child he would perform for his mother in the kitchen.

Philip is a graduate of the Julliard School. In the early 1960s, while studying under Nadia Boulanger in Paris, he earned money translating Ravi Shankar’s Indian music into Western notation. The techniques he picked up he later employed in his music, which he developed with the Philip Glass Ensemble.

Mid-evening, Ira played a taped segment from “This American Life� in which a soldier who had returned from Iraq joined a Muslim student group on campus to overcome his oppressive biases. Another poignant moment was when Philip accompanied Ira’s reading of Allen Ginsberg’s “Wichita Vortex Sutra.�

Of the role of emotion in his work, and whether or not he writes to affect his audience, Philip said, deftly, “[The question is] not ‘where does the emotion come in?’ but ‘how does it not come in?’�

“I don’t want to be the composer who had one more piece to say, but nothing to say,� he said.

Unlikely, Philip Glass.

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