It happens to every musician in this country.
You get to a certain point and your parents say,
"When you gonna get a real job?"
Were your parents supportive of a music career?
When I came home and said to my mother...
I said I was going to go to Juilliard,
which was really a misstatement.
I was going to go to the building and that's what I did.
And it took me a year to get through the front door.
She came up to New York because I was doing a
concert at Queens College and it was a big hall.
You know, colleges have places where
people graduate from so they have to have big
places that hold two or 3,000 people.
And there were six people in the audience
and she was one of them.
And this is what my mother said,
"If you do this,
you're going to be moving from city to city,
playing jobs here and there, never settling down."
And I'm thinking, wow, that sounds great.
Families are families and they're wonderful.
But when you choose a life like this,
not many people can understand that.
I first heard Philip's music because I'd go to
Virgin Megastores and just buy stacks of CDs
based on artwork.
And I saw the artwork to Glassworks
and just bought it without even thinking.
You know, who knows what it could be.
And I was so blown away and then after that, you know
just wanted to find more.
And from then on, I would
seek stuff out and listen and yeah...
I don't know if you noticed it over the years
but how your music has crossed
boundaries to the point where
it's classical music but it's wider than that
and it's maybe even pop to some degree.
I grew up in Baltimore, Maryland.
My dad had a little record store downtown.
I began working there when I was 12
and by the time I was 15,
I was a record buyer for the store.
My dad was a car mechanic.
He began fixing radios and ended up
selling records out of his radio shop
and then ended up having a record store.
He didn't know anything about music but he was a...
he loved music.
He didn't say this is the good music
and this is the bad music
or this is the classical music.
We never used those words.
It was all just music.
So I grew up that way.
So what year did you move to New York
from Baltimore?
Let's see, I think I came in '57.
I moved to New York from London 10 years ago.
I just turned 21 and I didn't really come for any purpose.
The New York influence for me I guess is in the pulse,
in the pace of the city,
which is something you hear a lot in
Philip Glass's music.
I mean the fact that he drove taxi cabs,
like you can you can feel that,
especially in those pieces around that time.
You can really sense it.
What were some of the things when you
first moved to New York that you did --
Well I had day jobs.
I did very simple things like loading trucks
or moving furniture.
I was in very good shape.
But what I liked about it
was that I was very independent.
Also I never took a job that I couldn't quit
really easily.
I need to put that one in.
I know because I wanted to go... what I
really wanted to do was go out and play.
When the ensemble started maybe in
'71, '72, we could get jobs but I couldn't...
and I could get enough to pay the players,
but not that much, but I didn't get paid for years.
After Einstein, the next week I was driving a cab.
It was a big hit but it was not a financial success.
We sold full houses we thought we were making money.
We found out we had lost money.
We were really stupid but we were just
we were idealistic and we didn't know anything about it.
It was okay.
We didn't really care about the money.
He plays live way more than I do,
which is incredible.
He keeps playing and keeps writing,
premiering new pieces and
and in fact he's constantly trying to like do
something better and he's trying to do
something different and something that
would surprise the audience.
In the worst times we have in this country,
that's when the arts get best.
Right now that there are a lot of
problems in this country.
There are race problems.
There are economic problems.
There are all kinds of these things going on.
And when that happens, the arts and the
artists become the voice.
It's a wonderful thing.
I went to see Hamilton.
I thought it was so great.
I said, oh, maybe Jefferson was like that.
Maybe Jefferson was a hip hop guy.
Did you ever see that?
I never... no, I can't get a ticket.
They're talking in language that you know
and they're supposed to be the founding fathers.
Well they're hipsters.
It was really...
you've got to see it.
When things get out of balance,
the arts come in and bring the human side back.
Without that, our societies would be prisons.
They wouldn't be able to renew themselves.
