Reviews

No other composer has made as long and lucrative a career out of so modest a bag of tricks as Philip Glass. For four decades, his diddle-diddles and doodley-doodlies have transported some and maddened others. But predictions of his imminent demise have proved unfounded.

His opera Appomattox was premiered last year by San Francisco Opera, and his 1980 Satyagraha is playing now at the Met. And Thursday evening Mr. Glass himself reminisced and ruminated, and played the piano, at the Nasher Sculpture Center.

Presented in the Nasher Salon Lecture Series, the hearty-looking 71-year-old was interviewed by WFAA-TV newsman John McCaa.

As unassumingly charming as ever, Mr. Glass recalled his father's record store and early jobs as a steel-mill crane operator, taxi driver, plumber and furniture mover.

And there were tales of the two dominant influences of his postgraduate study in Paris: a formidable French pedagogue and an Indian composer- performer. "My musical mother was Nadia Boulanger, my musical father was Ravi Shankar. I was their child, by immaculate conception."

By the late 1960s, the musical scene was ready for something radically different from abstract atonality. Composing a score for a Samuel Beckett play opened Mr. Glass' ears to the possibility of music based on hypnotic repetitions. "It was," he said, "the shell of the egg cracking."

In 1976, he created a sensation with his opera Einstein on the Beach , created with director-designer Robert Wilson. Since then he's worked with a who's who of directors, choreographers and filmmakers.

At the piano, he demonstrated his mesmeric style with a 14-minute Mad Rush and two movements from the cycle Metamorphosis.