In the Review’s October 22 issue, Matthew Aucoin surveys Philip Glass’s six-decade musical career, occasioned by the premiere of his new symphony, Lincoln, at Tanglewood this past summer. “Any artist who invents a distinctive, instantly recognizable mood is sure to leave a mark on the history of their art form,” Aucoin writes. “And Glass did invent a mood, one that feels inseparable from American urban life in the late twentieth century.”

For twenty-first century American life, the classical music world may look to Aucoin, who, when he is not writing about Thomas Adès, Pierre Boulez, and the state of music criticism for the Review, is primarily a composer and conductor. His operas, including Eurydice and Crossing, have been performed everywhere from New York’s Metropolitan Opera to the Los Angeles Opera, and the Metropolitan’s Eurydice was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording in 2023. Aucoin was also the recipient of a 2018 MacArthur Fellowship. A studio recording of his operatic work Music for New Bodies will be released later this month.

This week I emailed Aucoin to ask him about the rigors of performing Philip Glass’s concatenating arpeggios and the pleasures of putting poetry to music.

Daniel Drake: I have an indelible memory of seeing the Philip Glass Ensemble at the Ravinia Music Festival outside Chicago about twenty years ago, and there was a woman sitting in a chair on stage doing nothing for the first thirty minutes of the performance, until finally she sang one long, high note a few times, and then, in my memory at least, returned to silence. Anyway, as you note in your essay, performing Glass’s music can be a particular kind of challenge. Have you ever performed or played one of his compositions? What was the experience like?

Matthew Aucoin: I’ve performed a reasonable amount of Glass’s music over the years, as a conductor and as a pianist. I’ve played some of his piano études; I conducted his opera Akhnaten in Los Angeles, with my friend Anthony Roth Costanzo, the countertenor, in the title role; and I’ve conducted some of his vocal chamber music, also with Costanzo.

You have to adjust your inner clock, your inner sense of time, when you perform Glass. Or at least I do: I find myself generally more at home performing music that has a playful, quicksilver sensibility, music that’s full of surprises and that can turn on a dime from one mood to another, whether it’s Mozart or Thomas Adès or whoever. With Glass, you have to train yourself to feel larger units of time: a phrase might repeat sixteen or thirty-two times, and you have to feel that whole span of time as a single gesture, not a million swirling notes.

It makes all the difference in the world whether the people performing the music love and believe in it. Costanzo, for instance, has become one of the world’s great Glass performers; you feel, when you perform with him, that he’s slowed down his metabolism to match that of the music. He’s undergone some kind of quasi-monastic training. I have a suspicion that when he sings Akhnaten he subsists entirely on sunlight; the guy may have mastered photosynthesis.

And I’ve performed Glass’s études alongside pianists, like Timo Andres, who inhabit the music so deeply that they’ve found ways to be creative with it, to stretch its phrasing from within, the way you would with late Brahms. But if you perform Glass’s music with an orchestra that has no experience with it or sympathy for it, sometimes the main thing on the string players’ mind is the risk of tendonitis.

Where and how did you first encounter Glass’s music, that you remember?

I have no idea. By now his music is everywhere, it’s in the American ether. I probably encountered some Glass knockoff (hard plastic?) in a movie soundtrack or TV commercial before I heard the real thing.

In Geoffrey O’Brien’s 2022 review of your Eurydice, he notes your “insistently vigorous score full of quick changes and fleeting stylistic intrusions of everything from Philip Glass to tango music,” and on listening to it this week, I seemed to pick up on snatches of minor-key arpeggios and the kind of percussion one sometimes encounters in a Glass work. Did you consciously incorporate any of his style into your opera, or—and forgive my ignorant ear—are there explicit references to his Orphée? Or do you think it’s just a matter of composing After Philip, as it were? 

Another eminent composer once wrote to me saying, in effect, “don’t worry if people compare something of yours to Philip Glass, that happens to everyone and it means nothing.” I touched on this in my essay: if you make use of the humble and ancient arpeggio, which surely belongs to us all, people will instantly think of Glass.

There’s texture, and then there’s process. It’s easy to recognize likenesses of texture between different composers. But what matters more is the musical process, how musical material (harmony, timbre, etc.) evolves in time. And when it comes to process, my music has nothing to do with Glass’s. I would make a terrible minimalist! For better or worse, in my music, one idea tends to follow another pretty swiftly, and I have my hands full trying to weave them into something coherent. At his best, Glass is patient—a quality I admire.

What music are you working on now? Are there any subjects or ideas you’re working through?

A project that’s especially close to my heart, and that’s consumed my energy for the past few years, is about to be released: the recording of my piece Music for New Bodies, which is a vocal symphony or nonnarrative opera based on recent poems by Jorie Graham. That album will come out through DACAMERA Editions on October 30.

Graham’s poetry—as readers of The New York Review will know—somehow manages to reckon with the whole spectrum of human existence in the 2020s. And maybe not only human existence: some poems seem to be spoken by nonhuman presences. One features the oracular voice of the bottom of the ocean, who has frightening things to say to our species; and in several poems, there’s an unsettling collective voice, like a swarm of bots. (The word “bot” suddenly looks antiquated, doesn’t it? Even they have been replaced, by “agents.”)

Anyway, it changed my life, to immerse myself in this polyvocal poetry and find a way to set it to music. The director Peter Sellars, who staged the piece’s first production last year, also worked with me on assembling the libretto, and Peter is a force of liberation.

There’s a mysterious liminal zone of musical works that are neither concert pieces nor operas. They’re music-theater works, but they resist the conventions of the theater. Glass’s Einstein on the Beach lives in this zone. And I found that it activated something new in my music, to write a music-theater piece that wasn’t a tidy narrative, where you’re not constantly thinking about plot, but where the music could be the guiding force.

What music are you listening to right now?

Can I admit something embarrassing? I don’t listen to that much music at home. I compose music all day, and then usually the last thing I need is to hear more notes. Often I just want the pablum of a good podcast. However, one new album that I’ve found totally mind-expanding—inventive and virtuosic and without any precedent that I know of—is my friend Keir GoGwilt’s Zarabanda Variations, which takes the music of colonial New Spain (present-day Mexico) as a jumping-off point for a musical voyage that’s dazzling and dislocating and fabulously weird.