Glass on music, movies and wherever the twain shall meet

Lately you can find Philip Glass everywhere. On the liner notes of a Ravi Shankar album. Paying tribute to George Harrison alongside Shankar in The New York Times. In the form of flattering imitation a la James Horner’s musical soundtrack to A Beautiful Mind.

Horner’s use of luminous repeated string arpeggios, set against bright horns and transcendent wordless vocals, is only the most recent evidence of the influence of the 65-year-old Baltimore-born composer’s work. More than 20 years ago, there was Godfrey Reggio’s landmark film Koyaanisqatsi, which, unlike Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind, features no actors or dialogue — only breathtaking images alongside Glass’ music.

Koyaanisqatsi is one of a dozen soundtracks featured on a fascinating five-CD box set, Philip on Film, released last October on Nonesuch Records. Propelled by its release, and by his abiding eagerness to reach larger audiences in lots of places, Glass has been touring the U.S. He and his ensemble visit Atlanta Jan. 20-26 for a five-day retrospective of his filmworks.

Speaking by phone from his home in Lower Manhattan, the composer reflects on a multifaceted career transpositioned from the fringe to the focus of the public eye and ear — and on his adventures with movies in particular.

Creative Loafing: First, I want to make sure I’m aware of the limitations on your time.

Philip Glass: Of course, I have a lot of other things to do today. I’m writing a new opera based on the life of Galileo, and it’ll open in June in Chicago. And I’m completing a new film with Godfrey Reggio called Naqoyqatsi. We’re in the rough-cut stage. And there’s a symphony of mine that’s gonna be premiering at Carnegie Hall on Feb. 3. So those three things are running around my studio now, trying to get settled down.

With everything you have to do, is touring particularly invigorating?

[This tour has] been very interesting because it functions as a retrospective of the film work I’ve done. It covers films from ‘78 to 2001, more than two decades of work in film, and it’s also a very big range in terms of the kinds of films. There are classic films like Dracula and La Belle et la Béte, and there are absolutely new films like the Shorts, which were made in 2001 by people like Atom Egoyan and Peter Greenaway and Shirin Neshat and Michal Rovner and Godfrey Reggio. Then there are the classic Qatsi films of Godfrey.

What they have in common is that they’re explorations of the possibilities and impact of real-time performance with film — and that’s what it’s really about. It’s been pointed out that there are many different modalities within that enterprise, different ways of doing it. For example, La Belle is sung as an opera with the film, Dracula is spoken words with film, and the other films are like modern silent films. I make a point of saying [that] it’s not music accompanying a film — in fact, often it seems like the film is accompanying the music.

You have been something of an icon to the Boomer generation, of a boundary transcender and also perhaps a reinforcer of spiritual values. Does that persist with your audiences?

When Koyaanisqatsi came out [in 1983], it was seen as a kind of hippie movie.

A trip kind of thing.

Yeah. Smoke a joint and go with it. But the audiences have been evolving over the years — in some ways in a good way, and in some ways not so good. The good way is that there’s a body of concepts and ideas that have to do with experimental work which have become commonly accepted now. The sad thing is that the whole notion of art film and art music has become pretty much degraded by popular media, to the point where I could say that, for most people, the idea of entertainment has become the substitute for art.

So many people have said you brought something entirely new and vastly influential to the medium of film music, and I’m curious about the influences on you.

I wouldn’t say it came from film for me. There were people like Ravi Shankar. And the two other people who would most come to my mind would be John Cage and Allen Ginsberg, both creators who became performers, as it were. I think the main inspiration for me was seeing that the creative performer was a combination. I had already, long before, decided that I wasn’t going to be a music teacher. But I saw how it might be possible to function and make a living in the music world.

And in film, the collaborative process, with directors, has been essential to you. You’ve made yourself present early in the film production process. It was said that the cinematographer on Reggio’s “Powaqqatsi” was listening to your music while he shot in South America.

That’s the essential part of the process — to be there at the beginning. And I managed to convince Marty Scorsese to do that with Kundun. I was able to convert a mainstream film director to working with me in that way, and that was a great accomplishment in itself.??