Highly influential composer Philip Glass’s unique, immediately identifiable voice has spawned many imitators and greatly altered the landscapes of both film music and concert music. Although many listeners and critics have considered his music an offshoot of minimalism, one most certainly cannot limit his work, particularly his current music, to the school of minimalism. Until recently, most of Glass’s work (operas, chamber music, orchestral music) has been outside of film. However, with increasing frequency, he has been composing dynamic and dramatic film scores, including “The Hours” (2002), which flows with emotion; the dark haunting “Candyman” (2001); and the cold, introspective “A Thin Blue Line” (1988). These scores, like most of Glass’s film-work, are beautifully married to the picture, yet, Glass’s somewhat specific style may not lend itself as well to less consciously artistic and more overtly “mainstream” films. What inspired you to take your music to films? It depends. I’m interested in certain filmmakers. Starting around 180, some very interesting people began asking me to write music for them. There were some very interesting movies that came along and, since I had worked a lot in the field of theater, dance, and opera, it wasn’t much of a problem for me to shift my thinking to a genre that was closely related. At the beginning, I did mostly independent films, in which there wasn’t a lot of money involved. Do you believe that minimalist-style music can work with a variety of storylines? It doesn’t work very much in film. “The Hours”, for example, is a romantic, warm score. I don’t think of it any other way, really. I haven’t thought of myself as a minimalist composer for twenty-five years anyway, so I never think that way. There are some times when directors want something that is very redundant and reduced, because they don’t really want a lot of music, and, in those cases, I have plenty of history and technique in that area of a minimal nature. How would you describe your sound now? It’s theater music, basically. It’s music that helps to tell a story. It uses a contemporary harmonic vocabulary to tell a story and show movement. When looking at a picture to score, what do you look for? That’s an interesting question because you have to start somewhere. Very often, I start with the director or the music editor, and we decide where the film should have music – we spot the film. Then I have quite a long encounter with the director about what they think the music should be doing. For me, the music has to help to tell the story and not just decorate a scene. I see music as being part of the narrative. So I ask myself, “What is the story trying to tell, and what is the pace?” It’s a complicated question because it leads you right into the big area: The function of music in the film and how it’s achieved, and it even indicates some of the artistic collaboration that’s involved in that endeavor. You have a signature sound with your music’s instrumentation and texture. What has inspired your music’s instrumentation, versus using the full range of the orchestra for a film? Did you see “Taking Lives” or “Secret Windows”, which were full orchestras? The answer to your question is that the larger-scale films allow a bigger budget for the orchestra. That’s really the truth to the matter. With the independent films, I had constraints that dictated the forces I had available. The mainstream films allowed me to write for a full orchestra, and I often did. So these things that became a signature were more necessities than choices. They just arrived naturally in that working environment. There are many Dracula scores covering a full range of styles. Why did you choose a chamber-music approach? This is a film made from a play that had been in London, touring the UK for about eighteen months. They took this play and filmed it. Everything took place in drawing rooms, bedrooms, maybe the basement of the castle – in other words, we’re talking about fairly confined interiors. I felt it needed something that achieved the same depth of emotion but remained in the same scale as the film did, so I chose a string quartet. I remember the carriage ride over the Transylvanian mountains. It takes a second to realize that you’re looking at a painted set – the whole thing is staged. So even there I felt that the quartet would be appropriate. “Kundun” is a Tibetan film. Did your Buddhist faith give you a clear understanding of this culture and the needs of an authentic sound to tell the story? First of all, it’s a Disney film directed by Martin Scorsese. The actress is Tibetan, but no one behind the camera is Tibetan. There are films made by Tibetans, but this isn’t one of them. Martni Scorsese, who is a well-known filmmaker, created the film for a big studio. Second of all, Buddhist faith is a term that I find rather strange, because I don’t think of myself as having some connection to this culture. I don’t know if I know what the Buddhist faith is. I have spent a long time with the Buddhist or the Tibetan community, which, as a refugee community, started turning up in this country in the early-seventies. I got to know them that way, and I became very interested in the culture. I would say that I have as much faith in them as I have in anybody. I wouldn’t say that it’s an abstract thing. It has more to do with knowing what their conditions were and learning the history of the people. I don’t know that I have any specific insight into it. I think, for all the time I’ve spent with it, it still remains a fairly esoteric culture to me, but one that I have a lot of interest in and sympathy with. You weave the musical languages of different cultures into your work. Do you seek projects purposely to explore these communities? Yes, I do. When I was in my mid-twenties, I began traveling the world. Not really as a performing musician yet, but mainly to translate the encounters I had into musical language and musical ideas that I felt were very stimulating. What were your first thoughts when beginning the film “The Hours”? They were looking for my style of music, but they didn’t think I would be interested in film. But, as you know, I’ve done a lot of my work in films. They contacted me and showed me the film, and I was very impressed with it. I connected right away and knew that this is something I could do. I knew exactly what to do. We got along very well. Everything was terrific. You don’t get to have that much fun in movies every time you go to bat. It is interesting that you use the piano as the focal instrument of this score. I was looking for intimacy, and there is certainly something about intimacy with the piano for me. It’s the thing you can have in your home. I contrasted it with the string section to give it depth and variety, but it’s basically about the piano. I thought about what instrument would be playing in the room, which might be a strange question in a way, but it sometimes leads to interesting answers. Your music in this film served as a character itself – one that stood out. Why did you place your music in the foreground? Well, the reason I did that was that the film needed it. Without the music, you have three stories happening at three different times with three different sets of actors. It was so chaotic in a certain way without any music that it seemed to me that the score had to come in and become like the director and the writer – it had to guide you throughout the story. So it became a bold presence of the film, and I don’t think the film would have worked otherwise. I was the third composer they hired. I don’t know who the other two were, and I don’t know what they did. They had to solve the same problem, and evidently they didn’t. I managed to do it. Your technique or style has influenced so many. Are there particular composers that you are inspired by or loop up to? If you start talking about music I like, I’ll sound like an encyclopedia. It’s a wonderful art that has been blessed with a tremendous amount of genius and variety, and the more different, the better for me.