PHILIP GLASS: I have a son who's 14 now,
but when he was six or seven, he was starting to write music.
And he said, Daddy, I can write the first couple of measures,
but then what do I do?
I said, exactly.
That's the problem.
The problem is what happens next?
AUGUSTA REED THOMAS: Philip Glass
is one of the most celebrated, famous,
performed, lauded composers of any time.
He writes works for chamber music, opera, film,
theater pieces, everything.
I mean, the amount of music that he has composed
is unbelievable.
PHILIP GLASS: When I came to Chicago,
it felt like it was walking into a living encyclopedia,
and the school was like that.
It was a place where education was sacred place.
It was up to you to make the best use of that place.
I spend a lot of time at the library at night.
I was listening to music at the time.
I knew a lot about music because my father owned a record store.
So I knew music.
I found scores by von Sternberg, and the thought
began forming in my mind that I might actually
become a musician, and that's what I would do.
What Chicago provided me was a deep and broad cultural basis.
The music of the south side was fantastic.
I mean, The Beehive was here.
The Cotton Club was here.
Years later, I just began to understand
that the energy of that music, I had captured it somehow in some
of the music it was writing.
AUGUSTA REED THOMAS: For many, many months,
we've been looking forward to having Philip Glass here
on campus.
And I was really, really asking that I
could have a session with Philip just with my composers.
PHILIP GLASS: We learn the language of music
and that's as if a painter knows how to mix paints.
If you don't know how to do it, you'll
never get the paint right.
It will never look right.
It will never sound right.
But then we get into this area about what do we hear?
And that's when things really start happening.
And that's when you've reached the limits of what you know.
Of what you can learn.
And it can happen to you when you're in your 70's
which has happened to me.
The thing that's wonderful about music and that
why I think we're all so drawn to it
is it has the possibility of reconciling
parts of ourselves that seem to be at odds at times.
You know, the mind, the body, the emotion, the heart,
all those things.
AUGUSTA REED THOMAS: People who are spending
their life making and sculpting sound
are incredibly interesting.
And bringing someone of such enormous stature
who has spent their entire life literally doing this
is incredibly inspiring to the composers.
And in a larger sense, bringing a composer of that stature
and performing his music so beautifully in Mandel Hall
really ripples out into the entire community.
PHILIP GLASS: What happens to me sometimes,
you get to a place in music where
you want something to happen but you don't know how to do it.
The way I solve the problem, is that I just
have to spend the time with it.
If I sit with it long enough, it will reveal itself.
And when we get to that place, music is true dreaming.
By dreaming, I mean that we've left the dock.
We're out in the sea now, where there's nothing but us
and the water and the open sky.