Philip Glass, going through a red light and Geoffrey Boycott's granny

Many years ago I had a very distressing experience.  I was living in London and had formed the habit of going to the Coliseum to watch English National Opera.  This was in the glory days of Elder and Pountney, when there was a management team that knew what it was doing most of the time.  One of the productions I went to was Philip Glass's Akhnaten.  I think this ticket must have been free, because I have never much liked Glass.  At any rate, the curtain rose to show a stage filled with sand, which I guess must have represented the desert, and the violas began what I remember to have been an A minor arpeggio.

Akhnaten entered, naked except for a prosthetic penis (if I've done this blog before, apologies; I do get to a new bit in a minute).  The penis apparently cost several thousand pounds.  Anyway, 15 minutes later the arpeggio was still going on, and Akhnaten was still running round the stage trailing a long streamer of pink cloth.  In that era Andrex had a series of adverts in which a labrador puppy ran around trailing loo roll with the strapline, "soft, strong and very long". It was hard not to associate the two cultural phenomena.

I can't remember if there was any advance on A minor, but Glass's opera was boring beyond belief, and, in much the same way that when I am confronted with terrible wine I push it discreetly away reflecting that I am not going to waste my 21 units a week on such rubbish, I and my companion left at the first interval.  Life is very short.

I was reminded of this tonight by a friend who showed me some of Glass's piano pieces.  Of these more in a minute.  I told him about going to see Akhnaten, or at least some of it, and whilst trying to think of a way to explain how boring it was a memory suddenly sprang to mind of the time when I ran a red light and had subsequently to go on a naughty-boy driving course near Warrington.  The reason why the course was so much more effective than 3 points and 60 quid, which you soon forget, is that you had to suffer a whole morning's boredom.  This was the real punishment.  It was a lovely spring day, and a dozen of us laboured in some soulless hotel or office block conference suite for hour upon hour we would never get back.  That was the painful thing.  It was time unrecoverable.

That's how I felt watching Akhnaten.  You felt your life slipping away.  Unlike, for example, the first two and a half hours of Gotterdammerung, which seem to go by in about twenty minutes. And something perhaps even more awful to contemplate was the thought that somewhere some committee of well-paid, well-fed, well-educated people had sat round a table and one of them had said, "I know, why don't we do Akhhaten", and the others had said, "Yes, that sounds like a really good idea. Let's".

What on earth were they thinking of?  Couldn't one of them read a score?

Anyway, to the Glass piano pieces.  Did I like them?  No.  I thought they were quite extraordinarily bad and lazy.  There was an E minor arpeggio (can anyone spot the theme emerging here?) in the left hand and some soothing minims high in the right. Then four or five chords, the same in each hand. The chords descended into a pit of banality with a really wretchedly weedy fourth chord the apotheosis.  Then there was some more E minor nurdling. Presently there were not four but five chords, culminating in a wretched whole tone clinch. In despair I turned the page. Here were approximately the same musical gestures, but starting with an A minor arpeggio.  With a sudden awful vision of Akhnaten's wrinkly prosthetic penis, I shut the book.

OK, I kind of get what Glass is trying to do.  Familiar, banal musical objects are presented in a context different from the familiar one.  You hear them in a different way.  But oh Jesus, for a little invention. For some interesting objects presented in a context different from the familiar one instead of something that, to paraphrase Geoffrey Boycott, my granny could have made up (and would have been too embarrassed to present to the paying public).  This is one of the greatest living composers?

From now on, whenever I am feeling bad about my work I will muse upon Sonnet 30.  As Shakespeare nearly said, "But if the while I think on thee, Philip Glass / all losses are restor'd and sorrows end".