Monsters of Grace, the new opera by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson that is destined to be one of the highlights of the Belfast Festival, is unlike any work that has ever been seen on an Irish stage. Using three-dimensional digital technology developed for the film Jurassic Park, the 68-minute performance will be projected onto a large screen and viewed through souvenir polaroid glasses designed by l.a. Eyeworks.
The score, which is performed live by the Philip Glass Ensemble, is written for four live amplified voices, woodwinds, keyboards, Macintosh computer, MIDI interface and "custom-designed, sampled Persian and Middle Eastern string and percussion instruments".
The text for the world's first digital opera is based on poems by the 13th-century mystic Jallaluddin Rumi, who is believed to have been the world's first whirling dervish.
The opera, which is the fourth collaboration between Glass and Wilson in 20 years, is an attempt to combine high art with high technology as part of their joint quest for new ways of combining music and images.
"Technology certainly gives us different tools to work with. But I think there's something more than just the technology - the very way we think about music theatre," according to Glass. "We're taking the elements of music theatre and we're talking about movement, text, image and music. So we get it down to four elements, like earth, air, fire and water. I think we're going through this period of hyperanalysis. I think they call it a deconstruction of the medium. We take it apart, we look at the elements and we put it back together. And when we put it back together, it's somehow taken on a new kind of vibrancy."
Monsters of Grace is the centrepiece of Through the Looking Glass, a mini-festival devoted to the music of Philip Glass at the Belfast Festival, which offers audiences a comprehensive introduction to one of the world's best known and most controversial living composers.
Apart from the new opera, the Philip Glass Ensemble will perform Glass's music for the Jean Cocteau film La Belle et la Bete and will provide a live soundtrack to Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi. The Ulster Orchestra will perform the Symphony No. 3 for String Orchestra and the Heroes Symphony and Glass will give a solo piano recital of his own work.
"It occurred to us at a certain point when we began talking with the festival that I could present a range of work that was on the one hand focused on the idea of multimedia and at the same time it covered a period of about 18 years, from 1980 to 1998 - and very differently," he says.
Born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1937, Philip Glass started playing the flute at the age of eight and later studied piano, harmony and composition with Louis Cheslock. He graduated in Mathematics and Philosophy at the age of 19 from the University of Chicago. After attending the Julliard Music School in New York, he studied with Darius Milhaud and Nadia Boulanger in Paris.
During his stay in Paris, he worked on a film score with the Indian musician Ravi Shankar, notating Shankar's improvisations so that Western musicians could play them on the soundtrack. This marked the start of an enduring interest in non-European musical traditions.
Although he dislikes being described as a minimalist, Glass came to prominence in the late 1960s as part of a group of composers of minimal music that also included La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass. These four composers were the first to apply consistently the techniques of repetition and minimalism in their music and, in the case of Glass, the overlapping of rhythmic structures, and the lack of harmonic development, lent the music a slow, mesmeric effect.
This quality makes the music remarkably effective in film soundtracks and Glass's music has been used in dozens of films, most recently in Jim Carrey's The Truman Show.
Critics complain that his music is too simplistic and many serious music enthusiasts are offended by the highly amplified volume Glass prefers, making some of his performances seem like rock concerts.
Glass certainly struggled to find acceptance during his early years as a composer and worked as a plumber and a taxi driver to support himself. But in 1976, when he collaborated with the Texas-born, avant-garde theatre director, Robert Wilson, on Einstein on the Beach, an opera about science, he at last found a way of realising his vision of a new kind of music theatre.
"When we began working on Einstein on the Beach we weren't working from an ideological or aesthetic ideology. We were two young guys trying to figure out a language for contemporary music theatre. We were just making it up as we went along. We were not theoreticians at all. We came to a better understanding of how we were working over the years but I would say a lot of it was intuition to begin with," he says. Wilson's theatre is characterised by the separation of text, gesture, movement and lighting so that each can take on a life of its own and can often appear contradictory. Unlike conventional directors, Wilson is not concerned with interpreting a text - a role he leaves to the audience. Instead, he creates events on stage that start with a visual image and shun every kind of naturalism.
"Bob brings a very special point of view to the work. I think it's largely because he's so driven by image. He hears with images, he thinks with images, he understands with images and he's truly a director. He's not just a designer working in the theatre. He's a real director who thinks in image and that's what gives the work its special quality," says Glass.
Glass is excited at the prospect of performing in Belfast, not least because, despite the fact that he tours in Europe for a number of months each year, he has never played in either part of Ireland. He is curious to see how a Belfast audience will respond to his work, which evokes a different reaction wherever he goes.
"I have no idea why. I can't even predict it. There seems to be cultural differences and I should be able to predict it but I can't," he says.
