This article appeared in the June 6, 2003 Jewish Advocate.

Making the most of the least:

Philip Glass premieres new work at the A.R.T.

By Susie Davidson

Advocate Correspondent

Philip Glass' new musical theater piece, the Sound of a Voice, a collaboration with playwright David Henry Hwang currently premiering at the American Repertory Theatre, explores the dimensions of solitude. It's an especially apt setting for the avant-garde composer, renowned as a master of minimalism.

New York-based Glass, called the most important living composer by Rolling Stone Magazine, has scored over a dozen films. As a director and co-founder of the Mabou Mines company of New York, his theatrical edge is apparent as well; his orchestrations assume a vitality of their own, an existence independent of the staffs and the bars on the page.

Director Robert Woodruff will simultaneously conclude his first season at the helm of the Cambridge arts institution. The Sound of a Voice runs through Sunday, June 29, in repertory with Shakespeare's Pericles, directed by Andrei Serban.

The premise of the piece is that intimacy can be realized by those who live in isolation. In one act, a Japanese warrior visits a reclusive woman who lives in the woods, and in the other, set at a brothel aiming to alleviate loneliness in elderly men, characters evolve to a revelatory appreciation of human interaction brought about simply by the words spoken by another. Bass baritone Herbert and his twin brother, baritone Eugene Perry; mezzo-soprano Janice Felty and soprano Suzan Hanson round out the singers. The music director/conductor is Alan Johnson, with Wu Man on Pipa, Rebecca Paterson on cello, Susan Gall on flutes and Bob Schulz on percussion. Designers are Robert Israel (set), Kasia Walicka Maimone (costume), Beverly Emmons (lighting) and David Remedios (sound).

Glass, highly acclaimed for his music for opera, dance, theatre, chamber ensembles, symphonic works, and film, broke operatic ground with the 1976 Einstein on the Beach, a five-hour classic created with Robert Wilson. His myriad credits include the Academy Award-nominated music for "The Hours," which won the British Academy of Film and Television Association Award, another Oscar-nominated work, Martin Scorcese's film Kundun (a portrayal of the current Dalai Lama), and the Golden Globe-winning score for the Truman Show.

Glass was raised in Baltimore, Maryland in a music-oriented family. “My father, who owned a record store, was a second cousin of Al Jolson,” he said. “I grew up among Holocaust survivors,” he recalled. “My mother would house them upon their arrival to the US during the mid-40s.” He was bar mitzvahed at the end of that decade and is a cousin of NPR’s Ira Glass.

Following a bachelor’s degree in math and philosophy from the University of Chicago and a master’s in composition friom Juilliard, he studied with Nadine Boulanger in Paris on a Fulbright scholarship. The sitar music and spirituality of Ravi Shankar inspired a trip to India, where he began a lifelong effort, which has included benefit performances and talks, to try to alleviate the plight of displaced Tibetans.

Glass, who thinks of himself as primarily a follower of peace, played in an open-air theatere in Tel Aviv. “I’ve also played in Jerusalem, and I’m currently collaborating with Israeli artist Michal Rovner in a film project,” he said. In New York, he belongs to the YMHA on 14th Street, where he regularly swims. A father of two sons and a daughter, he is expecting a new son in October. “My oldest son, Zach, is a songwriter; my daughter Juliette a food writer for Gourmet and other magazines,” he noted.

Glass’ first foray into Asian instrumentation in this work reflects his osmotic ability to draw from varied sources. His eclectic influences and collaborators have included the late filmmaker Jean Cocteau, David Bowie, Brian Eno, the Kronos Quartet, the Grateful Dead’s Mickey Hart, Allen Ginsberg, Japanese artist Kitaro, Suzanne Vega and Richard James, and Tibetan Gyuto monks. He worked again with Wilson on “the CIVIL warS,” scored the provocative, anti-industrialism 1980s trilogy “Koyaanisqatsi," “Powaqqatsi," and "Naqoyqatsi", and scored Errol Morris’ “The Thin Blue Line” (1988).

At the A.R.T., Hanson appeared in Glass’ “Fall of the House of Usher,” Felty and Eugene Perry in “Orphee” (with Perry in the title role). Israel, a professor at UCLA’s School of Arts and Architecture, designed the sets for “Orphee” at the A.R.T., as well as for past A.R.T. director Robert Brustein’s “Shlemiel the First” and “Tartuffe.” Woodruff and Glass have previously collaborated on “A Madrigal Opera.”

Maimone has designed costumes for Glass and Susan Marshall’s Les Enfants Terribles and Glass’ “Dracula”; Emmons, who worked on “Einstein on the Beach” and “the CIVIL warS Part V,” has

received seven Tony nominations.

The A.R.T. is located at 64 Brattle St. in Harvard Square, Cambridge.

Tickets can be ordered by calling 617-547-8300 or by visiting

www.amrep.org. Box office hours are 10 a.m. to curtain time on

performance days, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. on Mondays and nonperformance days, and noon-5 p.m. on Sundays.