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Sitan Chen
Professor Michael Allen
Expos 20: Indian Philosophy
12 December 2012
Hindu Influences on the Music of Philip Glass
American minimal music emerged in the 1960s partly as a response to the
polarizingly cerebral serialist music that had dominated modern music in the decades
prior. Whereas the latter studied atonality within a complex framework of chromatic
manipulation, the former stepped back into the realm of stable tonality, featuring
repetition and basic thematic material and drawing from Eastern influences which Jones
attributes to the attempts of a jaded post-war generation to explore beyond the confines of
a Western culture that had produced things far worse than a repellent music that hardly
anybody liked (xiii). Of these explorations, among the most notable have been those of
composer Philip Glass, whose travels in India from 1965 to 1977 (Glass 90) and
collaborations with renowned Indian sitarist Ravi Shankar (Glass 17-8) typify this
intersection of East and West. It was through working as an assistant in charge of
transcribing Shankars score for Conrad Rooks film Chappaqua into Western notation
that Glass first came into contact with what he interpreted as the uniquely additive and
cyclic rhythmic structure and monophonic melodies of Indian music (Glass 16-7). Yet
while his compositional style was deeply affected by these additive rhythms that he
believed formed the basis of Indian music, (Glass 17), he has more recently conceded that
his original interpretation of rhythm in Indian music was not altogether accurate (Tricycle

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318). For all the purported Eastern influences in minimalism, then, it seems that this
fundamental misunderstanding leaves Glasss listeners with music that, while undeniably
intriguing in concept, is related only loosely at best to the Indian sources on which Glass
has drawn for inspiration.
This conclusion fails, however, to acknowledge that the convergence of Eastern
and Western culture that Glass work represents is hardly limited to an exchange of
musical ideas: a year after his work with Shankar, Glass embarked on a period of intense
Buddhist study in India (Tricycle 316) and in subsequent travels visited Hindu spiritual
communities as often as he attended traditional music concerts (Glass 90). And while
Glass has denied any Buddhist influences on his music (Tricycle 322), the same should
not be said about Hindu influences given how deeply music is rooted in religious thought
in India. Greig notes that fundamental Indian musical modes called ragas (upon which
this essay will elaborate later) were originally treated as minor divinit[ies] (313).
According to Shankar himself, the Hindustani musical tradition of North India that he
represents dictates that the Hindu gods Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva created music, that
music can lead the individual to self-realization and nirvana, and, most tellingly, that
sound is God (Shankar 24). I will thus argue that Glasss works indeed possess a
distinctly Indian flavor, but one in which resonate not the rhythmic qualities of
Hindustani music that Glass failed to reproduce so much as the Hindu ideas he absorbed
from his travels. Ultimately, from these sympathetic vibrations1 between the music of
Glass and the religious thought of India emerge subtle parallels between his compositions

1 I would like to thank Michael Allen for suggesting this term.

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and Hindustani music, ties rooted in the roles of the listener, the artist, and music in the
aesthetic experience.
Central to both styles of music is an underlying simplicity that governs the
listeners response. The basis for melody in Indian classical music is the raga, which
closely resembles a mode in the Western sense as a sequence of pitches with a general
arching shape (Shankar 30). In a way then, Indian classical music loosely follows a
theme-and-variation form in the way that all melodic material arises from a single
passage, one difference being that a theme in the Western sense is not constrained to an
ascending-descending form like a raga is. Behind the improvisatory brilliance and
system of ornamentation and embellishment (Shankar 33) in every performance thus
lies something quite bare, yet powerful enough to [color] the [mind] (Shankar 28).
Significantly, though, when he uses the image of a blank canvas [that] can be covered
with colors and forms to describe the mind of the listener affected by the raga, he is
careful to characterize such a human mind as necessarily receptive (28), hinting that the
music can only move listeners willing to accept the contents of the music presented to
them. There is thus a sense of reciprocity between audience and performer in Indian
music which Claman furthers by noting that Indian listeners commonly follow the
rhythmic structure of the music...with clapping and waving hand motions, or even hum or
sing along with phrases they know (69). The performer delivers the music to the
audience, but it is ultimately the audience that decides whether to open itself up to what it
hears and how to interact with it.

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Glass has extended this dynamic of performer and audience working together to
effect some aesthetic experience out of music that is minimal in material so that a
receptive human mind is not enough. In Two Pages, one of his earliest reductive works,
he takes the simple sequence of pitches G-C-D-E-F and repeats it with periodic
additions and subtractions of notes from the sequence (York 62-3); here the sequence of
five tones recalls the simplicity of a raga stripped of any nuance, and in this context, the
additive/subtractive technique seems like a Western modernist deconstruction of the
Indian method of embellishing and improvising upon a raga. Glass explains that his
technique preserves the melodic shape while constantly shifting the rhythmic
configuration (58), keeping the audience waiting keenly for the next subtle change in
accenting even as the music meanders around the same five tones for hundreds of
iterations. On top of this layer of rhythmic ambiguity, York observes that Glass casts an
additional veil of harmonic uncertainty, stripping the melodic basis of any discernible
stressed tone by arranging the five pitches perfectly symmetrically (67).
Indeed, making sense of this sort of ambiguity lies at the core of the Glasss audience
experience: of his Einstein on the Beach, an opera with a libretto of nonsense words and
syllables, Glass says [f]undamental to our approach was the assumption that the
audience itself completed the workthe story was supplied by the imaginations of the
audience (35). Glasss listener thus faces a task similar to that of a raga listener: to
respond with understanding to the thematically sparse building blocks making up the
musics melodic structure. In the end, doing something with the attention (Foreman
84), represents a source of gratification as much as a goal for Glasss listeners.

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One could object, however, that Glass only ever mentions borrowing rhythmbased structure from Indian music that he even makes clear that [a]lthough this melodic
aspect [of ragas] is fascinating, it was not what attracted my attention then, and not what
has held it ever since (17). There does however exist between the raga and Glasss own
minimal thematic material an extramusical resonance rooted in the dissolution of the ego.
Claman traces the association of the complexity of Western music with vanity back to Sir
John Tavener, a British composer whose conversion to the Russian Orthodox church and
subsequent exposure to the compelling simplicity of traditional Indian, Middle Eastern,
and Persian music led him to wonder why Western art had replaced sacred, spiritual art
with the domination of the ego (83). Music in the Hindu tradition, after all, is a kind of
spiritual discipline that raises ones inner being to divine peacefulness and bliss
(Shankar 24) that necessarily requires an erasure of this ego, and this is precisely what
Glass does in his music. Foreman observes that Western art has traditionally called for the
consciousness to projectwhat we are as individuals onto the subject, whether a
painting, a symphony, or a film. In this interpretation of the role of art, the aesthetic
experience represents a way for the performer and audience to identify personally with
the music in a way that Glasss music precludes: the work offers lens through which to
interpret ones own thoughts, memories, and identity, a looking-glass with which the
artists and listeners can objectify all elements of the self for reflection. Yet the Advaita
school of Hinduism teaches that the self objectifies the body, mind, and all things that
are known but cannot be objectified itself (Rambachan 37). In fact, the bare thematic
material in Glasss compositions can be interpreted as a musical representation of this

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teaching, effacing the ego by inviting the self to make sense of the rhythmic and
harmonic ambiguity purely in the context of the music. Inspired at the same time by nonnarrative theater and how it similarly dissolves the norm of identification with the
protagonist, Glass thus seeks in his music to transcend what he calls the self-grasping or
self-cherishing mind (Tricycle 320). To be sure, his wording here lends context to
Foremans explanation that Glasss listeners must cast himself-as-self aside (86): it is
almost as if his music echoes Maharshis own words that the state in which the thought
I [the ego] does not rise even in the least, alone is self (13), because the sound world he
creates with the subtle additive and subtractive alterations of deceptively simple melodic
fragments certainly comes off as a microcosm of the highest peace characterizing
nirvana. And if the discovery Foreman claims the listener makes that his consciousness is
a nonsubjective faculty.behind all being (85) is indeed characteristic of the aesthetic
experience envisioned by Glass, now the parallel to the Vedantic notion of the thinking
behind thinking (Upanishads 5) is all too clear. Stripped of the traditionally elaborate
thematic material onto which the audience and artist can easily project their egos, Glasss
compositions, like Indian music, move performer and listener alike to concentrate more
on that by whichthe mind itself is grasped (Rambachan 37), the agent of awareness
within them that drives their perception of the music, than on their own selves reflected in
the sounds they hear.
On the other hand, just as the listener in both styles transcends the traditional
Western role of a self-cherishing, passive receiver, the performer likewise transcends
that of a mere messenger in the service of the composer. To be sure, in the

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improvisational style of alap, a mainstay in recitals of Indian music, the only precomposed music the artist has in mind before the performance is a raga on which he
expands on the spot, gradually moving up the scale degrees while spinning and
thematically developing short melodic units out of the mode (Claman 93). There is a
sense of organic spontaneity that lends the act of performance relevance comparable to
the very act of composing the raga. And while Glasss music is written down in advance
just like any other Western piece, the way Glass and his ensemble of vocalists and
instrumentalists perform his pieces bears a striking resemblance to improvisational
practices in Hindustani music. In his Music with Changing Parts, the score serves as a
strict guide for the keyboardists but as a mere melodic sketch for the horns and vocalist, a
platform over which to improvise harmonic support or double the line over cycles whose
lengths, dictated real-time by Glass, are determined largely by how the piece feels in
each performance (Kostelanetz 111). Its the first hint of a parallel in the key role both
styles performers play in the creative process.
I will argue that this key role in improvising respectively on rhythm and melody
could be interpreted to evoke the relatively personal nature of the path to enlightenment
and the idea of brahman as shared awareness.
Specifically, the former is captured by the rhythmic freedom within cycles in
Glasss music; as an example, the variable length of cyclic units in Music with Changing
Parts recalls the irregular line durations of the namavali form, an Indian devotional song
with word motifs but little actual verse which, unrestricted by rhythmic units, proceeds
wholly at the discretion of the singer (Simon 85). Simon argues that [t]he flexibility of

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line-times is another indication of the Hindu emphasis on personal freedom and

individuality (85), so the fact that Glass as a performer determines when to move to the
next repetitive structure in a piece might suggest that he too does not believe in
restraining himself to a static score, that the path to the ideal artistic experience in
Hindustani and Glasss music should ultimately be up to the performer. Here the score
plays the same role as the teacher in the Chandogya Upanishad who points a lost student
in the direction of the students hometown of Gandhara and leaves the student, being
capable of judgment, [to ask] his way from one village to another, [and] arrive at last at
Gandhara (Upanishads 3): gesturing the performer in a general musical direction but
leaving the performer to pursue that direction on his own.
With respect to melody, Foreman claims that the unison playing that characterizes
many of Glasss works puts the performance rather than the music as a kind
transcendental structure (81) at the center of attention. Specifically, unison playing
keeps each player closely tied to the pieces entirety as it develops so that, in the absence
of any interweaving of voices, the transformation of the melodic material is the subject
rather than the source of the music (Foreman 81-82). In fact, the abovementioned
doubling of the keyboard parts by horns and voice directly recalls another Indian musical
form that underscores the performers role in the aesthetic experience. In the sath sanga
style of tabla accompaniment, the tabla, like Glasss horns and singer, accompanies the
solo instrument by improvising a duplicate of the soloists themes and metric patterns
(Shankar 40). While the monophony that comes from this on-the-spot doubling ensures
the individuality of the performer is not lost to the disembodied sound phenomenon that

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stands by itself printed on the score (Foreman 81), the listener can no longer distinguish
one voice from the other. Lost amidst the haze of unison playing that suggests a shared
artistic individuality, the audience might thus discern hints of the Vedantic teaching that
the self is shared awareness: just as the one sun lights up our solar system and just as
one melodic line drives the music of Glasss entire ensemble, so too does the one self
[illumine] all bodies and all minds (Rambachan 44).
Yet one could easily argue that Glasss conception of performance as not strictly
following the score echoes jazz influences as much as it does Indian ones; one could even
extend this to a wider criticism that the American minimalist movement actually
borrowed from a multitude of musical idioms as archaic and diverse as Balinese
gamelan musicAfrican polyphonic drumming, the medieval European organum, and
American jazz (Lange 89). Yet the very fact that such a wide-ranging palette of musical
idioms has colored Glasss music is motivation enough for the focus on Indian influences,
because Hindustani music itself emerged from the mixing of Hindu musical practices of
North India with those of the regions Muslim conquerors (Britannica). Far from
distancing itself from competing Arab and Persian musical trends at the time, the
Hindustani tradition took strands from its own and foreign styles and wove them together
into a compelling, distinctive idiom. As I will make clear, in this context, the passage
From death to death he goes, who sees here any kind of diversity (Upanishads 5) from
the Brihad-aranyaka Upanishad proves especially relevant.
And while these Muslim influences music might seem like additional grounds for
questioning whether the Indian thought that bears resonances in Glasss music is truly

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Hindu, they simply reinforce the connection between the eclecticism of his work and that
of Hindustani music. Put a different way, if the sympathetic vibrations between Glasss
compositions and Indian religious thought are not entirely Hindu, the parallel between
Hindustani musics diversity of cultural influences and Glasss own commitment to
collaborating with artists whose idioms clash sharply with his own is undeniably so. In
1984, Glass collaborated on the Brothers Grimm-inspired opera The Juniper Tree with
Bob Moran, a composer whose style and musical ideas were markedly different from
Glasss own, yet he notes that by choosing to emphasize rather than smooth out those
differences, he and Moran managed to breathe into the work a broader musical range
than if one of us had composed it alone (206). A year later, he composed his song cycle
Songs from Liquid Days, studying the way pop artists could enunciate with amplification
so much more clearly than opera singers by working directly with songwriters in the pop
music industry (201). Glasss conviction that his music is trapped within neither the
boundaries erected between his compositional style and others nor those between art
music and popular music dissolves the artificial sense of separation between his and
others artistic identities, further underscoring a notion that resonates in his music as
much as in Hindustani music, that fundamentally, such diversity of selves is illusory.
Glasss collaborations beyond the realm of music likewise highlight this parallel,
but additionally, they connect his music to Hindustani music in the treatment of musics
more general role in aesthetics. For one, in Indian culture there is a conjunction between
the arts called sangeet, the threefold art of vocal music, instrumental music, and the
dance (Shankar 24) which Glass extends to a unique ideal of integrating different art

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forms in the realization of a single aesthetic goal. According to Welch, Glass cites avantgarde composer John Cages dissolution of the boundaries among the creative arts as
inspiring his own work in theater and film (181). On his work in theater writing
incidental music for Beckets avant-garde Comedie (Roddy 170) and in film scoring
Godfrey Reggios non-narrative, wordless Koyaanisqatsi, Glass explains that the
separation between image and music becomes the area where [viewers] personalize the
work (Berg 141), which is doubly significant. For one, it reinforces the notion that the
audience plays an active role in completing the artistic experience. More importantly, he
makes clear that the intersection of sound and image adds an enthralling extra dimension,
the visual complementing but never strictly following the aural, their interactions
suggestive of but never dictating a single interpretation.
It is appropriate then that among the most popular Indian art forms is the
ragamala painting, a visual representation of a particular raga and its associated rasa, or
emotion. Typically depicting people in certain situations representing those emotions,
ragamalas originated in poetic descriptions, ragdhyanas, of the ragas, and the
conjunction of raga, ragdhyana, and ragamala marks a unique intersection of the
musical, literary, and visual art of India (Greig 312). Like Glasss work with image and
sound, ragamalas and ragdhyanas rarely make reference to distinctly musical
elements, instead appealing directly to the universal emotions represented by the ragas
(Greig 317). Just as a single melodic line links the music-making of an entire ensemble in
Glasss Music in Twelve Parts, so too does a rasa connect the different forms of artistic

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expression, further underscoring the sympathetic vibrations between the Vedantic concept
of a single shared self and both Glasss and Hindustani music.
So for all the inaccuracies in Glasss portrayal of the rhythmic structure of Indian
classical music, the two styles are subtly linked by how the complete aesthetic experience
emerges not from a single composers will, but from the conjunction of the music with
listener, performer, and image. It is no coincidence that, fundamentally, this tie seems to
echo extramusical ideas in Hinduism of the dissolution of the self, the process of
achieving enlightenment, and the shared awareness that is brahman. The
interconnectedness between God and music in Indian culture inevitably breathed into
Glasss experiences collaborating with Shankar a sense of discovery as spiritual as it was
musical, and while the strictly musical ideas he took from his work with Shankar have
given more to an intriguing compositional idiom founded on rhythmic development than
to a Western reproduction of ragas and alaps, the spiritual undercurrents in his
experiences with Indian music and Hinduism certainly resonated with the compositional
style he developed to yield a host of subtle parallels between his and Hindustani music. It
is fitting, then, that what emerges from the union of audience, musician, and image is
what Johnson describes as one of the signature elements of Glasss aesthetic, a joyous
optimistic tone with [n]o gnashing dissonances, no eerie sounds, no melancholy
moments, no downs (54). Nowhere is there a more appropriate sonic embodiment of the
highest bliss awaiting the Hindu devout who seek nirvana than the additive sequences in
Glasss Two Pages, undulating and shifting at times but motoring ever onwards towards
some ultimate high (Johnson 54).

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Works Cited
Allen, Michael. The Upanishads: Two Famous Passages, course handout.
Berg, Charles. Philip Glass on Composing for Film and Other Forms: The Case of
Koyaanisqatsi. Writings on Glass: Essays, Interviews, Criticism. By Richard
Kostelanetz. New York: Schirmer, 1997. 131-151. Print.
Claman, David. Western Composers and India's Music: Concepts, History, and Recent
Music. Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest Information and Learning, 2002. Print.
Foreman, Richard. Glass and Snow. Writings on Glass: Essays, Interviews, Criticism.
By Richard Kostelanetz. New York: Schirmer, 1997. 80-86. Print.
Glass, Philip. Music by Philip Glass. New York: Harper & Row, 1987. Print.
Greig, John. "Ragamala Painting." South Asia: The Indian Subcontinent. By Alison
Arnold. New York: Taylor & Francis, 2000. 312-18. Print.
"Hindustani music." Encyclopdia Britannica. Encyclopdia Britannica Online
Academic Edition. Encyclopdia Britannica Inc., 2012. Web. 12 Dec. 2012.
<http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/266470/Hindustani-music>.
Johnson, Tom. Chronicle, 1972-1981. Writings on Glass: Essays, Interviews, Criticism.
By Richard Kostelanetz. New York: Schirmer, 1997. 51-59. Print.
Jones, Robert. Introduction. Music by Philip Glass. By Philip Glass. New York: Harper &
Row, 1987. Print.
Kostelanetz, Richard. Philip Glass. Writings on Glass: Essays, Interviews, Criticism.
By Richard Kostelanetz. New York: Schirmer, 1997. 109-112. Print.

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Lange, Art. "Chronicle, 1977-1980." Writings on Glass: Essays, Interviews, Criticism. By

Richard Kostelanetz. New York: Schirmer, 1997. 87-93. Print.
Godman, David. Be As You Are: The Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi. Arkana Penguin
Books, 1955.
Rambachan, Anantanand. The Advaita Worldview: God, World, and Humanity. New
York: State University of New York Press, 2006.
Roddy, Joseph. Listening to Glass. Writings on Glass: Essays, Interviews, Criticism.
By Richard Kostelanetz. New York: Schirmer, 1997. 167-175. Print.
Shankar, Ravi. My Music, My Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968. Print.
Simon, Robert L. Spiritual Aspects of Indian Music. Delhi: Sundeep, 1984. Print.
Tworkov, Helen, and Robert Coe. "First Lesson, Best Lesson." Writings on Glass: Essays,
Interviews, Criticism. By Richard Kostelanetz. New York: Schirmer, 1997. 31630. Print.
Welch, Allison. Meetings along the Edge: Svara and Tla in American Minimal Music.
American Music , Vol. 17, No. 2 (Summer, 1999), pp. 179-199.
York, Wes. "Form and Process." Writings on Glass: Essays, Interviews, Criticism. By
Richard Kostelanetz. New York: Schirmer, 1997. 60-79. Print.