MUSIC,

MEDITATION,
PAINTING—
and DREAMING
A CONVERSATION WITH

Philip Glass at his studio piano in 2017 | Photograph by Danny Clinch

4 8 T R I C Y C L E | FALL 2021
PHILIP GL ASS AND FREDERICKA FOSTER

Fredericka Foster at her Soho art studio in June 2021 | Photograph by Celeste Sloman for Tricycle

FALL 2021 | T R I C Y C L E 4 9

are on the phone, freewheeling about
our practices: music, art, and meditation. Another day, we are in Philip’s
kitchen, sitting at a wooden table. Behind us are comfortable couches and a
private outdoor space. Philip’s partner, the artist Saori Tsukada, is working
with flowers in the urban garden surrounding the house. 
PHILIP GLASS (PG): I was talking
once to Gelek Rimpoche [1938–2017]
about meditation, and I asked him,
“Isn’t it just paying attention?” Yes,
he said, “that’s absolutely what it is.”
Meditation is a nice fuzzy word that
we all like to talk about—but paying
attention is placing your mind and
functioning in a different way.
During the few years I have prac-
ticed meditation, I have worked with
a number of texts. Say I am reading
texts I have read many times—I’m
thinking of the first Panchen Lama’s
book on guru devotion [Lama Chöpa:
The Guru Puja], which is not well
understood. It is not about the guru; it
is about the devotion. When I decide
to really pay attention, I go back in
my memory and look at some of the
initiations I have taken. I watch the
language change from awareness to
remembering. It is possible to train
the mind to increase memory.
I once asked the [scholar-teacher]
Demo Rinpoche how many books he
had memorized, and he replied that he
wasn’t doing much memorizing at all—
he thought only about 19! I’m sure it is
many more now, and Gelek Rimpoche
—Fredericka Foster
had memorized a library. The Tibetan
culture cultivated the idea of memo-
rizing. The passing on of wisdom could
have been very accurate, since this was
their main way of sharing informa-
tion. The Tibetan lamas would memo-
rize entire books and then, looking at a
particular page, include the footnotes
from other books they had read to
verify a particular idea or lineage in the
book they were writing themselves.
FREDERICKA FOSTER (FF): And here
I am, still working to memorize all the
texts that I work with daily! Memori-
zation is also a part of a visual artist’s
training. When we learn to draw, we
work from reality—say, at its simplest,
a still life. First we draw a series of lines
to establish a compositional placement
on the page. Then we memorize a line,
draw it, and go back to the source to
check it. We keep doing that until we
have trained our hand to accurately
follow our eye. Another memory exer-
cise involved going through a pile of
one thousand prints in a day and then
discussing what we had seen. Or we
would spend hours in front of a single
painting and then sketch it out later.
PG: Culture has often been passed from
one generation to the other through
the power of memorization. We know
the Bible was written 200 years after
the birth of Christianity, so we assume
it was made up. But it is possible that
a sharp mind could remember very
clearly and pass it along to another
sharp mind, so the passing along of
wisdom could have actually been very
accurate, maybe more accurate than
you would find in books, which are
subject to typographical error, bad
editions, and missing pages.
FF: Tibetan Buddhism attracts a lot
of visual artists, and I suspect it is
because we take easily to the many
visualization exercises available for
practitioners. I remember your telling
me that your father taught you to play
mental chess, which would certainly
serve to sharpen your memory.
PG: Yes, he began doing that with his
brother to pass time while they were
waiting for the papers to be delivered
for their paper route. And he contin-
ued playing with me and my brother.
If you go back to the 15th and 16th
centuries, people didn’t write down
everything. Many people didn’t write at
all! One memorizing trick was to visu-
alize a bookshelf and to actually visual-
ize the names of the books on the shelf.
I tried this once to see if it would work
with a dance company in Australia.
There were 20 people in the company,
and we worked with them for a few
days. With each member, I visualized
their name on a book cover and put it in
a certain location on an imaginary shelf.
The last day I was able to say goodbye to
each one, correctly remembering their
names while looking at the bookshelf I
had created in my mind. And they said,
“How did you do that?” Well, what I
was doing was trying to see if that thing
worked. It did work.
FF: And we both did a lot of memori-

Philip Glass is a composer and performer who lives in New York City. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential contemporary classical
composers, particularly because of his innovative minimalist style. A member of Tricycle’s Board of Advisors since its first issue, he was chair of its Board
of Trustees from 2006 on and is now a chair emeritus. Fredericka Foster is an American painter, cultural activist, and educator, born and raised in
Seattle, Washington. The two artists have known each other since the late 1990s, when they attended Gelek Rimpoche’s retreats in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

5 0 T R I C Y C L E | FALL 2021
 “When that intensity of attention is
applied to creating, you can’t stand outside and
watch it; you have to give up the witness.”

zation in school—of poetry, speeches,
and so on. It’s helpful when we memo-
rize sutras and prayers today.
PG: All that also serves to assist us
with the flow of attention. I once
heard someone say he didn’t under-
stand meditation. I said, “Forget that
word; just pay attention to what you
are doing.” We had been talking about
infinity, and my friend suggested it
PH OTO GR A PH BY TH OM AS BOWLE S / A L A MY S TO CK PH OTO
was the flow of eternity, and I said that
is the whole idea, the process of the
mind attending to what you are doing,
one moment at a time.
I find that when that intensity of
attention is applied to creating, you
can’t stand outside and watch it; you
have to give up the witness. People ask
me all the time, “Where did that music
come from?” I have no idea, because
all my energy went into writing the
music. Since I had no awareness of
myself writing, I had extra energy to
increase the depth of concentration. It
left me without the awareness of doing
the work. I discovered that being aware
of myself creating was an indulgence I
couldn’t afford.
FF. It sounds like you have somehow
overcome dualism when you are writ-
ing music. It’s like the state we work to

The English National Opera company performs Philip Glass’s Satyagraha at the London Coliseum in 2018.

FALL 2021 | T R I C Y C L E 51
achieve in order to become one with
the object of meditation.
PG: Actually, when I decided to
explore where music lived, I found
that music comes from dreaming. I
noticed I would wake up with a piece
of music very clear in my mind. I
thought these were stray ideas, but
then I became curious where these
ideas came from—the dreaming
function of the mind is not ordinarily
available to us. So I decided to wake
up and write it down.
Recently, I was considering work-
ing on King Lear, a play I don’t like very
much, and I was thinking I don’t want
to write music for this. I finished the
play and went to sleep. Then, at 5:30
in the morning, I heard music playing,
Rose Devouring Covid 19, Fredericka Foster, oil on canvas, 18 in. x 24 in., 2021. The rose, a symbol of healing, came to the artist in a dream state.
and realized it was King Lear music
and that the play was all about Lear’s
relationship with his daughter; every-
thing else was distraction. I went to
the piano without hesitation. I started
to write words by hand to describe the
idea, then I sketched the music—a few
measures. I thought it was the begin-
ning of Lear, but actually it was the end.
FF: I keep pen and paper at my bedside
and write or draw ideas as they appear.
I haven’t done much with these ideas,
but you are inspiring me to pay closer
attention to them.
PG: Dreaming is the most personal and
unique function that we don’t normally
share with others. In analysis, we paid
a lot of attention to dreams, but I am
5 2 T R I C Y C L E | FALL 2021
not talking about Freudian analysis
and projecting it onto everyone else.
What I learned from analysis was to
give up my interest in the uninterest-
ing—all those family issues made me
bored with myself, and I didn’t have to
do that anymore. Maybe the analyst
knows this is what is happening. I read
that during the first two hours of sleep,
the mind looks at the day just past and
sorts out memories to be preserved and
those to be put away. The mind acts as
an archivist. The creative part comes
close to morning, before you wake up.
When I wake up, I ask myself What
was I just thinking? It is probably what
I was dreaming about.
FF: Are you talking about lucid
dreaming?
A R TWO R K CO UR TE SY FR E DER ICK A FOS TE R
 “I have turned this change idea into a mantra:
I am never happier than when I don’t know what
I am doing. Still, I have moments of panic.”
PG: No, but I can stand at the door
of my dream and look into the room,
as it were. It’s not complete, but it’s
enough. Before I write, I access that
dreaming state. I may never under-
stand the dream, but what is import-
ant is that the material of the dream
has become available.
FF: You encouraged me once to see
the Cocteau Orphic trilogy, which
inspired you to write an opera trip-
tych. Those three films explore dreams
and myths and can be watched again
and again. When I moved from doing
paintings exploring the symbols of
faith and myth to working with images
of water, I felt that I moved into meta-
phor and closer to the dream state. I
am so relaxed looking at water. It frees
my mind to wander, and I get new
ideas, or watch old ones come together.
PG: The challenge of any artist is to
keep the fire of creativity alive. What
we mostly do is, we get good at doing
something, and we keep doing it and
don’t change much at all. If I look at
the work of Sol LeWitt [1928-2007],
it is extraordinary, but it doesn’t change
much. [ Josef ] Albers did manage to
work with a square in a square over
and over, but while they might look
the same, they are not the same at all
because of the influence of color.
An artist like me wants radical
change. I found that the engine of
change was working with new people
and the new ideas they brought to
the conversation. It didn’t turn into a
formula, but I often did this.
Bob Wilson and I did [the opera]
Einstein on the Beach, and it was very
successful. To avoid doing “The Son
of Einstein on the Beach,” I next
did the opera Satyagraha, which was
completely different. That was coun-
terintuitive. We all want to please
people. Your gallery wants you to make
more of the same kind of paintings
because they were successful. Most
people follow success with another
similar one, but I wanted to keep
creative thinking alive in the process.
Every time I made a big change, I
would lose a lot of people, but I would
get some new ones. I found 50 percent
of people liked it and 50 percent didn’t.
FF: After the Fischbach Gallery [where
I regularly showed] left New York and
went online, I found my work chang-
ing. I’ve always had to solve a new
problem with each painting, but now I
feel free to change what I was doing in
a more radical way.
PG: I’ve noticed your work is changing.
I have turned this change idea into a
mantra: I am never happier than when
I don’t know what I am doing. Still, I
have moments of panic. How is this
going to work? It can be very stressful
trying to do new things, and I am not
always completely successful, but I
change as much as I can.
I discovered it was impossible not to
do something familiar to some degree.
When working in theater, I had to have
at least one person who would come
with me into a new project. I had to
find a compromise about what I was
willing to know and not know. I found I
had to take something with me. Parts of
my language would have to be the same,
or my task would become impossible.
FF: In your ninth symphony, I feel like
you are communing with the cosmos;
there seems to be a seamless interaction
between art and meditative revelation.
PG: Our minds are working all the time,
but we can’t drive thoughts into aware-
ness. As an artist, you are distilling your
thoughts all the time, or listening to
FALL 2021 | T R I C Y C L E 5 3
music, or paying attention to images.
You are probably painting very differ-
ently now than you did when you were
young, and some of that will be due to
the fact that you have learned how to
master your attention.
Once when I was in the moun-
tains of Mexico with friends, we had
to cross a valley to where we left our
car. It looked to me like we didn’t
have time to get there. If it got dark
and we were in the desert, we would
be in trouble. We started walking in a
focused-intention kind of way—they
called it a walk of attention. A walk
that would have normally taken 40
minutes took 10. I had that experience
of being able to pay attention to my
attention, to actually cross a valley in
a much shorter period of time so that
we got to where we needed to in the
light. We’re talking about pretty hard-
core reality. The only way to do it was
to command my attention to the point
where I was able to make that happen.
You can say “Well, you just made that
up.” Of course I just made it up; how
else could it have happened if I hadn’t
made it up? But the fact of the matter
is, I got across the valley before the sun
went down. I know you’ve experienced
something like that in painting.
FF: Yes, and at those times it seems
that the painting paints itself. Later,
I think, How did I do that? I’ve also
experienced the sensation of enter-
ing the consciousness of animals, or
even fish, when I have been watching
water; suddenly feeling the sense of
hunger and of being prey at the same
moment—imagination becoming
compassion. Music, art, and medita-
tion are all means of accomplishing
deep mental targeting of our feelings
of interdependence and compassion.
PG: Bravo!
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