Philip Glass
Koyaanisqatsi

Philip Glass and I met by chance when I was just 16 years old, hanging around like all teenagers of the time, listening to the singer-songwriters of the Seventies and little else. Thanks to Tele+ and my curiosity. I wanted to see what the pay-TV was broadcasting on New Year's Eve, what kind of schedule they had organized to toast 1993 with a zero-point-something share. Tele+ had decided to broadcast Koyaanisqatsi and Powaaqqatsi, and these names made me laugh a lot.

I set the timer, and after a few days, I remembered that there was this videotape waiting for me inside the VCR.

The meaning of Koyaanisqatsi is that the world is fantastic, humans a bit less, and that the Hopi had predicted it would be necessary to return to a new way of life before the frantic grids of compulsive civilization turned us into predictable and dangerously automatons. Philip Glass's soundtrack greeted me like a friend you've known forever but never met. That music seemed to belong to me. It was consonant, repetitive music: doodles of five or six notes, prolonged in a sort of ad libitum with a droning charm and auditory illusions, with a vertical construction and a counterpoint that did not skimp on tradition and innovation, reminding me at times of that guy, Bach, whom I had listened to carelessly between a De Gregori and a Venditti. Glass's music, written especially for this docu-film, was perfect, and it seems that during post-production, Reggio himself adapted some scenes to avoid resorting to cutting practices on the Baltimore composer's music.

Koyaanisqatsi picks up the aesthetic dictates of "North Star" (Arturo Stalteri considers it Glass's most successful album), "Glassworks," the “dances,” and all that journey from the extreme beginnings of “Music in Fifths” or “Music with Changing Parts” led him to Paris and into a path where one could breathe India and oriental modulations. The scene of the “grid-like highways,” accompanied by the composition “The grid,” is perhaps the peak of this work.

I confess that from that day on, my life changed. My friends repeated it to me almost every day: "You've changed," with that accusatory manner typical of an individual straying from the pack, because in that concept of the group-community, where everything must be motivated and explained, I saw those same grids-chains, a homologation that would have prevented me from searching for my identity. Even my life was in turmoil and required another way of life.

Even today, over twenty years later, they look at me like the one who "thinks he's the shit."

That Qatsi joke was a sort of prophetic message: the Native Americans, Glass, Reggio, were waiting (also) for me, to make me a better person, to help me understand that evil is created by those who see it. This masterpiece shows our everyday life as an evil to which we are tragically accustomed. We are now incapable of detaching from collective habits and finding the courage to search for our deeper "who we are." The only "who we are" that exists today can be found in website menus. Paradoxically, both Godfrey Reggio and Glass once again demonstrate how the States, from Charles Ives to Lou Harrison, passing through John Cage and La Monte Young, built a fascinating literature of ethnological thought to oppose Western cornerstones that have always drawn inspiration from a Christian-Catholic styled theosophy. And in the end, from Reggio, a member of the “Christian Brothers Teaching Order” (unfortunately brought to the spotlight for anything but commendable situations), one could also expect a sermon in the art of Christian discourse from the post-Vatican II era.

Shortly thereafter, I also purchased “Low Symphony,” the symphonic adaptation of some tracks from Bowie’s Berlin album “Low.” On the cover are Glass, Eno, and the Duke, and that piece would also soon become very clear to me.

Philip Glass wrote symphonies, produced albums for new wave groups like the debut of the underrated Polyrock, dismantled the concept of highbrow music and utilitarian music, would write soundtracks for films (horror, in classist musical circles), and collaborated with Cohen, Shankar, Ginsberg. I have his "Hydrogen Jukebox" autographed because, in the end, I also got to know Philip Glass personally: in Foligno, in Palermo, in Rome. Many opportunities to chat with one of the nicest people I have ever met on this earthly journey.

And all thanks to these Qatsis but above all thanks to the prophecy of curiosity that should never be lacking.