How did it feel to play with Philip Glass again in 2014 after such a very long time? Was it significant that the first work you performed that evening was Four Organs?
Phil and I had been at Juilliard together, but much later [in 1967] he came to my concert at the Park Place art gallery in New York and said: “I really like what you’re doing. Would you like to come over and see what I’m doing?” The following year, he wrote Two Pages for Steve Reich, basically taking a set of patterns, repeating them and making them longer, which was the breakthrough for him in the way phasing was for me. After that, we travelled and toured together, shared an ensemble – and then at some point it got a little close for comfort and suddenly my best friend became somebody I didn’t talk to.
That persisted from the early 1970s until 2014, when Nonesuch Records’ Bob Hurwitz wanted to do something where we shared the evening. He took us out for dinner and I said [to Glass]: “Hi. How are you?” The deal was I’d play a piece of Phil’s and he’d play one of mine. He played Four Organs, which we’d both played on in 1970, and I played Music in 12 Parts, one of the early pieces I’d played in his ensemble. The whole thing went very well and we … we don’t hang out, but it broke the ice and just made things a lot more humane.
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