Why Dracula scores at the box office

By Michael Roddy

Knock, knock ... Who's there? Philip Glass and Dracula. Should you let them in? You may already have done so.

The music of the world's most famous minimalist composer, whose repetitious style is parodied in the run-on "knock, knock" joke, is ubiquitous in classical music circles, not to mention films, radio and videos, and mimicked in advertisements.

The 1931 film Dracula, with the late actor Bela Lugosi doing the batty bat-and-cape swirling honours, needs no introduction.

Put them - improbable as it may sound - together, get the trendy Kronos String Quartet to play Glass' new film score for Universal's reissued black-and-white classic, and you have the hottest thing to hit the video and concert hall circuit.

"All you have to say is 'Dra-' and it's sold out," says Glass, aged 62, recovering one night recently in Budapest, pretty close to Dracula territory, after a two-hour, non-stop performance of his solo piano music.

He was talking about the special concert version of his Dracula score that he performs live with Kronos in big cities such as New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and London. He might as well have been speaking about anywhere else he shows up these days as one of the hottest properties in the classical music world.

Glass, whose somewhat stony-faced demeanour might have made him a natural for a Universal horror classic, was exhausted after flying in the same day from New York and facing a flight back the next. He was clearly in his element with a sell-out crowd that overflowed onto the stage of the prestigious Liszt Academy.

Legions of adoring fans besieged him for autographs, to play concert dates, to look at their scores, just to be near him - like a pop star. This for a man born in Baltimore, Maryland, who drove a cab for more of his adult life than he cares to remember.

He hadn't given up navigating the streets of New York long before his landmark, 41/2-hour opera Einstein on the Beach had its premiere at the Metropolitan Opera more than 30 years ago.

Since then, it has all been up, up and higher up for Glass, who has managed to maintain centre stage in the serious music world while making forays into film, with the score for the cult environmental film Koyaanisqatsi and, more recently, for director Peter Weir's dig at television, The Truman Show.

It seems natural to Glass, who says his music is connected "to the four elements of theatre - text, music, movement and image." Perhaps even more important, for those who think classical music died an atonal death early this century, it is tonal.

"It's in the new tradition of tonal music," he says. "That means there is a very strong idea of tonality, but it is interpreted in a very different way."

His music is characterised by arpeggiated, or rolling, chords and by melodies often wistful and reminiscent of Indian music.

Glass says he and similarly minded composers had to stage a mini-revolution against the musical establishment to gain acceptance for music some critics saw as a throwback, or worse.

"I think I was a significant member of a generation that decided in the mid-60s that the future of music was not in what is historically defined as the 'second Viennese school'," he says, mentioning serialist-and-beyond composers like Pierre Boulez and Luciano Berio as its main avatars.

"You were told there would be no place for you if you did not follow that line ... but our generation simply decided to halt that and we began to play in galleries, museums, in pubs. Now the big difference is that in the 60s if someone came to you and said 'modern music' you knew what it was like. Today you have to hear it. That's a sea change - just that simple fact is a profound change."