When Philip Glass joined a crowd of Occupy Wall Street protestors last Thursday at Lincoln Center, it wasn’t on a whim. “It looked spontaneous, and it was supposed to, but those things are very well planned,” the composer revealed to Daily Intel last night at BAM’s Next Wave Festival gala. When Glass realized there was a kinship between his opera Satyagraha (or Truth Force) — which concerns the early life of Gandhi and is about “social change and non-violence” — and the Occupy cause, he hooked up with Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson to plan a reading after the opera concluded its run at the Met.
Just a few minutes after taking his bow at the curtain call, Glass came outside — where demonstrators were shouting, “The opera is your life!” and, “Join us!” to exiting operagoers — to make his cameo, in which he participated in the call-and-response style of the People’s Mic with an excerpt from the “New Castle March” section of his work:
