WISDOM OF AGES

Philip Glass understood the risk of joining the frenzy to churn out music for the millennium. Then add the risk inherent in describing a piece as “5,000 years of human meditation on eternity.” And then pile on the risk of equating sections of the Koran with the Mayan creation myth and, yes, the Bible too.

“It always comes up, ‘Isn’t this a danger? Isn’t that a danger?’ And it’s all true,” Glass says.

“But you don’t want to not be invited to the party.”

It looked like that might be happening to him a few years back, when everyone from the International Bach Academy to the Walt Disney Co. was dishing out commissions for millennial celebrations. The buildup generated perhaps unrealistic expectations of a profusion of memorable music, but it also provided a welcome profusion of paychecks for composers--along with guarantees that their new works would be played for an audience, at least once.

“All my friends were getting them,” Glass says of the commissions, with a pause to underscore how he wasn’t. “Then the invitation came. . . . “

Glass is not a comedian, but he’s turned this into a bit almost, how he came to write his Symphony No. 5. He shared the story during a preconcert talk last weekend at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, scene of the North American premiere of the work, which will have its West Coast unveiling this evening at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

Glass recalled how he finally got not only an invite, but a daunting directive, from Austria’s renowned Salzburg Festival. He was told by the artistic director, Gerard Mortier, that the Japanese company financing the commission “ ‘wanted a piece kind of like Beethoven’s Ninth.’

“I said”--a prime laugh line--” ’Sure.’ ”

Oh, and America’s pioneering Minimalist composer would have at his disposal a full orchestra, a choir, a children’s chorus, etc.

“I said, ‘Can I have four soloists?’

“He said, ‘Take five.’ ”

Though his sponsors were fantasizing if they thought any occasion or amount of money could produce another Beethoven’s Ninth, Glass had been thinking for some time about an ambitious work with universal overtones.

An old friend, the Very Rev. James Parks Morton--president of the Interfaith Center of New York--had been imploring Glass for years to write a Requiem. Glass wanted something less overtly religious, a symphony that would underscore similar teachings in diverse “wisdom” texts.

Glass recruited Morton and another veteran of interfaith discussions, Kusumita Priscilla Pedersen--head of the religion department at St. Francis College in Brooklyn--to help him come up with a libretto that would draw from such familiar sources as the New and Old Testaments and “The Tibetan Book of the Dead,” and from dozens of others less well known, from the writings of 13th century Persian poet Rumi to a Japanese death haiku.

The 63-year-old Glass, born Jewish but a practicing Buddhist, has often found inspiration in Eastern thought, as in his opera “Satyagrapha,” about Gandhi and nonviolent resistance, or in his music for “Kundun,” Martin Scorsese’s film about the early life of the Dalai Lama.

In his new symphony, Glass decided to have 12 movements, beginning and ending with English translations of texts he already knew--a “Before the Creation” movement drawing from the Hindu Rig-Veda (“There was neither non-existence nor existence then . . . “) and the Buddhist “Dedication of Merit,” a prayer for the world with passages such as “May the forest of razor-sharp leaves/become a beautiful pleasure grove.”

He sought something different, however, in the 10 movements in between, covering creation through death and such topics as “Love and Joy” and “Evil and Ignorance.” Here he and his collaborators--both Episcopalians--spent a year sifting through texts to juxtapose the various traditions with one another. In a movement on “Suffering,” a lament from the Bhagavad Gita, “I cannot hold myself steady; my mind seems to whirl,” leads into text from the Old Testament book of Job, beginning “Let the day perish wherein I was born.”

Glass did not want to use perhaps the best-known line of Genesis, “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” The composer argued that it had been set to music too many times. “I have nothing more to say,” he said.

His collaborators insisted otherwise. To Pedersen, it was the epitome of “texts that deliver--texts that will shiver your timbers.” She also saw a stunning parallel to a passage in the Koran, “When he decrees a thing/he but says to it,/’Be,’ and it is.”

Though they took pains in excerpting the sacred works, Glass knew this sort of exercise could draw criticism from two directions: from adherents angry at how their faiths were lumped with others; and from those who saw the spotlighting of similar passages as naive, ignoring fundamental differences among religions on matters as basic as whether there is God or an afterlife.

“In fact, I don’t think they’re the same,” Glass says. “One of the reasons I aligned myself with Jim and Kusumita is I wanted professionals, people who have spent their lives studying these texts and had been involved in the debates over ecumenicalism. I’m a poor, ignorant slob--I don’t know whose toes are there to be treaded on. At one point I said to them, ‘Will we be accused of some sort of amateurism, a kind of New Age dilettantism, mixing everything up?’ I was not interested in that.”

‘There Are Ethical Commonalities’

Pedersen reassured him that “it’s not superficial because the texts themselves are not superficial. [And] there is no ideology [in the symphony] saying they are all alike or ‘this is what it all means.’ ”

“There are ethical commonalities,” she notes. “All religions agree about kindness and compassion. [So the piece] reflects on good and evil rather than whether there’s a god or not.”

The trio met every other week for a year to polish the libretto. “I didn’t write a note of music until it was completed,” Glass says.

His score was no small endeavor, either--it covers more than 800 pages--but there remains an emphasis on text rare for the concert hall. An hour after the Brooklyn symposium, audience members headed downstairs for the performance and found the house lights not fully dimmed, so they could follow line by line through the librettos that are distributed free at Glass’ insistence. The cover shows him in his trademark look--wild-haired, wild-eyed--but in younger days, closer to when he first made a splash with his 1976 opera, “Einstein on the Beach.”

Though it will take years to determine whether Symphony No. 5 will endure as that work has, it already has achieved a distinction not all the millennium music will share--a life beyond the commissioned performance. It has been played in Australia, Belgium and Japan since its 1999 world premiere in Salzburg, which drew a prolonged ovation.

“I thought this was going to be a very obscure piece that would be done in a festival once and never done again,” Glass said a couple of days after the last of three sold-out performances at BAM. “It would be considered an exercise, a kind of abstract, eclectic oratorio.

“You can’t talk about popularity with a work of this kind, but the general acceptance of the piece in the concert hall has surprised me. It’s a piece that has become strangely popular.”

Nursing a coffee in his East Village home, he was still mulling the sensitive issues raised by his work. Saturday’s audience included an old friend, author Salman Rushdie, who had to go into hiding after his novel “Satanic Verses” enraged Islamic leaders. Glass only half jokes that his symphony does not “mess around” with its passages from the Koran. “Some of those guys . . . seem a little touchy.”

He said the woman in his life commented after his talk at BAM that he had not “made any friends among the Christians.”

“I said, ‘What did I say?’

“ ‘Well, you were a little dismissive of the whole God idea.’ ”

In fact, Glass had told the symposium that he tried to keep down the number of God references, and that he viewed the texts not as the actual word of God, but as “the words of people envisioning the words of God.”

Then he added, “but in a way these things are minor matters.”

Two days later, he explained it this way:

“One of the things I’ve been successful at is venturing into very dangerous waters without getting a lot of anxiety about it. I do everything in public--I can make a hero of myself in public, and I can make a fool of myself in public.

“Here the piece is still kicking around. I hope it works out, but I’m gonna live.”

He does have one regret--he couldn’t get in some terrific aboriginal Australian stories. They were simply too long, even for a symphony that runs more than an hour and a half.

“This year I’m doing it,” Glass declares. “I’m working with aboriginal writers. At least I’m getting around to it now.”

Philip Glass’ Symphony No. 5, Pacific Symphony, Carl St.Clair, conductor, tonight at 8. Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, $15-$55. (714) 755-5799.