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Catison
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« on: November 09, 2004, 03:42:20 AM » |
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Here is a post I saved from the old board. It explains a lot about a composer few people really know. I'll continue below.
Glass is one of my favorites, but minimalism is a passion, so I suppose I am biased in that respect. You either like minimalism or you hate it. It is either sweet, meditative, consonant rhythm or its annoying, static repetition of repetition.
Glass is undoubtedly associated with "minimalism" but in fact he hates the word. I wish that word was stamped out, he has said. He does, however, concede that his earlier work can be called minimalism. This includes all of his post-Shankar music up until Einstein, which is his first mature work. These works are characterized by their heavy repetition of musical unit cells. But the more important part is their structure. Most of these pieces are simply based upon the addition and subtraction of notes from these cells, however, they can become quite complicated. One of Glass' more popular minimalist works, Music in Contrary Motion, uses two contrasting lines which are built up in a regular pattern after each iteration. In theory, the piece could go on forever. While this isn't the "method" of all of his music from his minimalist period, it shows the "music as a process" approach which Glass took. This approach lasted until he finally exhausted himself with Music in 12 Parts (1972-74).
To backtrack a little, it is important to understand where this music comes from. To most people, it sounds a little pretentious to use repetition as the basis of your music, but it was really something that Glass just happened upon. Glass was educated at Julliard and then went to study with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. While he was in Paris, he had a chance meeting with Ravi Shankar, who was just coming to be known as THE sitarist. Shankar was doing a film score which needed a string quartet to play indian music, however Shankar didn't know how to write in Western notation. He hired Glass to transcribe his sitar playing into notation the Parisian quartet could read.
The problem was how the Indian music was organized. It cannot be organized in simple measures. Glass struggled with how to get the accents right until he realized that the music was organized out of small patterns, which were then added up. The idea was that this was completely separate from traditional Western ideas, where music is broken down, subdivided, and played in small groups. In this music, the cells made the music by being strung together. He was astonished that there was a different way to organize sound.
So this is the basis of where his music comes from, but it was still not generated out of purely personal reasons. After Glass returned to New York, with his new enthusiasm for "finding his voice", he got involved with the group Mabou Mines, a sort of avant-garde theatre group based in Soho. Glass wrote music for many of their productions, and specifically, a production of Beckett's Play. Beckett succeeded in removing the "main character" from the narrative. You no longer identified with the characters and simply watched what they did. Glass wanted to create music which did a similar thing. This music need to be divorced of traditional musical structure and emotion. In short, it needed only to exist as music. What he finally developed, in this experimental playground, was minimalism.
Einstein on the Beach (1976), his first opera, is what Glass refers to as his first mature work. What is extremely special about this opera, is the subtle narrative structure. Although it is filled with Beckett-esque rambling text and has no real plot, with further inspection, there is a very subtle narrative flow. When I finally realized this, it was a relevation to me. But most importantly, there are themes, there are repeated phrases, and underlying meanings which were specifically composed that way. In other words, no longer was the music about the process; he used the process for its dramatic and artistic qualities. I make this point, because this is the difference between minimalism and post-minimalism. Minimalism is about the process, post-minimalism isn't any longer.
Glass' first real popularity came with his music to Koyaanisqatsi. These really aren't environmentalist films at all. I have certainly never thought of them that way. They are really about the impact of civilization on our world, but not the world of conservation. They speak of the world we have created for ourselves as human animals. Godfrey Reggio, the director of all three Qatsi movies will never say what they are about. They are meant to be, like music, interpreted individually.
But to get back to the music, Koyaanisqatsi is characterized by dramatic movement. It is a dramatic buildup of music. In fact, there is one section called The Grid, which builds and builds over 22 minutes. It shows New York in timelapsed footage, sped up until everyone appears to be walking at 100 mph. Here, Glass' music is most at home. His music's relentlessness never gives up, and at the end, you feel as if you have been moving along with the city at its incredible pace. This movie reached thousands of people, and was probably the key to Glass' success.
The two later films, Powaaqatsi (1988) and Naqoyqatsi (2002), explore similar realms: the movement of tribal culture to civilized culture and the civilized world as an ongoing war, respectively. If you were to limit your first encounter with Glass to just these three films, you would get a good idea about Glass' own style shifts.
Glass' music during the 80's shifted from his more highly repetive style to a more lyrical style. His first orchestral work, the Violin Concerto (1987), shows where his music was going. The second movement especially, with its touching long, high, crying notes is some of the most beautiful music I have heard. The piece was dedicated to his father, a record shop owner and violin concerto fan who had a huge impact on Glass musically. Glass has said he wrote it in the vein of Mendelssohn.
His work since the 80s has focused increasingly more on orchestral music, although he would never admit it. The fact is that he gets commissions left and right from orchestras who want to play his music. He has a hard time turning them down. He now has 6 symphonies, a violin, cello, piano, harpsichord, two tympani, and saxophone quartet concerto, and numerous orchestral "tone poems".
His best symphony is probably the 3rd, which is very close to the Violin Concerto in sound. The second movement, probably the most "moving" thing he ever wrote, contains those same high passages, except transformed into an almost Vivaldi sounding shimmer. I would start here if I wanted to hear Glass at his most lyrical. The Symphony No. 5: Requiem, Bardo, Nirmanakaya is certainly his largest work, for chorus, soloists and orchestra. In his work he almost approaches Bruckner in scale. What I am really excited about is his Symphony No. 6 "Plutonian Ode", for soprano and orchestra. It is a setting of Ginsberg's poem and is supposedly (it still isn't recorded) one of his most inspired and emotional works yet.
What I am more and more dissapointed with are his film scores. I also felt The Hours score to be banal. In truth, only about a third of it was newly composed. The rest was a reworking of his Metamorphosis for piano (itself a reworking of his score to The Thin Blue Line), his opera Satyagraha, and other works. The problem is that when he is approached to do these scores, they usually have already put down a temp track of his music. Because he feels he is unable to rewrite his own music, he licenses it and lets them use it.
One overall thing that has stayed constant throughout his development is theater. Like Prokofiev, he considers himself a theater composer first, and writes his other music almost out of necessity. Most of his theatrical music comes from his own invention. If you want to see Glass at his most personal, then his operas, chamber operas, and theater pieces are the way to go.
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