Philip Glass - Repetition and sublimation

Knock knock. Who’s there? Philip Glass
Knock knock. Who’s there? Philip Glass
Knock knock. Who’s there? Philip Glass

The most common and unjustified criticisms and jibes aimed at Philip Glass's music concern its apparent repetitiveness: a corpus of works supposedly always identical to themselves, both to one another and in the internal structure governing them. The composer himself points this out calmly - though not without a hint of irritation - in his recent autobiography, "Words Without Music", comparing such inattention to falling asleep during a film and waking up for the intermission.
But this is, especially today, a thoroughly ungenerous grievance against a style that, like it or not, has perhaps influenced today's forms of "pop" composition more than any other, from film music to the modern classical wave of recent years.

And that's only as far as its long-term legacy is concerned: almost half a century now separates us from the early works for amplified organ and the revolutionary performances of the Philip Glass Ensemble; forty years ago the creative genius of Glass and director-choreographer Robert Wilson gave birth to Einstein On The Beach, quite simply one of the most innovative theatrical works of all time; a few years later Godfrey Reggio would further cement the American composer's status with the release of the all-encompassing Koyaanisqatsi.
From here on, we can only speak of legend, and of a legacy that never stops feeding the most diverse musical expressions, from concert halls to the stages of major indie festivals - just three recent names: Benjamin Clementine, Colin Stetson, Sarah Neufeld.

Philip Glass's music wasn't born as crossover music, but it managed to become so by introducing - together with the likes of Terry Riley, Steve Reich and La Monte Young - a new taste for compositional process over final composition. In this way the listener is brought back to an earlier stage of musical creation, to a kind of underlying "arithmetic" beneath the expression of the work, which thus lays bare its rhythmic, melodic and harmonic sinews, like the detail of an intricate fabric examined under a microscope.

A series of humiliations marked Glass's early years as a musician: he soon realized he was "living in a world where all composers were dead, even the living ones," and so resolved to keep going his own way. In 1966 his fellow students under Nadia Boulanger at Juilliard pronounced their verdict: "Mais ce n'est pas la musique!"; ten years later the Metropolitan Opera House sold out the first two performances of Einstein.
Today, as he turns 80 and completes his eleventh Symphony, we can't think of another composer of our time whose style has so significantly reshaped musical conventions - both in the "classical" sphere and beyond - as well as neighbouring art forms.

Biography

From the back room of a Baltimore record store to the biggest stages in the world. The arc of Philip Morris Glass's career (born January 31, 1937) reads almost like a fairy tale. Son of Jewish immigrants of Lithuanian origin who settled in the heart of Maryland, his is an artistic journey that spans decades with an innate – and unprecedented – tendency toward the omnivorous blending of styles, aesthetics and philosophies. Perhaps because, from a tender age, the counter of his father's shop had already opened up boundless horizons to him. Besides repairing radios, in fact, his father Ben kept an inexhaustible stock – often unsold – of works by modern composers (Paul Hindemith, Béla Bartók, Dmitri Shostakovich) and classical ones (the string quartets of Ludwig van Beethoven and the two piano trios of Franz Schubert). Records that young Philip devoured, making his first contact with the Western art-music tradition. From the age of 6, Phil Glass studied violin, but what was little more than a childhood pastime turned into a concrete interest two years later, when he began studying flute at the Peabody Conservatory. Baltimore's stifling musical scene, however, proved too small for him. So, after two years of high school, he moved to the University of Chicago, where he majored in Mathematics and Philosophy while continuing his musical studies (piano, in particular). The young Glass was already a scientist-composer, one who combined mathematical logic with the musical staff and dreamed of observing the stars, dabbling in building telescopes.

At 19 he was ready for the big leap. He moved to New York, where he attended the Juilliard School, focusing mainly on keyboards under teachers such as Vincent Persichetti and William Bergsma. Having abandoned the twelve-tone techniques he'd experimented with in Chicago, he became infatuated with John Cage and Morton Feldman. But it was jazz that swept him away: he never missed a concert by John Coltrane or Ornette Coleman at the Village Vanguard, and he practically lived at the Five Spot on St. Mark's Place, the haunt of Charles Mingus and Cecil Taylor. He did not yet seem interested, though, in composing for theatre or opera, limiting himself at most to the occasional foray to Broadway, or to the upper balcony of the old Metropolitan on 39th Street. In 1960 he composed a violin concerto for his fellow student Dorothy Pixley-Rothschild.
His interests ranged from Beat literature to the Living Theatre. But that urge to broaden his horizons – a kind of "creative claustrophobia" that would accompany Glass's entire artistic journey – manifested itself even within the boundless metropolis of New York, that endlessly churning forge of avant-gardes. And so it was the pull of Europe, with its rigorous musical training and the ferment of its theatrical world, that drew Glass to Paris, thanks to a Fulbright scholarship.

On the banks of the Seine, from 1963 to 1965, he studied composition with Nadia Boulanger, teacher at the Fontainebleau school and guiding light for several generations of American musicians until her death in 1979. Under her guidance, Glass analyzed the scores of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. Looking back on those years in his autobiography "Music by Philip Glass" (1987), he would recall that the concerts of Pierre Boulez's Domaine Musical did little for him (with the exception of the works of Cage and Feldman), while he was greatly impressed by the productions staged by Jean-Louis Barrault at the Théâtre de l'Odéon and by the French nouvelle vague of directors such as Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut.

In France, Glass met another key figure in his formation, the Indian composer Ravi Shankar, the man George Harrison would dub "the godfather of world music". His collaboration with Shankar produced Glass's first film score, for Conrad Rooks's "Chappaqua" (1966). A year earlier, he had made his theatrical debut, writing the music for Samuel Beckett's "Play", in which Glass was able to put into practice compositional processes borrowed from the hypnotic ragas and talas of Shankar and tabla master Alla Rakha, based on the repetition of melodic-rhythmic cells that were then varied through the addition or removal of notes, via what became known as the "additive process".
Out of his partnership with the sitar virtuoso, Glass's new style took shape, introducing compulsive rhythms into his earliest minimalist-leaning compositions, among them the music for a Beckett play ("Comédie", 1963) and a string quartet ("No.1", 1966). But Shankar's influence wasn't only musical: during a trip to India, Glass came into contact with the community of Tibetan refugees, and would go on to become a Buddhist and a vegetarian – for a period even vegan, until his friend Doris Lessing managed to talk him out of it.

The structures I deal with are those of repeated elements.
(Philip Glass)

Right from the experience of "Play", Glass became the bearer of an epiphany: to "make art in a non-narrative, non-conversational way, through an experience more in tune with our actual perceptions". A vision aimed at dismantling convention – musical, theatrical, psychological – through a flow that was no longer linear but circular, the flow of minimalist music. Technically, minimalism consists of an extreme reduction of traditional musical material and the reiteration of a phrase with micro-variations, generating compositions that are timbrally uniform, often tonal, and lacking a musical structure defined by harmony – compositions that change progressively, yet almost imperceptibly and seemingly statically, through the repetitions and rhythmic layering of melodic cells that can sometimes give rise to remarkably complex sonic textures. But for Glass, minimalism would only ever be a starting point, never a destination, let alone a safe harbour to anchor himself to. "The structures I deal with," Glass would state conclusively, "are those of repeated elements."
After all, by the mid-1960s his work was already hybrid and multiform, to the point that galleries became its natural home, where musical minimalism and visual-art minimalism merged into an unprecedented artistic experience. Emblematic in this respect was the concert at Jonas Mekas's Film-Makers Cinematheque in 1968, featuring Music In The Shape Of A Square for two flutes (a tribute to Erik Satie, performed by Glass and Gibson) and Strung Out for amplified solo violin, played by violinist Pixley-Rothschild.

I'm an artist, but sometimes also a plumber.
(Philip Glass)

But the trade of avant-garde composer is a luxury. So Glass, even at 30, made ends meet driving a cab in Manhattan and running a moving company with fellow minimalist Steve Reich. While wrestling with the score for the gargantuan "Music In Twelve Parts", he also took up plumbing on the side. At 37, he found himself in a Soho loft installing a dishwasher: he was hard at work with pipe cutters and wrenches when he caught the startled gaze of Robert Hughes, the Time art critic: "But you're Philip Glass! What are you doing here?" He didn't bat an eye: "I'm an artist," he replied, "but sometimes also a plumber. Now please let me finish."

A further turning point in his artistic career came with the founding of the Philip Glass Ensemble (1968), which brought in keyboards, winds (saxophone and flute) and a soprano voice, all amplified through a mixer. While works such as Two Pages, Music In Contrary Motion and Music In Fifths (a tribute to Boulanger) renewed a minimalist framework, pieces like Music In Similar Motion (1969) and Music With Changing Parts (1970) show a process of growing complexity, which culminated in the four hours of the performance piece Music In Twelve Parts (1971-1974), closing with the soprano voice singing a twelve-tone theme.

From here on it was all breathless acceleration, under the banner of a visionary avant-garde. Instrumental works such as Another Look At Harmony (1975) and Fourth Series (1978-79) laid the groundwork for this new direction, but it was above all his work for theatrical productions that defined the new Glass. Starting with the seminal Einstein On The Beach (composed in 1975 and first performed in 1976), a theatrical work written in collaboration with Robert Wilson and centered on the figure of Albert Einstein, featuring his ensemble, a solo violinist, a chorus and actors. The work – an immense four-and-a-half-hour epic, the fruit of four months of rehearsals, ten tons of scenery and a crew of 32 made up of musicians, choristers, actors and dancers – received rapturous reviews in the United States, establishing Glass as the leading composer of the new New York school. The musical text of "Einstein On The Beach" became the first chapter of a thematically linked trilogy, followed by Satyagraha (1980) and Akhnaten (1983), together forming the Baltimore-born artist's three "portrait operas". Centered on Mahatma Gandhi's early years and his experiences in South Africa, "Satyagraha" is also Glass's first opera for a symphony orchestra, although the leading parts remain reserved for solo voices and chorus. The final chapter of the trilogy, "Akhnaten" (1983-84), is a portrait of the pharaoh Akhenaten, a sumptuous vocal and orchestral composition sung in Akkadian, Biblical Hebrew and Ancient Egyptian, in which the violins disappear and the orchestra takes on "a low, dark sound", in the composer's own words.

That same year Glass worked with Wilson on another opera, the CIVIL warS, which premiered at the Rome Opera House. His theatrical work during this period also includes numerous compositions for the Mabou Mines company, which he co-founded in 1970, consisting mainly of music for stagings and adaptations of Beckett's prose, such as The Lost Ones (1975), Cascando (1975), Mercier And Camier (1979), Prelude to 'Endgame' and Company (1984).
Nor should one forget other daring theatrical productions, such as the gothic The Fall Of The House Of Usher (1987) and the equally bold 1000 Airplanes On The Roof (1989), a psychodrama for speaking voice, soprano and mini synth ensemble, staged in Hangar 3 of Vienna's airport.
Glass's omnivorous art was also fed by literary collaborations, such as the one with Doris Lessing for The Making Of The Representative For Planet 8 and the one with Allen Ginsberg for the piece Hydrogen Jukebox.

Compared to other composers of my generation I have a bigger following; I love the fact that thousands of people come to my concerts.
(Philip Glass)

Through these works too, Glass sharpened his concept of theatre music, music whose starting point is not the language of music itself, but a subject external to it. Yet his versatility also proved illuminating on the front of melodic exploration, with the successful experiment of Glassworks (1982) for solo piano and orchestra. He himself, moreover, acknowledged his inclination toward crossing boundaries, toward blending high and low, art and popular music: "One thing sets me apart from others of my generation: I have a bigger following, because I care about bringing my work to the public on a large scale. I love the fact that thousands of people come to my concerts." This is also why he performed everywhere: in art galleries, Upper East Side apartments, parks and nightclubs.

His love affair with cinema stands as another central aspect of Glass's art, always strongly rooted in the visual arts and in every form of non-narrative, anti-naturalistic dramaturgy. His output of film scores grew more intense, starting (1981-83) with the score for Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi, the first documentary in the Qatsi series, for which Glass would also score the subsequent soundtracks, continuing with Paul Schrader's Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), and, in the following decade, The Secret Agent (1996) with the English Chamber Orchestra and Martin Scorsese's Kundun (1997), which would also earn him an Oscar nomination. For the film The Truman Show (1998), besides the music, he would gift audiences an unexpected cameo.
Between 1993 and 1996, Glass turned to another trilogy of operas based on the prose and films of Jean Cocteau: Orphée (1949), La Belle et la Bête (1946), and the 1929 novella Les Enfants Terribles, adapted into a film in 1950 by Cocteau himself together with Jean-Pierre Melville, a musical tribute to the French group Les Six.
Among his later film work, standouts include the scores for films such as The Hours (Stephen Daldry, 2002), another Oscar nomination, The Fog Of War (Errol Morris, 2003), The Illusionist (Neil Burger, 2006), Cassandra's Dream (Woody Allen, 2008) and Notes on a Scandal (Richard Eyre, 2007), which would earn him yet another nomination for the statuette – one that, alas, still eludes him.

David Bowie and Brian Eno helped me capture the energy, the magnetism of those years, and translate it onto paper, locking it into another form.
(Philip Glass)

While enriching itself with sophisticated forms – from the chaconne in "Satyagraha" to scattered references to classical styles like Baroque and early Romanticism – Glass's music simultaneously proves well suited to more accessible ensembles, such as string quartets and symphony orchestras. This gave rise to significant works such as the Violin Concerto (three nearly neo-Baroque movements, over which texts written in the language of Akhenaton are sung), the Sibelian trilogy ("The Light", "The Canyon", "Itaipu", 1987-1989) and The Voyage, commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera for the record fee of $325,000, plus two further three-movement symphonies. The first – Symphony No. 1: 'Low' – is a total surprise: it consists of a reworking of the music from the identically titled album by David Bowie made together with Brian Eno. To perform the three movements ("Subterraneans", "Some Are", "Warszawa") Glass employs a full orchestra: 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, piccolo clarinet, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, percussion, harp, piano and strings. In 1996 a symphony based on another Bowie album would follow, the second chapter of the Berlin trilogy, "Heroes" (Symphony No. 4). "Bowie and Eno," he would recall, "helped me capture the energy, the magnetism of those years, and translate it onto paper, locking it into another form."
After all, contact with popular music had already been established in 1986, with "Songs From Liquid Days" (1986), a collection of pieces composed by Glass with lyrics by Paul Simon, Suzanne Vega, David Byrne and Laurie Anderson, while in 1997 his partnership with Natalie Merchant would also arrive (the piano-and-voice piece "Planctus").
Two years after the "Low Symphony" he instead composed Symphony No. 2 (1994), commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music and structured as a study in polytonality close to the music of Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud and Heitor Villa-Lobos. With Symphony No. 3 (1995), commissioned by the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra, his orchestral style instead becomes clearer and more intimate, following the evolution of Reich's contemporaneous work.

Also worth noting in the chamber music output of the period are the last two string quartets of a series of five written for the Kronos Quartet (1989 and 1991), and the piece Music From The Screens (1989), the fruit of his collaboration with Gambian musician Foday Musa Suso and theatre director Joanne Akalaitis (Glass's first wife, from whom he divorced in 1980 to marry Luba Burtyk), with sonorities closer to classical chamber music (Bach, Debussy, Ravel). His output for piano also grows, from a cycle of five pieces for a stage adaptation of Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" (Metamorphosis), presented on the album "Solo Piano" alongside the splendid Mad Rush – composed in 1979 on the basis of an organ piece – to the first volume of Études for Piano (Nos. 1-10, 1994-95). The first six études were commissioned by pianist and conductor Dennis Russell Davies.

By the year 2000 Glass is by now an undisputed world guru, crowned by the British magazine The Telegraph at number 9 on its Top 100 list of living geniuses. And his music continues to pursue disorienting trajectories, from the score for Godfrey Reggio's film Naqoyqatsi (2002) to the chamber opera The Sound Of A Voice (2003) to the three symphonies built around the exchange between voices, choir and orchestra.
Among his recent symphonies, at the very least No. 6 – Plutonian Ode deserves mention, commissioned by the Brucknerhaus Linz and Carnegie Hall in honor of Glass's 65th birthday and born as a collaboration with poet Allen Ginsberg, for spoken voice and piano. It is precisely during the making of this work that Glass marries Holly Critchlow, a young entrepreneur he had met four years earlier, at the end of a very difficult period following the death, from cancer at just 39, of his previous wife, the artist Candy Jernigan. In total Glass would have 4 marriages, as well as 4 children.
In 2004, for Orion, he collaborates with six other international artists on a project tied to the Athens Olympic Games. This is followed by the Piano Concerto No. 2 (After Lewis and Clark) with the Omaha Symphony Orchestra. Symphony No. 7 and Symphony No. 8 debut in 2005, a year that also sees the premiere of Waiting For The Barbarians, an opera drawn from the novel of the same name by J.M. Coetzee. The orchestral tribute to the Indian spiritual leader Sri Ramakrishna, The Passion Of Ramakrishna, is instead performed for the first time in 2006 at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa, California. Between 2007 and 2008, meanwhile, come The Book Of Longing, which sets to music 22 poems by Leonard Cohen (presented in Italy in the breathtaking setting of Villa Adriana, in Tivoli), and an opera about the end of the Civil War, Appomattox. In 2009 he debuts in Linz, Austria, with an opera inspired by the life of Johannes Kepler.

In Western music, one starts from a great unity and divides it up like a slice of bread. I do the opposite.
(Philip Glass)

But what remains above all is the legacy of one of the most influential lessons in contemporary music. His style, having overcome the last resistance from critics, has thoroughly permeated entire scenes, including the most distant and disparate ones. Rather like what happens to the musical cells within his own works. "My hypothesis is that sound is part of the structure, and that amplification and electronics are stimuli and projections of that situation," he would explain. "In Western music, one starts from a great unity and divides it up like a slice of bread. I do the opposite. Because of the way we perceive things, we tend to hear the band of a sound, the impact of a sound, the breath of a sound, the pitch of a sound, the depth of a sound; that is, we tend to hear it as a single whole, whereas in fact what we are playing is something quite different; we are playing small, individual, separate particles. It's a structure that happens moment by moment and creates an ever-changing experience. I make the music change by altering those elements that are repeated units, and as those elements change, the whole rhythmic sense changes." A magic that has renewed itself, regularly, for half a century. And if it's true that listening to one of Glass's progressive sequences can induce a trance, there's nothing left to do but surrender once again to the imaginative power of his scores.

Ten essential works

1+1 (1967)

Although Glass has every reason to resist being pigeonholed within the minimalist camp, a debut like 1+1 fully qualifies the essential, almost "mathematical" nature of his character. A work focused solely on rhythmic structure, in which a performer confronts the amplified surface of a table, striking it with fingers or knuckles.
The piece brilliantly lays out a principle that would become recurrent in Glass's output, namely the "additive/subtractive" process: a sequence of notes to which one note at a time is added and subtracted, creating an effect of shifting intervals while maintaining a constant pulse. The composer sets no time limit and leaves it to the performer to freely alternate between two sixteenth notes and one eighth note, combining rhythms and repetitions while remaining faithful only to the arithmetic development of the piece.
Starting from this insight, two years later one of the seminal works for electric organ would take shape, Music In Similar Motion (1969), presented on Glass's first LP release alongside Music In Fifths (1969) – a kind of "harmonic heresy" based solely on the use of parallel fifths, the nemesis of classical counterpoint.
The energy and propulsive drive of these early rebellions against the dominant aesthetic seemed to do a disservice to both classicism and the tonal suspension of the European avant-garde: based on the musical language itself rather than on narration through it, a music was born that was objectifying, non-descriptive, powerful and mesmerizing by nature, which, aided by high-volume amplification, led to a collective trance that already echoed the fruitful encounter with Ravi Shankar that had taken place in the mid-60s.

Music With Changing Parts (1970)

As in other cases that would follow, the idea for Music With Changing Parts originates from an episode tied to the performance of a pre-existing work: during individual rehearsals of "Music In Similar Motion", near the end of the piece, Glass noticed a vocal tone amid the organ notes, only to discover later that it was a psychoacoustic illusion caused by the natural reverberation of the space in which he was playing.
From this extraneous, purely "mental" tone arises the inspiration for the ensemble score, with a flexible lineup that in the first recording counted seven players with varying instrumentation including keyboards, wind instruments and, indeed, voices. With his return to New York and his gradual rise with audiences, at the dawn of the 1970s Philip Glass feels the need to find musicians who would devote themselves continuously, alongside him, to the study and performance of his music: we find them for the first time on what until recently was the only LP recording, released in 1973 and recorded live two years earlier at New York's Martinson Hall.
The score admits aleatoric passages within an order structured in modules, which are changed without interruption following, each time, the cue of a musician-conductor (in this case, Glass himself); a slight opening to improvisation allows the musicians to replace certain bars with long sustained tones, as well as to freely pause the performance to catch their breath or rest their fingers.
What is thus created is a circle with shifting edges, continually advancing and receding within the acoustic and temporal space of an hour: an immersion that recalls the intoxicating effect of his earliest compositions, but in a broader, more varied and "stereophonic" context that marks the birth of the rich, polychromatic sound of mature Glass, and although it remained an isolated case – for a long time almost buried – within his output, "Music With Changing Parts" is still one of its most dazzling examples. The piece would be a source of inspiration for Brian Eno's album "No Pussyfooting", made in collaboration with Robert Fripp.

Music In Twelve Parts (1971-1974)

The anecdote surrounding the genesis of this work can rightly be called memorable: during his stay in Paris, Glass played electronic music composer Eliane Radigue the first recording of Music In Twelve Parts (Parts 1 & 2) on a single LP (Virgin Music, 1974). "Did you like it?" he asked her. "Very much," she replied, "what are the other parts like?" And so what had begun as a pair of movements (originally conceived as twelve lines/parts performable by eight players) came back to haunt the American composer, who decided to turn it into a cycle of pieces to be presented, one at a time, in individual premieres over the course of three years, thereby giving the Philip Glass Ensemble a steady stream of work.
By the composer's own account, once completed the work – lasting roughly four hours in total – had taken on an encyclopedic character, exploring the various forms that the additive process can assume when applied to seven instruments in tight dialogue: twelve distinct pieces/parts, then, each of which starts from a pattern and develops it over the course of some twenty minutes, surprisingly reconciling the elusive wave-like motion of the individual bars with an overall effect of persistence typical of drone music. The sheer scale of the experiment also allowed for a deeper exploration of the "phantom tones" that spontaneously emerge from the constant interweaving of melodic lines, making the pieces potentially perceivable differently by each listener.
More than ever, to fully experience it the listener is forced to make their way through an anti-narrative dimension, the very opposite of the logic of programmatic music from the Baroque to modernism: "The gradual accumulation of musical material can and in fact does form the basis of the listener's attention," leading toward a mode of listening "without memory or anticipation [...] a pure sonic presence freed from dramatic structure."
Music In Twelve Parts is a long hymn to the generative force and unstoppable forward thrust of musical matter, a vertigo that is at once joyous and resolute, liberating and cerebral, which Glass allowed audiences to experience in alternating stretches, letting them leave the hall at will during the performance. Performed in full for the first time in 1974 at New York's Town Hall, it represents the culmination of the process of integrating melody, harmony and rhythm pursued since his studies of Indian music: a periodic table of elements that brushes up against meta-musicality, and an early immersion into the parallel world-language that would find its ultimate stylistic fulfillment in Einstein.

Einstein On The Beach (1976)

Musical theatre is the symbol of a tradition rooted in the classical period, built upon clearly recognizable expressive conventions and stage devices. A "closed," self-contained world that has rarely undergone radical change – unlike spoken-word theatre, whose foundations were already being undermined by the Futurist avant-garde at the dawn of the 20th century. Achieving a true change of course required a work that would be a direct descendant of its time, invented even before being written, by the vehicles of that fervid cultural humus that was New York in the 60s and 70s. The chance meeting between Philip Glass and theatre director Robert Wilson brought together, in Einstein On The Beach, two artistic visions that were related and complementary to one another, triggering a synergy of intentions so precise that it gave birth to what is perhaps the most revolutionary and influential theatrical work of the second half of the 20th century.
The figure of Albert Einstein is nothing but a pretext, a collecting point for figures, objects, images and suggestions offered to the free imagination of Bob Wilson, who, in agreement with Glass, worked on an anti-dramaturgical and strongly symbolic staging, developed across four acts rendered nearly uninterrupted by connecting pieces (knee plays, musical "joints"). Every actor or dancer is required to have singing abilities and vice versa, effectively erasing the distinction between classical roles and turning every individual into a pure element, an "atom" of the unprecedented chemical bond thus created.
So while for Wilson Einstein translates into the crowning achievement of an abstract imagination made of hyper-stylized, stripped-down settings and choreography, Glass is given the opportunity to rework the complex palette of ideas that had flowed into the summa of "Music In Twelve Parts", forging solid main themes modulated each time within a whirling rhythmic and chromatic alternation. Among the most effective devices lending Einstein its character as a contemporary allegory is what was initially a measure Glass adopted to aid the chorus's rhythmic and melodic learning process: as fate would have it, the sung parts ended up consisting solely of numbers and solfège syllables, thereby further freeing the staging from any constricting narrative intent (or even from meaning itself).
Exceptions are a handful of monologues and a few short verses repeated obsessively, entirely extemporaneous and disconnected from one another: the authors are Christopher Knowles, a kind of literary idiot savant discovered and supported by Bob Wilson himself; the designated dancer and choreographer Lucinda Childs, whose "Supermarket piece" is repeated 43 times in a row; and finally the African-American Samuel M. Johnson, already elderly at the time of the original production, who personally wrote and performed the closing 'Knee Play' – a dialogue between two lovers as simple and sincere as it is steeped in genuine poetry.
Amid all this, off to the side, is the mute, bewigged figure of the famous physicist, portrayed as a violinist owing to the amateur studies he undertook as a child; but the work dedicated to him imagines him as a virtuoso, as if the extraordinary power of the scientific mind had been transferred, by transitive property, into the frenetic language of the hands.
Taken as a whole, the experience of the work performed live constitutes a parallel universe where time and space, needless to say, become relative, and everything speaks to us in a symbolism that neither offers nor requires explanation, driven by a stage design and a score that override our perception of reality and act solely within the free will of the mind.

Koyaanisqatsi (1982)

The history of film music has a before and an after Koyaanisqatsi. It is, in fact, a work that writes its own separate history, capable of overturning the role and rules of the musical score in relation to the film image. An audiovisual flow that originates from the Hopi word in the title, and from a cryptic prophecy that will only fully confirm, at the very end, what we have seen with our own eyes: "If we dig precious things from the land, we will invite disaster."
Like an extraordinarily well-argued thesis, director Godfrey Reggio's work starts over from the cinema of its origins, from the intrinsic power of representing reality, only to then alter it through the virtuosic use of editing and time-lapse. But the revolutionary and unprecedented factor of the film lies in the close interdependence between Reggio's footage and Glass's composition: over the course of the work they achieve a complete symbiosis, to the point that the cyclical character of the music comes to strongly influence the very process of editing the film; as in Eisenstein's visual poems with Prokofiev, or in the Disney enchantment of "Fantasia", sound and image proceed hand in hand without interruption, piling up the most disparate scenarios in a solemn depiction of the gradual yet increasingly perceptible imbalance of life on Earth.
From the powerful fanfare of "Cloudscape", where clouds flow like a foaming ocean inhabited by gigantic sea creatures, we move to a swift bird's-eye flight over deserts, expanses of water and kaleidoscopic flowering fields, all the way to quarries and oil extraction plants, the first warning sign of humanity's destructive action. The massive demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in Missouri is accompanied by a funereal string orchestra, a prelude to what remains the most visionary and shattering sequence: "The Grid" is the very definition of a tour de force (for the viewer as much as for the musicians), a hypnotic and destabilizing torrent of stimuli in full flood, designed to open our eyes to the unnatural rhythm of metropolitan civilization. Here a game of assonances is set in motion with the first part of the film: the natural plunge of enormous waterfalls is mirrored in the relentless up-and-down of escalators that carry and scatter thousands of faceless individuals into chaos, like particles in an enormous tunnel with no way out. Glass supports the rhythmic editing with precision, fueling the climax with an alienating "loop-suite" of winds, keyboards and choirs, intensifying Reggio's dystopian nightmare and contributing equally to the creation of an iconic moment in contemporary cinema.
Even thirty years on (production, begun in 1975, had its world premiere in 1982), beyond the message it conveys, "Koyaanisqatsi" stands as an absolute, sui generis cinematic experience for which Glass's masterpiece score is, more than a mere soundtrack, a load-bearing pillar. And just as listening to it reliably conjures the film's most spectacular images, likewise today the sped-up image of a metropolis in full ferment cannot help but evoke the unshakeable precision of those oscillating harmonic progressions.

Glassworks (CBS, 1982)

Glassworks is something of a paradox for Glass devotees. Condemned to defend their idol against the slings of the most myopic and hidebound classical critics, they find themselves divided over the Baltimore maestro's best-selling work (200,000 copies), with some going so far as to accuse it of being a commercial detour within a career dominated by far more ambitious and experimental works. In doing so, they do nothing but apply to the record the very same perverse evaluative criteria used by Glass's detractors. Because "Glassworks" is, on the contrary, proof positive of the American composer's genius, here commissioned by a fresh contract with CBS to devise an album more oriented toward popular music, with shorter, more accessible pieces (it's no coincidence that it would become a cornerstone for much avant-pop to come, from Tortoise to Portishead).
After venturing into the outer reaches of twelve-tone and serialist technique with the boldest compositions imaginable, Glass settles into a more human and earthly dimension, putting his pioneering research in service of emotion. The result is six pieces, composed for solo piano and orchestra, lasting just over 39 minutes of music, in which his (post)minimalist techniques merge with unprecedented melodic freshness. Glass's musical cells cyclically coalesce and dissolve, yet never give a sense of fragmentation or artifice, because the sound flows as a single stream, an enveloping wave that swings between moments of apparent calm and sudden surges in the vein of Glass's typical "rushes."
With the Ensemble conducted by Michael Riesman (piano, keyboards, organ, winds, horns, viola and cello) Glass carves out six utterly pure crystals, inspired by the miniatures of Erik Satie, with arrangements that are always carefully calibrated and rigorous, sharply sculpting the melodies.
Composed with eighth-note triplets, eighth-note duplets and whole notes in 4/4, the soft solo-piano piece "Opening" aims – according to the composer's own stated intentions – to create an intimate, delicate mood right from the start, with its magnificent arpeggios gently inducing a trance, until, in "Floe", the eruption of Sharon Moe's French horn and the saraband of winds, doubled by near-cacophonous synthesizers, transform that calm into a dizzying climax. Then stillness takes hold once more, rippled by delicate filigrees of strings and the winding wind melody of "Island", the longest piece (7:40). It is the calm before the new storm of saxophones and counterpoints in "Rubric", originally composed for "Koyaanisqatsi" and here instead serving to express the peak of chaos and creativity, countered by the renewed cosmic stillness of "Façades", with Jon Gibson's soprano sax weaving swirls of aching melancholy. The closing "Closing" is a reprise of "Opening", with piano triplets and duplets shining once again and an orchestration for strings, winds and brass that flirts with new age.
"Glassworks" is almost a one-off within Glass's output: it cannot be placed alongside his more titanic works simply because it is not a symphony, an opera, or even a film score. It is pure, simple, magical flowing sound. Listenable by anyone, in any situation, to the point that a special mix was even made for the Walkman. But while the days of the Walkman are now firmly behind us, the beauty of "Glassworks" has remained unchanged even after nearly four decades. It will stand as the most minute, melodic and graceful package in Glass's body of work: six sonic jewels enclosed in a heart of glass.

Mishima (1984)

A style that is already inherently cinematic cannot help but remain closely tied to images on film: movies like The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1988), Kundun (Martin Scorsese, 1997), The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998) and The Hours (Stephen Daldry, 2002) owe their success, to varying degrees, also to the scores signed by Glass, which deeply shape their atmosphere and heighten their key moments – in particular "Truman Sleeps" has become a classic of its kind.
But if we had to choose one soundtrack to represent the American maestro's contribution to the genre – alongside Godfrey Reggio's trilogy – we could not fail to mention Mishima (1985) by Paul Schrader, an unconventional biographical tale told in four chapters dedicated to the prolific Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima: having long experienced a profound conflict between art and the written word, in November 1970 the tormented writer went so far as to cast himself as a revolutionary, orchestrating a subversive act meant to denounce the Westernization of Japanese power and to reclaim the lost national spirit embodied by the figure of the Emperor; Mishima would commit ritual suicide (seppuku) immediately after delivering a speech from the balcony of General Mashita's office.
The narrative unfolds in a free form through an effective juxtaposition of images in stark chromatic contrast, set within stylized, minimalist-expressionist backdrops. Like a shadow, the entirely instrumental score follows every shade of this elegant palette step by step, as always not through mere adherence to what the images suggest, but based on the sensations Glass retained after a single viewing of the footage, freely translated from the memory of the senses onto the score.
He has always maintained that music has the final say over what the screen projects, granting it the power to attach the most varied connotations to the visual body of work. The main themes are thus shaped according to the different contexts and moods: from the intimate, gentle romanticism of the string quartets (which would go on to form the Third in Glass's quartet repertoire) we move to the martial cadences of reprisal, solemn and resolute in the roll of military drums; in between there is also room for the classic arpeggiated synthesizer progressions and an original arrangement blending surf-rock and lounge, close to the dark atmospheres of Badalamenti's "Twin Peaks".
Like Reggio before him, Schrader too adapted the final cut of certain sequences to the score, allowing "Mishima" to fully take on that dry, measured character that is the fruit of a sophisticated fusion between the rigorous style of the Japanese masters and the visionary spirit of Western arthouse cinema. Without fear of being unfair, we can certainly place it alongside the brief but essential partnership that united the eccentric neoclassical syntax of Michael Nyman with the stark obsessions of Peter Greenaway.

Metamorphosis (1988)

After the years of revolutionary theatrical works, during a period of temporary distance from the ensemble bearing his name, Philip Glass reconnected with his solo voice through the piano, embracing an expressive intimacy diametrically opposed to the exuberance of the minimalist suites for electric organ. Beyond the individual pieces, in this case it was the entire album "Solo Piano" that became a cult object, thanks to the absolute consistency of style and emotional suggestion running through it. A success that proved more cross-generational than ever, one that in the following years achieved a breadth of acclaim matched only by his film scores. And not by chance: if the tempo variations in the scales of the suite Mad Rush (1979, the earliest by date of composition) already genuinely suggest the acceleration and slowing of a heartbeat during a desperate run, and the famous Wichita Vortex Sutra (1988, inspired by his friend, the writer Allen Ginsberg) transposes that circular motion into a luminous, overwhelming hymn, the cycle Metamorphosis (completed in 1988) constitutes the essence of a subtly tormented expressionism, halfway between classical narrative and inner poetry.
The theme is naturally drawn from Franz Kafka's story, but the five parts stem from different experiences: the third and fourth movements were commissioned by two separate theater companies, who at the same time were working on stagings of the early-20th-century masterpiece; the remaining three sections rework themes for mixed ensemble originally written for "The Thin Blue Line," Errol Morris's documentary about the case of an innocent man sentenced to death for murder. So those pieces, which had initially formed the solemn soundtrack to a legal thriller rather detached on an emotional level, filtered through a reductionist lens take on a romantic flavor reminiscent of Chopin's ballades, suited to depicting, without excess of form, clearly defined and tangible states of mind. Without any effort we can picture the sunlight slanting through the blinds, partially illuminating the dusty room in Gregor Samsa's humble dwelling, as he wakes up helpless in the form of a giant insect.
A clear counterpart to the positive, revolutionary figures of the first operatic trilogy, Glass's fascination with Kafkaesque grotesque surrealism dates back to his teenage reading and would find further confirmation in the chamber opera drawn from the story "In the Penal Colony," made even more unsettling by the historical echoes and moral questions it implies.
It's no exaggeration to say that, without this fundamental step in Glass's poetics, most of today's production in the modern classical field would not look the same, nor enjoy such wide-ranging appreciation. But although these piano compositions are today among the most performed in the contemporary repertoire, no pianist — however technically accomplished and faithful to the post-minimalist style — reaches the intensity of Glass's own performances, less "precise" in academic terms but absolutely overwhelming on an emotional level.
The typical performer tends to apply their own expressiveness — marking accents and pauses according to their own taste — onto a text that doesn't require it, since that expressiveness already inevitably shines through the sublime tonal geometries of the composition. In this sense, the approach of veteran Michael Riesman remains exemplary, having always been so close to Glass as to fully absorb his aesthetic.

La Belle et la Bête (1994)

The first historic operatic trilogy, devoted to social change through the power of thought ("Einstein On The Beach," "Satyagraha," "Akhnaten"), was followed in the 1990s by a new one, developed in various forms around the imaginative universe of Jean Cocteau, the multifaceted artist and master of French cinema between the two world wars.
The first text, Orphée, was transposed into a chamber opera in two acts, whose libretto is drawn from the film's original script; Les Enfants Terribles, on the other hand, expresses the tragic character of Cocteau's story through dance, with intense choreography by Susan Marshall. In between we find an even more refined and ambitious tribute to the fairy tale La Belle et la Bête, documented in writing since the mid-16th century.
It is on this occasion that, for the first time, Glass's music "bends," without compromise, to the structure of a pre-existing work: with admiring devotion to the magical suggestions offered by Cocteau's masterpiece, the composer traces it faithfully, working out a demanding time signature for each line of dialogue, around which the instrumental section is then orchestrated. Shaping the sung parts as a mirror of the French-language dialogue, Glass adopts a light form of sprechgesang that merges solemn classical opera singing with contemporary theater, borrowing the still very melodic guise that belonged to Debussy's "Pelléas et Melisande."
On the purely musical side, Glass's language acts as a complement to a scenario of clear gothic inspiration, giving prominence both to the brilliance of the synthesizers and to a small string orchestra (14 players among violins, violas and cellos) that suggests a kinship with the imagery of another master of film soundtracks, his fellow countryman Danny Elfman. In the manner of Wagnerian leitmotifs, every type of action or feeling expressed on screen corresponds to a specific musical theme, later summarized by Glass in the overture written for the opening titles. The magical colors of the keyboard perfectly counterpoint the settings of the castle, from its first appearance before the disbelieving eyes of Belle's father to the elegant slow-motion sequence in which the young woman makes her entrance running up the staircase.
The score's brisk pace creates an effective contrast with the mostly stately pacing of the 1946 film, thus rescuing it from the narrative datedness typical of classic cinema. Almost without pause, the scoring manages to immerse us completely in a dreamlike atmosphere, more so than any accuracy of sets or costumes — on which, nonetheless, Cocteau had left no detail unattended.
In 2015 the aficionado Michael Riesman would sign and record a splendid piano-solo transcription of the work, focused exclusively on the scenes featuring the two protagonists, thus interpreting the very heart of the romanticism that pervades the tale.

Symphony No. 4: “Heroes” (1996)

A feeling of friendship and mutual esteem sealed over the years the human and artistic bond between Philip Glass, David Bowie and Brian Eno: the latter two discovered the American composer right from his early days and recognized in him the spirit of bold innovation that would in turn guide them in creating what are today considered unique, unrepeatable albums in the history of pop-rock. An exchange of inspirations, then, but in a sense also a torch passed from hand to hand, crossing narrow genre boundaries to write a shared history of contemporary expression. The composer recalls with admiration the Thin White Duke, who, unlike him, had always preferred the "Heroes Symphony" to "Low," which marked Glass's debut in the predominant musical form of the classical era.
Whereas the European avant-gardes knowingly continued to distort the founding elements of orchestral music until tearing it entirely away from its original identity, Glass's approach has always remained notably austere and respectful toward the weighty tradition preceding him. This seems confirmed by the fact that, compared to his chamber repertoire, far fewer of Glass's symphonies have made it onto the programs of major overseas concert series: only conductor Dennis Russell Davies immediately recognized and affirmed their value, faithfully conducting their world premieres over the years and recording the reference versions for Glass's own label, Orange Mountain; and indeed it was Davies who, in the first place, urged the composer, by then in his fifties, to take on the genre, so much so that the first four symphonies were written within the span of just five years (1992-1996).
It goes without saying that Glass's work is not a trivial "remix" or rearrangement of Bowie's milestone, but rather a free synthesis, originally accompanied by a contemporary ballet by choreographer Twyla Tharp, who had already collaborated with Glass ten years earlier on In The Upper Room. Six movements, each originating from the melodic cell of a track from "Heroes" — including one episode, "Abdulmajid," dropped from the album's final master. A thoroughly classical excursion ranging from the most pompous solemnity to a delicate lyricism that today, following Bowie's untimely death, feels even more moving.
Full expressive autonomy is reserved for the movements derived from the instrumental tracks of the same name: with a gravity already recalling, within the album, the opening of Beethoven's 'Fifth,' the four descending notes of "Sense Of Doubt" are repeated like an unsettling omen, placed ideally at the center of the symphony's dramatic development. The faint brass share with the strings the adaptation of "Sons Of The Silent Age," which trades the epic quality of the original for a supreme grace rarely found elsewhere in the rigor of Glass's ensembles. In the "Heroes Symphony" there emerges a balance of elegance and melodic refinement whose romantic breath has been compared to that of Anton Bruckner, and which will probably have no equal among the composer's other symphonic pages. Over time Glass would set aside, though never entirely rule out, the possibility of completing, as a mirror image, Bowie's Berlin trilogy with one final symphony dedicated to "Lodger."
A few weeks after Bowie's sudden death, the work once again set the audience ablaze at an evening organized by MIT in Massachusetts — the proceeds of which went to support cancer research — and in June 2016, on the occasion of the hugely popular Glastonbury Festival.

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