glass fragments   a page about the music of Philip Glass (The first listed page on the Yahoo List)

Philip Glass

 

 

Contents of this Page
1.  About This Page		8.  The Later Period
2.  A Discussion Forum		9.  Glass the Performer
3.  An Introduction		10. Glass on Glass
4.  His Early Journey		11. Where I Started
5.  Philip Glass' Style		12. Start a Collection
6.  The Early Period		13. Top Glass Sites
7.  The Middle Period		14. Other Glass Sites

About This Page

  This is a general, introductory page about the music of Philip Glass. It covers his musical journey (as I have read about it), his musical style, some comments on where to start a collection and links to other pages. It is not a fan page - it is intended to be a page about music. I started this page when there were few web pages around about Philip Glass' music, but now there are many, including several far more detailed sites. These are listed below under the links section, and those looking for more detail should consult them, including Glass' own recently-launched official site. Newcomers to this composer, and those who can't be bothered navigating a large site, may find this page interesting. It started out for no particular reason, and took on a life of its own. Although it is updated only infrequently, I have left it here as it seems to be useful to some people and gets a lot of hits. Welcome in particular to visitors from the newsgroup Rec.Music.Makers.Piano.
 
 
 

NEW - GlassPane - The Philip Glass Online Discussion Forum

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Glass - An Introduction

  As Alexi Christaki notes, Philip Glass is arguably the world's best known living serious composer, due in part to the the number of his recording contracts compared with his contemporaries. His style is readily identifiable, if ever controversial, style that is both imitated and parodied the world over. He is familiar to pop audiences, crossover audiences, new music audiences, opera audiences and increasingly to chamber music audiences and symphony goers. He is in regular performance around the world performing with his ensemble; an output which generates around sixty concerts a year. Although he has written a fair amount of concert music, Glass has arguably won the most recognition for his work in dance, film, music theatre and opera.

  Despite all this, Glass is not all that popular with other contemporary composers or the so-called 'serious' music scene. A January 1999 article of the New Yorker debates whether this is because of his compositional style, or because of his popularity. Of course the article does not come to a conclusion, but I suspect that it is a little of both. In this article, the film director Errol Morris states that Glass is not avante-guarde at all, but the last great 19th century romantic. I regard this as true for some of his music, but not all of it.

   The best way to describe his music is that it contains rhythmic complexity overlaid on a gradually evolving pattern. Many people would describe his music as simplistic, or the sort of thing that would drill holes in your brain. However I find that there is a hidden beauty and complexity beneath the seeming simplicity. Again, according to Christaki, Glass' style challenges the listener's perception of the relationship between simplicity and complexity. His music has been called 'mesmeric', 'uplifting', 'mystic', and full of 'religious serenity'. Traditional composers complain that his music is insultingly simplistic; of course it is, if the principle is a complexity that only a peer can penetrate. But if the goal is a music with structure and integrity and conceptual fascination that excites and moves an audience, then music that fails to do that has fallen short.

  The principle of complexity within simplicity, and indeed beauty within simplicity is not new to classical music, and one only needs to consider the work of Mozart. Glass' music has complexities its critics rarely consider. Rhythmic units fly by with such speed that it takes a player considerable concentration not to get lost. Lines sometimes overlap in ways that are difficult to perform or perceive. And when played at great speed and the high volume that Glass favours, alien acoustical phenomena emerge - beats and combination tones - to lend the music an unexpected textural richness. The highly amplified volume which Glass prefers is part of the connection Glass has with rock; where the non-rock listeners become literally uncomfortable.

   Glass seems to have gone through three phases:

• I class his early music as definitely minimalist, typified by North Star (his earliest available recording afaik) and Music in Twelve Parts.

• The middle period was really a crossover period, in which his audience moved from being just a fringe element into a wide cross-section of musical tastes, and he released a number of concert pieces such as Glassworks and Songs from Liquid Days, not unlike a "normal" classical composer. However, a lot of his work was unrecorded (and still is - see The Lost Works of Philip Glass, by Jeff Zurita).

• a later period performance and recording period, during which he has had a large number of new works performed live - for example La Belle et la Bête, and written even more soundtracks for films - such as Kundun and The Truman Show, in which he appears. He seems to have increased his rate of composition, and the number of his recordings has grown, but not as fast as the number of his compositions, so Jeff Zurita's page is still relevant.

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The early journey of

  Philip Glass as born in Baltimore on January 31, 1937. He discovered music in his father's radio repair and record shop. Those that the young Glass happened to hear most were recordings of the great chamber works, such as Beethoven quartets, Schubert sonatas, Shostakovich symphonies and other (then) non-mainstream music. It was in his upper teens that Glass encountered the broader classical repetoire.

  Glass began the violin at six and took up the flute at eight. He was accepted for admission to the University of Chicago, and moved to Chicago where he partly supported himself with part-time jobs waiting tables and loading air-planes at airports. He majored in mathematics and philosophy, and in off hours practised piano and concentrated on such composers as Ives and Webern.

  At nineteen, Glass graduated from the University of Chicago and moved to the Juilliard School in New York, determined to become a composer. By then he had abandoned the 12-tone techniques he had been using in Chicago and preferred American composers like Aaron Copland and William Schuman.

  By the time he was twenty-three, Glass had studied with Vincent Persichetti, Darius Milhaud and William Bergsma. He had rejected serialism and preferred such maverick composers as Harry Partch, Ives, Moondog, Henry Cowell, Virgil Thomson, but he still had not found his own voice. Still searching, he moved to Paris for two years of intensive study under Nadia Boulanger.

  In Paris, he was hired by a film-maker to transcribe the Indian music of Ravi Shankar in notation readable by French musicians and, in the process, discovered the techniques of Indian music. Glass promptly renounced his previous music and, after researching music in North Africa, India and the Himalayas, returned to New York and began applying eastern techniques to his own work.

  Upon his return to New York City in 1967, he quickly established himself as an important figure in the blossoming downtown arts community. "When I first returned to the United States, my compositions met with great resistance", Glass recalled recently. "Foundation support was out of question, and the established composers thought I was crazy. I had gone from writting in a gentle, neo-classical style that I owned a lot to Milhaud into a whole new manner music. The time was not right for my work."

  So Glass worked as a plumber, drove a cab at night, and spent his spare time assembling an incubatory version of the Philip Glass Ensemble. The group, composed of seven musicians playing woodwinds and a variety of keyboards with amplified voices, began concertizing regularly in the early 70s, playing for free or asking for a small donation. "People would climb six flights of stairs for a concert" Glass recalls. "We'd be lucky if we attracted twenty-five people, luckier still if half of them stayed at the entire concert." Then, as now, audience response was mixed. Some listeners were all but transfigured by the whirl of hypnotic musical patterns the ensemble unleashed, while others were bored, hearing only what they perceived as mindless repetition.

  But slowly, very slowly, the concerts gained a cult following, and then, this time suddenly, Einstein on the Beach, a collaboration with the austere theatrical visionary Robert Wilson, became the talk of the international musical community.

References: 1  2  3  4

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   The work consists of eight melodic units or "cells" which are repeated in their entirety and ordered together to form a larger shape. For example: if each section is given a number, then the form of the work would be 123454321 67876 123454321 67876 12345432.

  By linking together the smaller units, and then combining the resultant shapes in similar arrangement, an entire piece can be spawned from minimal material. In his next works Glass uses not even eight units, but creates the entire work from only one; the 1967 work Two Pages is a "study of the elongation and subsequent contraction of a simple musical line," employing one idea which gradually becomes longer as the piece progresses by added notes or groups of notes. In other works the line is also elongated by the lengthening of notes, as in Reich's Four Organs.

  Cyclic rhythm is the other important device Glass uses in his music. Like additive process, cyclic rhythm is an Indian technique which Glass brought into the Western musical vocabulary. It is created by interaction of two or more cells of different lengths being played and repeated at the same time. For example: pattern A consists of four eighth notes, whereas pattern B contains only three. When the two are played and repeated at once, the two patterns starting eighth notes will sound at the same time every twelve eighths.

  The effect is what Glass recalls someone terming "wheels within wheels." The result of both of these processes allows the music surprising complexity despite spare Original material. As would be expected, it often does not fit into the very regular Western conception meter; certainly it is much more akin to Indian music. Just like Reich's music, rhythmic pulse is always present, which gives Glass's music life and vitality.

  Some other smaller works include Music in the Shape of a Square (1967), Strung Out (1967), and an interesting work for building blocks and tabletop entitled 1 1 (1967). All these works employed one or two musicians, but around this time Glass began to write for a larger group of instruments. The Philip Glass ensemble was formed in 1968, and it employs amplified keyboards, voices, and winds. Works for the group include Glass's large scale work, Music with Changing Parts (1973). In this piece Glass uses both additive process and cyclic rhythms, as well as controlled improvisations.

  As explained by Glass: "During rehearsal we noticed sustained sounds emerging from the repeated beats of the music. I stopped and asked who was singing. And nobody was singing; it was just a psychoacoustical effect of the music." Glass then added instruments to reinforce this effect by having them play whatever pitch they felt coming out the keyboard patterns for the length of a breath. Like Reich, the improvisation is very controlled; movement between large divisions of the work are determined by Glass during performance, and the improvisers are encouraged not to create melodies.

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The Middle Period

  According to Glass's notes on Akhnaten, "Each of the three operas of this 'portrait' trilogy has its own distinctive sound world. Einstein on the Beach, an opera about a great mathematician who loved music, is for amplified ensemble and small chorus singing a text compromised of numbers (actually the beats of the music) and solfège syllables. Satyagraha, a work about one man leading his people to freedom, is a large choral opera with text taken directly from Gandhi's philosophical guidebook (the Bhagavad-Gita) in the actual language (Sanskrit) in which he read it. In Akhnaten, my emphasis is orchestral, with choral and solo voices sharing common ground with the orchestra."

  The so-called commercial disks - Glassworks, Solo Piano and Songs from Liquid Days - released during this time remain controversial with purist Glassophiles. I find it hard to share this view. Listen here to this and some samples yourself, although be aware that midis need to be played on a pretty good computer synthesiser to sound any good. The real thing sounds much better:

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The Later Period

  His works since Satyagraha have incorporated increasingly expansive harmonic and polyphonic techniques, while at the same time being innovative in terms of performance. There are two works which stand out as works that need to be seen to be appreciated and not just heard - La Belle et la Bête, and Monsters of Grace.

  This quote from an interview with Philip Glass by Jonathan Cott illustrates Glass' innovative style and his preference for works that must be performed:

"I'm going to take La Belle et la Bête, eliminate the sound track, write a new fully operatic score and synchronize it with the film. You know, someone has to synchronize the film with the music, and also someone has to do the programming - in this production that someone is the musical director Michael Riesman. And the sound designer Kurt Munkacsi (also the record producer) must translate that into a finished musical result, which must then be brought to the stage by Jedediah Wheeler.

"People might think we're some kind of technicranks who are just fiddling around with a masterpiece using calculators and computers. In one or two interviews I have, talked about how I took the film and put a time code on it, timed every line in it, wrote down the libretto (which is not the same as the published one, since I wanted the words that were in the film), I timed every word, I placed it mathematically in the score... and then when I got done, Michael Riesman and I recorded it and put it up against the film and discovered it wasn't accurate enough. So we began using computers to move the vocal line around until it synched with the lips, and then I had to rewrite the music in order to achieve a better synchronization. Then Michael had to teach it all to the singers and they had to learn to do it live."

  The other work which illustrates Glass' dual orientations of innovation and live performance is Monsters of Grace - a new and continually evolving work by Glass and director/designer Robert Wilson, (with whom he created Einstein on the Beach). Using an up-to-the-minute 3D animation process (pioneered by filmmakers Jeff Kleiser and Diana Walczak) and realized in 70mm film, Monsters of Grace explores the unlimited possibilities of light, sound and objects creating a "millennium-crashing theater event" (!!!). The lyrics, sung in English, are gleaned from the spiritual poetry of the Thirteenth Century Persian mystic Jelaluddin Rumi and transformed into ecstatic love songs performed live by the Philip Glass Ensemble and voices. Even more so than with La Belle et la Bête, a mere recording of the music cannot do justice to the work

  In addition to his works for music theater there exists a large body of concert music ranging from string quartets to the Low Symphony, inspired by the music of David Bowie and Brian Eno. The American Composers Orchestra commissioned and performed his Violin Concerto in 1987 and in the same year his symphony The Light was commissioned for the Cleveland Orchestra.

  Glass has composed film scores for much of his composing career, but in recent times two of his film scores have taken him very much into the mainstream. The score for the Martin Scorsese film Kundun on the life of the Dalai Lama, brought a much wider audience into contact with his music. An even wider audience still was achieved through the score for The Truman Show. And having had his music satirised on the depraved SouthPark means he must really have made it.

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Glass the Performer

  As already mentioned, Glass sees himself as principally a composer who composes for live performance rather than recording (although we in the Southern hemisphere do not get many opportunities to appreciate this). In his own words (from Claudio Chianura's conversation with Philip Glass) "I think of myself mainly as an artist that works for the theater, save for an occasional symphonic or piano piece. If you look at my music, you will see that for the most part it is for theater, for opera, for dance or for cinema, which is a form of theater."

  Glass's works are continuously in the repertoire of dance companies around the world. Australian Dance Theatre's "A Descent into the Maelstrom," Twyla Tharp's "In the Upper Room," and New York City Ballet's "Glass Pieces," with choreography by Jerome Robbins, have all received considerable acclaim.

  Glass does try to perform as much of his own music as he can:

"Relating to the piano has very personal implications. When I perform I try to create an intimate relationship with those who listen. This is essential for creating a bridge between the composer, his music and his audience. When there is nobody else on stage, when it's only you and the piano, what emerges is a direct, unmediated relationship between performer and public. I started performing when I was ten years old. I've been doing it for fifty years, and I could never stop! I hold an average of twenty concerts per year. This of course does not mean that others can't perform my music: for example pianist Arturo Stalteri has taken some of my pieces and is working on them."

"The idea at the core was to find once again an audience, the audience that contemporary music had lost. In Romanticism, during the previous century, music performances brought the public closer, while during our century it was exactly the opposite. We wanted to play in front of an audience because it is the only way to know what is happening. The more abstract serious music avoided the challenge of the public's reaction. Instead we performed up to sixty or seventy concerts a year."

  As for the music Glass is willing to part with, he has a 25-track CD sampler he sends out to anyone interested in licensing his music for commercials, film soundtracks, and the like. "If I deny access to the music totally, I've found that people simply steal it anyway," Glass says. "Either in fact, by taking it off CDs, or in effect, by hiring someone to make a soundalike." Glass is always involved in at least one lawsuit over the latter practice: "Basically they hire somebody and say, 'Please make a copy of this music.' Frankly, it's not that hard to do!" (source: New Yorker.)

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Glass on Glass

  Glass strongly maintains that he is a theatre composer, which he defines as any type of visual performance whether it is dance, film or opera. He has a long-established policy of working in collaboration with artists from the visual arts and writing as well as theatre and music, a tendency which he feels has had a profound effect on his approach to music.

  Although a bit tangential to the theme of this web page and a little dated (1987), keyboard players and performing musicians generally will be fascinated to read the interview of Philip Glass by by Bob Doerschuk of keyboard magazine, in which Glass provides a fascinating insight into the challenges of playing and performing some of his music.

  Glass' own view on melody, modern compositional style and his music are interesting. This from an interview with Philip Glass by Jonathan Cott, regarding the later opera La Belle et la Bête:

"In much twentieth-century opera, there's a fixation on writing disjointed melodic material, as if modern music shouldn't be melodic. God forbid that a melodic line should contain step-wise movement! I'm either on the harmony or not on the harmony. I can be either on one or the other, and once I've decided where I'm going to be, I go there in the simplest way, which is usually step-wise. For me, the setting of the text and the shape of the line are closely connected. What is it one is saying? What is it one is singing?

In the old days I tended to write operas in languages I didn't know like Sanskrit and Ancient Egyptian. These days I prefer to write in languages I do know - English, French, Portuguese - because the way the word fits into the context of the sentence will determine a lot about where it will fit into the music. One has to be careful to avoid casual or unpremeditated resolutions. You have to look at the harmonic situation and the meaning of the words and then you'll find where to place them. It's from Handel that I've learned more than from any other composer for the voice about how to exercise the voice - taking it from its high to its middle to its low range, not leaving it in one part of the voice for too long. So a singer of my recent work can now count on using the whole range of the voice in the course of an evening, which is less tiring and more beautiful and which, in the end, is more expressive. Singers have taught me what they could and could not sing. I asked them and I still ask them."

  The most up-to-date introspective piece with Glass talking about himself is a March 1999 feature article in the Baldwin Piano Notes Artist-in-residence series.
 

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My First Steps Through Glass

  The first disk of his that I saw was Mishima, the disk you see here. The first disk I purchased was Glassworks and I would recommend that disk to others seeking a starting point. However the best place to start will depend to a large extent on where you are coming from musically.

  One good friend started with Mishima, and another instead chose both Songs from Liquid Days and Solo Piano. I suspect others are buying the soundtrack to Kundun as their first PG disk. I certainly recommend listening to disks before purchase, other than the ones I have mentioned, as there are some which I rarely play, and which might put off the budding enthusiast. The list below provides a number of disks that I regard as good representative starting points. If in doubt, buy Glassworks.
 

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Where You Should Start Your Collection

  My recommendations on where to start a collection are:

• The Glass Pages discography
• The Philip Glass Library discography
• A Philip Glassography compiled by Robert Burns Neveldine  

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Recommended Glass Web Sites

  The authentic version is here:  http://www.philipglass.com. After a long wait Philip Glass has an official siteweb . A natural starting point for further and authoritative information, although it is not a complete site by any means.

  The first substantial Philip Glass web site was GlassPages: Philip Glass on the Web. GlassPages are maintained by Jordi Petit i Silvestre from the Department of Software of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, in Spain, and Jose Jimenez Mesa a computer science engineer. He is assisted in some of the reviews by Mathias Strasser, who is currently doing a dissertation on Philip Glass music. This site is THE place to go for detailed and up to date information about Philip Glass and his music.

  The other recommended site is The Philip Glass Library, by Mark S. Krentz. This apparently was born out of the same frustration I have had with the slowness of the very early versions of Glasspages. This site is now only viewable in IE4/5, and as I don't use that browser, I am unsure of its current state. Worth a look by users of IE4/5.

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Other Glass Sites on the Web

  Other Web sites, in no particular order, include

• Yahoo - Entertainment:Music:Genres:Classical:Composers:Modern:Glass, Philip
  • Not all that comprehensive, but it does have me as No 1!!!!!!!!! (after the official site of course, and only because it is an alphabetical list!!!!!!!!!!).
• The Lost Works of Philip Glass, Jeff Zurita
  • This quote from the intro to the page I think says it all. A plea from all Glassians. "This page lists a wishful, non-existent discography of Philip Glass music which is not available to the (American) public. All we can do is cast a vote for which piece we'd most like to hear, and wait. I've listed primarily works that were publicly performed and omitted film scores for no good reason, however there are many more "lost" works that deserve to be heard."
• Philip Glass Lista De Composiciones 1965-1975
  • You can mostly tell from the title what this page is about, but have that Spanish dictionary ready. Actually I have referenced the english version of this page, but it is rough English. You may still need that dictionary.
• The Philip Glass Exponential
  • Quoting from the owner's mission statement:    "The purpose of this page is information. Sure, there are other pages on the internet, such as GlassPages and The Philip Glass Library, but I plan to offer more. This, however, will take some time. <snip> I also plan to create a "Philip Glass Timeline" which I hope will detail concert dates and other major points in Glass’ life. He is clearly well on the way to achieving this aim..
• Die deutsche Philip Glass-Site
  • A site by German musicologist and Glass Pages collaborator Mathias Sträße, but only in German. You will need the dictionary this time.
• A Philip Glassography compiled by Robert Burns Neveldine
  • I have not checked to listing to assess its completeness, but it seems long enough. Has a Philip Glass piece as background music. Recommended for the uninitiated purely to get a taste of the sound.
• Mozart Among Us - Philip Glass
  • Part of a site by Glen C. Ford which looks at contemporary composers. He seems critical and anti-Glass. Worth reading only if you insist on getting both sides of an argument.
• Philip Glass - Nubar Alexaniun
  • A personal account of travels with Philip Glass through India by a photographer who travels with musicians. One of the classier looking pages, and worth a look for the rare insights, but not a comprehensive info site (then I guess nor is mine). If you are interested in photographic images, then after you have looked at my gallery, the rest of his site is worth a look.
• The Rough Guide To Classical Music - Philip Glass
  • One of the better introductory pages on the Web on Philip Glass. Recommended but brief. Other Glass sites who also reference the RoughGuide site should note that the url has very slightly changed (a G has changed to a g!).
• Is Glass Half Empty? - article in NY magazine
  • An interesting article discussing (sympathetically) the lack of acceptance of Philip by the musical establishment.
• An online interview with Philip Glass
  • Neither the video or audio quality of this interview, in two video formats, is all that good. Nonetheless it is a rare treat for those of us a long way from the US.
• Monsters of Grace
  • The official web site for a new multimedia Glass opera.
• koyaanisqatsi
  • The official web site for this film featuring a score by Philip Glass.
• Einstein on the Beach - Jeff Smith's Page
  • A page devoted to this first Glass/Wilson opera.
• Einstein on the Beach - Nicolas Sceaux's Page
  • Another page devoted to this first Glass/Wilson opera. This page has both french and english versions.
• Singing Archaeology: Philip Glass's Akhnaten - John Richardson's Page
  • A page about a book about my favourite Glass/Wilson opera. Only really a flier for the book. Has been moved and is now hosted at GlassPages.
• The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (which seems to have gone missing from <http://ae.student.umd.edu/planet/planet8.html>)
  • "This site is dedicated to the discussion of the as-yet-unrecorded opera and the oft-neglected novel bearing this remarkable title." A fascinating site by Joel D Martinsen.
• IO the Musician
  • This is top quality site. It is not strictly a Philip Glass site, bit it does contain a link direct to this page. What is does contain is quality, original, modern compositions in the Glass style, which you can hear using the Netscape media player. Admire some genuine creativity.
• Jeffrey Radcliffe's survey of Minimalist Music
  • Only a short article - the essence of which is above.
• Philip Glass - Biography
  • Again only a short article - the essence of which is above.

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