Philip Glass is surely the world's best known living
serious composer owing to vast amounts of American recording contracts. He
has a 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.
Glass's history was an entirely orthodox one. He initially studied flute at the Peabody Conservatoire, then piano, harmony and composition with Louis Cheslock. He graduated in mathematics and philosophy at the age of nineteen from the university of Chicago. After attending at the Julliard Music School he studied with Darius Milhaud (in 1960) and Nadia Boulanger (between 1964-1966) in France. Boulanger made Glass go back to the basics, as she did with all her students, and although Glass valued the experience in some ways, he bridled at the discipline. In addition to what he considered Boulanger's too excessive preoccupation with musical theory, nearly all the contemporary music to be heard in Paris then was at Pierre Boulez's Domain Musical Series - which Glass has since described as "a wasteland, dominated by these maniacs, these creeps, who were trying to make everyone write this crazy creepy music... what one looks for in a composer is that singular personality that comes out of the soul of the person - that creativity cannot be taught."
This reflected later as clearly Glass felt the pressure in his music as he was cornered and confined by rules and regulations, he was unable to do what he really wanted. On his own initiative he finally decided to introduce harmonic modulation into his music because he resented the constraints of orthodox theory. "I decided to change the rules," he recalled. "I noticed I had been operating under a lot of rules that had been automatic, and that there were things that weren't possible in my music because I had made them forbidden. I said, 'Why can't I do it?' 'Well there is this rule.' 'Rule!!? Who's making the rules? I'm making the rules.' And that was the end of the rule. You can learn all the rules and yet the personality of the composer was not in the rule book."
A story that Philip talks about shows how his thought process developed. "I had been working with Boulanger for some years. I was in my mid 20's and I had a good grasp of harmony. I brought in a harmony exercise and she told me that it was wrong. I said 'Madame Boulanger, I know that it is correct.' I quoted all the rules and analysed it and proved to her that I had all the voicing correct, etc.; from the point of view of the rules it was impeccable! And she said: 'No, no, it is still all wrong!' She grabbed a score from the piano - a Mozart piano sonata. 'This is what Mozart did.' She found an exact parallel to my passage and she said: 'Look how he resolves it. The soprano resolves on the third, not the root!' I looked at her in amazement. Until then, she had never mentioned anything like this to me and I suddenly realised that beyond the rules there was something else that went on."
During his stay in Paris, he worked on a film score and met Ravi Shankar
and his tabla player, Alla Rakka. This was his first encounter with Indian
music as he was employed to work with Ravi Shankar on a sixties hippy film
by Conrad Rooks called Chappaqua. His job was to take Shankar's raga
improvisations and notate them so that Western musicians could play them on
the soundtrack. Glass set set about this task without much prior knowledge
of Indian music, and tried to figure out as he went along just how it
"worked." His conclusions were inaccurate but this was the first step
towards his own mature style. His works at this time were disliked in
Paris.
In 1966-1967, Glass stayed in Tibet and India, where he became a Tibetan Buddhist and was influenced by Oriental meditation. During these trips his interest in non-European music grew and he paid special attention to musical traditions based on additive structure principles. By the end of 1967, Glass had returned to the United States and settled in New York where he slowly began to find allies and set up his own performing group the Philip Glass Ensemble.
Having worked as a furniture remover, plumber and a taxi driver he was
still working as a taxi driver while with the ensemble even after the
Einstein premier in 1976. However, this non-musical work was always kept
to a minimum while touring with his ensemble. He followed the practice of
not allowing his music to be published so as to ensure exclusivity and to
maintain a high standard of performance by his ensemble. Glass is always
attending rehearsals, working closely with the singers, whom he says play a
central role in keeping the music vitally connected with the public which
he says is "crucial if the music is to maintain a high degree of
communicativeness."
Not much is known about the works Glass wrote before 1966 - some eighty compositions, of which around twenty were published, were written mainly in what Glass called "a more traditional style" and which he has disowned since 1968.
Glass's first recordings, which he made himself in the early seventies, were not intended as commercial products. "In 1969 and 1970, when I was touring, I wanted to get my music on the radio" he recalls, "but I discovered that radio stations at that time would only play LP's; they would not play cassettes. So what I did was to start a record company called Chatham Square".
With some production help Glass was able to record an early minimalist piece Music with Changing Parts for virtually the cost of the tape. Using a borrowed $500, he initially pressed 1000 records, but owing to demand this grew to 10,000.
Glass then recorded with the pop label, Virgin, and with the new music
speciality label, Tomato, which produced Einstein. After Tomato went
bankrupt, Glass followed in the footsteps of Stravinsky and Copland, and
signed an exclusive contract with CBS in 1982.
Minimal Music is usually associated with American composers starting in the late sixties La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass. These four composers were the first to apply consistently the techniques of repetition and minimalism in their works. Glass explains that it became a movement because when these four icons were going through their education they came to the decision that no one was going to listen to this music, so they created a style that people could understand. This technique has influenced or inspired a great number of British and other European composers, such as Michael Nyman, Gavin Bryars and Simon Jeffes who are concerned with forms of repetition or minimalism in their works.
The term minimalism was created by journalists when these composers were labelled with this controversial term. Indeed there are other names in circulation like repetitive music, acoustical music, meditative music, system and processed music which attempt to pigeonhole this style.
The term minimal can only be applied to the limited initial material and the limited transformational techniques composers employ, and even this is only the case in the earlier works of Steve Reich and Philip Glass. The term is most appropriate in Glass's Music in Twelve Parts which lasts longer than four hours and Terry Riley is well known for his All- Night-Concerts. The techniques used in Minimalism are unique but repetition has always been used.
Minimalism contains certain techniques which display the unique sound that it has now become and through this minimal music has developed into solely repetition to the non- academic ear omitting what the music is actually all about. Obviously the strong issue in minimalism is the repetition, but the most important feature is the procedure or procedures used to develop the music.
In order to define minimalism it is necessary to understand to basic
principles of minimum material combined with maximum repetition. In order
to achieve the required effect composers employ such techniques as phasing,
mass transposed layering, and mass accenting of isolated tunes. In mass
layering several players play the same motif at different transpositions
and then each player would progress. Within this technique certain players
may emphasis a note from the repeating motif which when combined produce a
tune which would otherwise be isolated. A excellent example of this is in
Steve Reich's Six Pianos, 1974. Apart from these basic systems minimalism
can also only contain the repetition itself with harmonic progressions.
Philip Glass's particular special interest was in additive progressions which are based on repetition in which the musical figures are structures according to this method. Without doubt it was the 'arpeggio' trade mark which is so characteristic and is the vehicle of this process. Its origin lies in Indian music, and it can be set in opposition to the Western principle of divisive time division, with longer units being subdivided into smaller units. The Indian musician, on the other hand, works with much larger units that are created by bringing smaller units together which have a structure different from that of larger units they finally form. "These larger units or periods are integrated in a cyclical process. Other cycles with different rhythms are added afterwards like a wheel-work: everything works simultaneously in a continuous transformation" Glass says.
The overlapping and interweaving of rhythmic structures, and the almost total lack of harmonic development, lend the music a slow, curiously hypnotic effect, but can also produce passages of great drama, a factor which Glass has put to use in film soundtrack music. Koyaanisqatsi and Mishima are his best works in that genre.
Whereas the basis of Glass's earlier works was additive structure, an evolution can be seen after 1970, when he leans towards a growing vertical differentiation - the use of harmony as a structural principle. The musical texture has become richer and more differentiated through the expansion of Glass's ensemble and the notation of given lines in unison or parallel motion and the introduction of rudimentary counterpoint. The concern with rhythmic structure was no longer dominant.
This interest in harmonic differentiation continues through to 1974 with
Music in Twelve Parts. In addition to the application to previously used
techniques such as additive process, repetitive construction, continuous
quaver movement, pulsation, a stable harmony per part and the introduction
of sudden modulations with each transition to a new part, Glass introduces
a number of new techniques. For instance, Part 1 of Music in Twelve Parts
is notable for the presence of a perfect fifth (F# - C#) that is audible
continuously as a "new resulting musical pattern" but is not written as
such it is the result of a number overlapping figures.
In creating his own style, Glass illuminated still further the relation 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. Glass's 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 strongly maintains that he is a theatre composer, which 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. The subjects of
his operas are imposingly large - science is presented by Einstein on the
Beech, politics by Satyagraha (the early political struggles of Ghandi, and
religion by Akhnaten (Egyptian theism), and he insists that the best music
is conceived in 'world terms', presumably on a large scale and with
impressively large concepts. The operas are successions of set pieces
(arias, choruses, interludes, etc.), all based on chaconnes of considerable
length, and without noticeable melodic or harmonic change. Visually they
are also largely static. A singer may cross the stage, climb a pole, and
then descend again, all in a period of ten minutes. But nothing else
happens.
Glass says "pieces I wrote ten years ago were only written once. Now I find I spend more time re-writing and re-thinking things, maybe because a certain complexity has appeared in the music in recent years and I simply can't let it go ,on such an easy basis as I did before. I also find that, in re-writing, I can make my biggest improvements. As you get older as a composer, you bring more to the music: you have more experience; your technique becomes more supple... by the age of 30, I began to get fluency, because of the sheer amount of practice I'd had. I had maintained that fluency for about fifteen years and then at 45 I began slowing down again I didn't lose the fluency but I began to be more critical of what I was doing.
Glass's comfortable harmonic language does undoubtedly have its roots among the groundsprings of musical romanticism; but when it comes to levelling 'harmonic balance' at Wagner, that is no more or less useful than observing 'minimalist' trends in Beethoven (the Pastoral Symphony's first movement development, for example) or Bach (the late canons). Glass's musical exposition is - at least as presented 'Organ Works' - based largely on thematic repetition, subtle rhythmic and harmonic variation and fundamental conceptual simplicity. Furthermore, it inhabits a world in suspension, where much is made out of very little, "minimalism."
Glass's separate works identify themselves by with two distinct features;
we can categorise works with the current influence at the time of composing
with Koyaanisqatsi, The Violin Concerto, 100 Airplanes on the Roof, Solo
Piano, The Photographer and Glass Pieces. These all employ the familiar
scoring of the electronic guided style with the customary progressive
arpeggio. Quartet #5, Mishima, Itaipu, The Canyon, The Low Symphony, In
the Upper Room, The Hydrogen Jukebox, Powaqqatsi and Anima Mundi contain
minor influences of the arpeggio but these do not dominate the work.
A particular characterisation which Glass uses in the latter is that of the
flute bursting with a subliminal arpeggios. The is more apparent in Anima
Mundi and Quartet #5 which were both written in 1991. The harmonic texture
is also very similar in the changing progression of keys and chords. Glass
says that he writes in period blocks which contain a certain style of
writing portrayed in the works at the time. Anima Mundi and Quartet #5 are
perfect examples of this.
Powaqqatsi and the Violin Concerto were both written in the same year, 1987, but they illustrate opposite styles. The Violin Concerto throughout contains the inflexible arpeggio subject where as Powaqqatsi completely omits the use of this. This shows the crossover of styles from 1982 with Koyaanisqatsi to the Violin Concerto in 1987 where he moves into the next development of style and material with Powaqqatsi, which then moves on to works such as Hydrogen Jukebox, Quartet #5 and Anima Mundi. The move is not so smooth as explained since works such as Mishima and In the Upper Room contain the crossover material which are all pre 1988.
GlassPages - Philip Glass on the Web
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