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March 26, 2010
Pleasure from music’s pulse
On April 5, composer Philip Glass will play works for solo piano.
DANA SCHLANGER
In 1982, American composer Philip Glass wrote the The Photographer, a chamber opera centred around 19th-century English photographer Eadwaerd Muybridge, whose famed experiments with the photography of subjects in motion anticipated and laid the ground for the development of motion pictures. The strips of images, incorporating gradual, minute changes that create an overall arc of motion, seem to be a natural choice for a composer who has turned the word “repetitive” into a compliment. In the process, Glass has become a genuinely popular creator, appealing to a vast and diverse audience, packing opera houses as well as rock clubs.
His music has been dubbed “minimalist,” although he recoils from this label, describing himself, instead, as a composer of “music with repetitive structures.”
It took Glass a little while to get there – his musical studies started in a very thorough and traditional way, at the University of Chicago, the Juilliard School of Music in New York and later, in Paris, with iconic teacher Nadia Boulanger. His musical sensibility developed in an unorthodox way, in his childhood. The grandson of (non-musical) Russian-Jewish immigrants, he describes growing to love modern music when his father would bring home the records that didn’t sell well in his Baltimore record store: modern and chamber music. The Glass family ended up having a very esoteric and refined home record collection. Later, working in his father’s store, Glass was exposed to all styles of music, in an oddly egalitarian way. This exposure later found its way into his compositions, which bridge the gap between classical, rock and ethnic music, as though such style-denominations are completely irrelevant – just as religious denominations are for the composer.
Asked by a reporter if he considered himself Jewish or Buddhist (he had adopted Tibetan Buddhism), Glass replied, “You might say I’m a Taoist, I’m a Hindu, I’m Jewish, I’m Christian. I mean, I’m interested in all of these things, but I’m not a card-carrying member of anything,” he insisted. “You have to understand, I’m a thoroughly Western person. But, I’m also a modern person, which means that world culture has come to me from all sides. I’ve accepted huge swathes of it, which my parents would never have known about.”
The influence of Indian music, as it came to him through Ravi Shankar in Paris in the 1960s, has been a major factor in the development of his musical language. His work with Shankar helped him discover the incantatory quality that stems from the use of repeated and/or slightly altered melodic or rhythmic structures, the hypnotic effect of recurring cycles of tones, the added and subtracted rhythmic pulses. Glass simplified his harmonic language and rediscovered the pleasure of a steady musical pulse.
Music critic and biographer Tim Page explains that much of Glass’ work is based on the extended reiteration of brief, elegant melodic fragments that weave in and out of an aural tapestry. It immerses the listener in a sort of “sonic weather” that twists, turns, surrounds and develops. Another writer compared Glass’ “minimalism” to the experience of driving across an empty desert, the layered repetitions of the music mirroring the changes that the eye perceives. They are subtle, they seep in slowly, yet they are as relentless as the motion that brings them about.
Glass achieved his greatest success and, perhaps, satisfaction, when he evolved into a “theatre composer,” in opera, musical theatre and film. His style thrives on the visual and dramatic dimension, on the spectacle that merges the mind and the senses with the full work of art. His most famous operas, Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha and Akhnaten, among others, are produced by major companies and play to full houses. His film scores – Koyaanisqatsi, Mishima, The Hours, The Illusionist, Kundun, and many more – have been repeatedly nominated for and awarded international prizes.
Now in his 70s, Glass continues to tour the world, playing his work on the piano – whether it’s the music he’s written for piano or arrangements of fragments from his operas and film music. This is his way of making his more complex pieces known to a wider public. “The piano is the instrument I play when I get up in the morning, and last thing at night,” he has been quoted as saying. “These concerts are the most intimate musical experiences I ever have. They represent my whole mission as musician and composer – those moments when it’s just myself, my music and an audience. Here, the whole cycle, the whole transaction, is complete.”
Glass will perform Études and Other Works for Solo Piano, April 5, 7:30 p.m., at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts. Visit chancentre.com for more information and tickets.
Dana Schlanger is a freelance writer and director of the Dena Wosk School of Performing Arts at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver.
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