Philip Glass - The Hours (Cover)
Philip Glass — The Hours (Cover)
Опубликовано: 19 янв. 2011 г.
Опубликовано: 19 янв. 2011 г.
Philip Glass,Violin Concerto No.1
Philip Glass,Violin Concerto No.1
Опубликовано: 11 февр. 2014 г.Following Glass's early operas, the conductor Dennis Russell Davies had been urging the composer to write more orchestral pieces, and the concerto marks Glass's first full-scale venture into non-theatrical orchestral composing.Glass's original concept was for a five-movement work, and Zukofsky requested a slow, high finale. As the composition process developed, however, Glass decided that five movements were too many and settled for a more conventional three-movement format. According to Glass, this traditional structure was not a concession to formality but simply a result of the work finding «a voice of its own» as the first and second movements developed into longer pieces than he had originally conceived. The work was composed with Glass's father, Ben, in mind, despite the latter's death some sixteen years earlier: «I wrote the piece in 1987 thinking, let me write a piece that my father would have liked. A very smart nice man who had no education in music whatsoever, but the kind of person who fills up concert halls. It's popular, it's supposed to be — it's for my Dad.»
Karen Gomyo(violin)/Hague Residentie Orchestra/Brad Lubman.
Опубликовано: 11 февр. 2014 г.Following Glass's early operas, the conductor Dennis Russell Davies had been urging the composer to write more orchestral pieces, and the concerto marks Glass's first full-scale venture into non-theatrical orchestral composing.Glass's original concept was for a five-movement work, and Zukofsky requested a slow, high finale. As the composition process developed, however, Glass decided that five movements were too many and settled for a more conventional three-movement format. According to Glass, this traditional structure was not a concession to formality but simply a result of the work finding «a voice of its own» as the first and second movements developed into longer pieces than he had originally conceived. The work was composed with Glass's father, Ben, in mind, despite the latter's death some sixteen years earlier: «I wrote the piece in 1987 thinking, let me write a piece that my father would have liked. A very smart nice man who had no education in music whatsoever, but the kind of person who fills up concert halls. It's popular, it's supposed to be — it's for my Dad.»
Karen Gomyo(violin)/Hague Residentie Orchestra/Brad Lubman.
Philip Glass - The Hours - 01 Poets Act
Philip Glass — The Hours — 01 Poets Act
Опубликовано: 6 февр. 2013 г.full album: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtWgp...
The Hours is the story of three women searching for more potent, meaningful lives. Based on Michael Cunningham's 1999 Pulitzer Prize--winning novel, the film interweaves the stories of three women—a book editor in New York (Meryl Streep), a young mother in California (Julianne Moore), and the author Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman). Their stories intertwine, and finally come together in a surprising, transcendent moment of shared recognition.
Philip Glass's ravishing, Oscar- and Grammy-nominated score was a key element in this acclaimed triptych of dramatic tales. «The inter-cutting of personal stories over a wide span of time, » says NPR, «is held together by a single music approach.»
Опубликовано: 6 февр. 2013 г.full album: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtWgp...
The Hours is the story of three women searching for more potent, meaningful lives. Based on Michael Cunningham's 1999 Pulitzer Prize--winning novel, the film interweaves the stories of three women—a book editor in New York (Meryl Streep), a young mother in California (Julianne Moore), and the author Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman). Their stories intertwine, and finally come together in a surprising, transcendent moment of shared recognition.
Philip Glass's ravishing, Oscar- and Grammy-nominated score was a key element in this acclaimed triptych of dramatic tales. «The inter-cutting of personal stories over a wide span of time, » says NPR, «is held together by a single music approach.»
Philip Glass - The Hours (piano version)
Philip Glass — The Hours (piano version)
Опубликовано: 15 нояб. 2014 г.In memory of our friend, Josef Trávníček (23.5.1970 — 9.11.2014)
— great teacher, follower of Comenius way (educating while playing), who was easily able to get attention and interest of his students at any time, showing them history of their own district, city, region, country and the whole world in the way they would love to see — in context… with accent on culture, folklore and true traditions.
This is my condolence to his family — my very good friends.
*************************************************************
Philip Glass — «The Hours» (soundtrack from the movie «The Hours»)
Dušan Holý — piano
Grandpiano: Feurig — produced +- 1920 (truly beautiful instrument)
Опубликовано: 15 нояб. 2014 г.In memory of our friend, Josef Trávníček (23.5.1970 — 9.11.2014)
— great teacher, follower of Comenius way (educating while playing), who was easily able to get attention and interest of his students at any time, showing them history of their own district, city, region, country and the whole world in the way they would love to see — in context… with accent on culture, folklore and true traditions.
This is my condolence to his family — my very good friends.
*************************************************************
Philip Glass — «The Hours» (soundtrack from the movie «The Hours»)
Dušan Holý — piano
Grandpiano: Feurig — produced +- 1920 (truly beautiful instrument)
Philip Glass - The Hours [HD]
Philip Glass — The Hours [HD]
Опубликовано: 21 нояб. 2013 г.Philip Glass — The Hours, 2002. Michael Riesman transcription.
Branka Parlić, piano. Synagogue, Novi Sad. 5.VII.2005
«The Hours», Music from the Motion Picture for piano.
There are movies where you notice the soundtrack, and others where you don't. The latter is usually considered ideal, and yet it's impossible to ignore Philip Glass' pervasive, all-encompassing soundtrack while watching Stephen Daldy's celebrated follow-up to Billy Elliot (the same could just as easily be said of Elmer Bernstein's majestic music for Far From Heaven). This isn't such a bad thing — far from it. The piano-dominated score, incorporating motifs from Glass' Satyagraha, Glassworks, and Solo Piano is, by turns, lush, sumptuous, and stirring.
Philip Glass' score for the film The Hours is very typical of Glass, with its nearly constant repetition and slowly evolving variations on a theme. It suits the moods of the film perfectly, reflecting mesmerically the inner thoughts and emotions of the characters, but remaining subservient to the film itself. Michael Riesman, a long-time associate of Glass, has transcribed the score of The Hours for piano. It wasn't hard for him to do this: the score prominently features the piano alongside the orchestra, and Riesman performed the piano part in the soundtrack recording. His solo piano version covers exactly the same music as on the soundtrack album, but to call it a «reduction» of an orchestral work would be unfair. Yes, it is one instrument instead of many, but just by the facts that it's a single performer being responsible for realizing the music and it's no longer an accompaniment to screen images, Riesman is able to add to it more expression and more life. Even though his tempos and the track times match the soundtrack almost exactly, he is able to take tiny liberties with the phrasing of themes so that the quiet desperation of the music isn't quite as desperate. It doesn't matter if he uses a larger array of dynamics and is not quite as strict with time. Whereas listening to the soundtrack without the film can be almost unbearably boring or depressing, depending on your state of mind, listening to Riesman's version is less so. Although the track titles make no sense without film, in this version, the music is able to stand on its own as a distinct creative work, with more vitality and wider-ranging sentiment than the soundtrack.
The complicated storyline, based on Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel (which was, in turn, inspired by Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway) is inherently dramatic and emotionally compelling enough that it doesn't really «need» music to get its message across. And the actors, including Nicole Kidman (Virginia Woolf), Julianne Moore (Laura Brown), and Meryl Streep (Clarissa Vaughn), breathe such life into these three distinct characters, living in three different time periods, that they don't need really need the music either. But it's always there, like a ghostly presence in each woman's life, helping to tie their divergent storylines together as much as the themes that are common to each. In the end, the score is as much a unifying force as Peter Boyle's deft editing and, most importantly, Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, which was originally to be called The Hours.
Pianist Branka Parlić is one of the most prominent interpreters of contemporary classical music in Eastern Europe. She graduated from the Belgrade University of Musical Arts in the late 1970s and studies under Professor Olga Mihailović. She later honed her craft at the Summer Music Academy in Nice under Professor Pierre Sancan of the Paris Conservatory. While studying, she also co founded the well-known Ensemble for Different New Music.
Taking on the task of presenting the cycle of the legendary Phillip Glass' «Metamorphosis,» is probably the most challenging task in the sphere of contemporary minimalism since Parlic's classical undertaking of Erik Satie's ''Gnossiennes'' in the 1980s. The album which she released back then, called «Initiés,» was the first album that contained one of Satie's compositions ever recorded here.
Branka Parlić premiered the Glass' pieces in Novi Sad in 2004 and the performance of «Metamorphosis No.2» recorded at this show was broadcasted regularly on prestigious British TV channel Classics FM. Recently, another British TV channel C Music TV http://www.cmusic.tv/cmusic/ started to broadcast two videos in Parlic' rendering: «Opening» by Philip Glass and «Spiegel im Spiegel» by Arvo Pärt. She also act as Artistic Director of the Concert Series «New Ears for New Music» in Novi Sad.
Опубликовано: 21 нояб. 2013 г.Philip Glass — The Hours, 2002. Michael Riesman transcription.
Branka Parlić, piano. Synagogue, Novi Sad. 5.VII.2005
«The Hours», Music from the Motion Picture for piano.
There are movies where you notice the soundtrack, and others where you don't. The latter is usually considered ideal, and yet it's impossible to ignore Philip Glass' pervasive, all-encompassing soundtrack while watching Stephen Daldy's celebrated follow-up to Billy Elliot (the same could just as easily be said of Elmer Bernstein's majestic music for Far From Heaven). This isn't such a bad thing — far from it. The piano-dominated score, incorporating motifs from Glass' Satyagraha, Glassworks, and Solo Piano is, by turns, lush, sumptuous, and stirring.
Philip Glass' score for the film The Hours is very typical of Glass, with its nearly constant repetition and slowly evolving variations on a theme. It suits the moods of the film perfectly, reflecting mesmerically the inner thoughts and emotions of the characters, but remaining subservient to the film itself. Michael Riesman, a long-time associate of Glass, has transcribed the score of The Hours for piano. It wasn't hard for him to do this: the score prominently features the piano alongside the orchestra, and Riesman performed the piano part in the soundtrack recording. His solo piano version covers exactly the same music as on the soundtrack album, but to call it a «reduction» of an orchestral work would be unfair. Yes, it is one instrument instead of many, but just by the facts that it's a single performer being responsible for realizing the music and it's no longer an accompaniment to screen images, Riesman is able to add to it more expression and more life. Even though his tempos and the track times match the soundtrack almost exactly, he is able to take tiny liberties with the phrasing of themes so that the quiet desperation of the music isn't quite as desperate. It doesn't matter if he uses a larger array of dynamics and is not quite as strict with time. Whereas listening to the soundtrack without the film can be almost unbearably boring or depressing, depending on your state of mind, listening to Riesman's version is less so. Although the track titles make no sense without film, in this version, the music is able to stand on its own as a distinct creative work, with more vitality and wider-ranging sentiment than the soundtrack.
The complicated storyline, based on Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel (which was, in turn, inspired by Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway) is inherently dramatic and emotionally compelling enough that it doesn't really «need» music to get its message across. And the actors, including Nicole Kidman (Virginia Woolf), Julianne Moore (Laura Brown), and Meryl Streep (Clarissa Vaughn), breathe such life into these three distinct characters, living in three different time periods, that they don't need really need the music either. But it's always there, like a ghostly presence in each woman's life, helping to tie their divergent storylines together as much as the themes that are common to each. In the end, the score is as much a unifying force as Peter Boyle's deft editing and, most importantly, Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, which was originally to be called The Hours.
Pianist Branka Parlić is one of the most prominent interpreters of contemporary classical music in Eastern Europe. She graduated from the Belgrade University of Musical Arts in the late 1970s and studies under Professor Olga Mihailović. She later honed her craft at the Summer Music Academy in Nice under Professor Pierre Sancan of the Paris Conservatory. While studying, she also co founded the well-known Ensemble for Different New Music.
Taking on the task of presenting the cycle of the legendary Phillip Glass' «Metamorphosis,» is probably the most challenging task in the sphere of contemporary minimalism since Parlic's classical undertaking of Erik Satie's ''Gnossiennes'' in the 1980s. The album which she released back then, called «Initiés,» was the first album that contained one of Satie's compositions ever recorded here.
Branka Parlić premiered the Glass' pieces in Novi Sad in 2004 and the performance of «Metamorphosis No.2» recorded at this show was broadcasted regularly on prestigious British TV channel Classics FM. Recently, another British TV channel C Music TV http://www.cmusic.tv/cmusic/ started to broadcast two videos in Parlic' rendering: «Opening» by Philip Glass and «Spiegel im Spiegel» by Arvo Pärt. She also act as Artistic Director of the Concert Series «New Ears for New Music» in Novi Sad.
Philip Glass - Music from "The Hours" (arr. for piano solo)
Philip Glass — Music from «The Hours» (arr. for piano solo)
Опубликовано: 20 янв. 2016 г.Philip Glass — Music from «The Hours» | Live & Complete | Arranged for piano solo by Michael Riesman and Nico Muhly.
1. The Poet Acts
2. Morning Passages
3. Something She Has to Do
4. I'm Going to Make a Cake
5. An Unwelcome Friend
6. Dead Things
7. Why Does Someone Have to Die?
8. Tearing Herself Away
9. Escape!
10. Choosing Life
11. The Hours
The Hours is the original soundtrack album, on the Elektra/Nonesuch label, of the 2002 film The Hours, starring Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore. The original score was composed by Philip Glass.
Опубликовано: 20 янв. 2016 г.Philip Glass — Music from «The Hours» | Live & Complete | Arranged for piano solo by Michael Riesman and Nico Muhly.
1. The Poet Acts
2. Morning Passages
3. Something She Has to Do
4. I'm Going to Make a Cake
5. An Unwelcome Friend
6. Dead Things
7. Why Does Someone Have to Die?
8. Tearing Herself Away
9. Escape!
10. Choosing Life
11. The Hours
The Hours is the original soundtrack album, on the Elektra/Nonesuch label, of the 2002 film The Hours, starring Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore. The original score was composed by Philip Glass.
Philip Glass - I'm going to make a cake
Philip Glass — I'm going to make a cake
Опубликовано: 25 февр. 2013 г.A piece from the movie soundtrack «The Hours»
Опубликовано: 25 февр. 2013 г.A piece from the movie soundtrack «The Hours»
Philip Glass - 1980 Satyagraha
Philip Glass — 1980 Satyagraha
Опубликовано: 14 июн. 2015 г.Philip Glass
Satyagraha — World Premiere;
Stadsschouwburg, Rotterdam, The Netherlands;
September 5, 1980. Very good Dutch Radio broadcast.
Satyagraha (”insistence on truth”) is a 1979 opera in three acts for orchestra, chorus and soloists, composed by Philip Glass, with a libretto by Glass and Constance DeJong. Loosely based on the life of Mohandas K. Gandhi, it forms the second part of Glass’s “Portrait Trilogy” of operas about men who changed the world, which also includes Einstein On The Beach and Akhnaten. The title refers to Gandhi’s concept of non-violent resistance to injustice, Satyagraha, and the text, from the Bhagavad Gita, is sung in the original Sanskrit. [The opera is semi-narrative in form and deals with Mahatma Gandhi’s early years in South Africa and his development of non-violent protest into a political tool.]
Satyagraha was commissioned by the city of Rotterdam, Netherlands, and first performed at the Stadsschouwburg (Municipal Theatre) there on September 5, 1980, by the Netherlands Opera and the Utrecht Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Bruce Ferden. — wikipedia
In Satyagraha, Glass is confident he has an enduring hit, People magazine reported. “We’ve had 70 years of pieces since Schoenberg that no one understands,” he argues, “so there’s nothing really wrong, is there, with a little contemporary music being appealing?”
• (Act 1) • Leo Tolstoy •
0:00:00 On the Kuru Field of Justice 18:35
0:18:35 Tolstoy Farm 13:38
0:32:33 The Vow 15:11
• (Act 2) • Rabindranath Tagore •
0:47:24 Confrontation and Rescue 15:52
1:03:16 Indian Opinion 15:28
1:18:45 Protest 17:26
• (Act 3) • Martin Luther King, Jr. •
1:36:11 Newcastle March 46:19
Performers:
Miss Schlesen — Claudia Cummings, soprano
Mrs Naidoo — Iris Hashishkee, soprano
Kasturbai — Beverly Morgan, contralto
Mahatma Ghandi — Douglas Perry, tenor
Mr Kallenbach — Bruce Hall, bariton
Parsi Rustomji — Richard Gill, bass
Mrs Alexander — Rhonda Lyss, contralto
Lord Krishna — Tom Heanen, bass
Prince Arjana — René Claassen, tenor
Choir of the Rotterdam Conservatorium
Utrecht Symphony Orchestra
Conducted by Bruce Ferden
Rotterdamse Schouwburg — September 5, 1980
Commissioned by the City of Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Dutch Radio Recording
Опубликовано: 14 июн. 2015 г.Philip Glass
Satyagraha — World Premiere;
Stadsschouwburg, Rotterdam, The Netherlands;
September 5, 1980. Very good Dutch Radio broadcast.
Satyagraha (”insistence on truth”) is a 1979 opera in three acts for orchestra, chorus and soloists, composed by Philip Glass, with a libretto by Glass and Constance DeJong. Loosely based on the life of Mohandas K. Gandhi, it forms the second part of Glass’s “Portrait Trilogy” of operas about men who changed the world, which also includes Einstein On The Beach and Akhnaten. The title refers to Gandhi’s concept of non-violent resistance to injustice, Satyagraha, and the text, from the Bhagavad Gita, is sung in the original Sanskrit. [The opera is semi-narrative in form and deals with Mahatma Gandhi’s early years in South Africa and his development of non-violent protest into a political tool.]
Satyagraha was commissioned by the city of Rotterdam, Netherlands, and first performed at the Stadsschouwburg (Municipal Theatre) there on September 5, 1980, by the Netherlands Opera and the Utrecht Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Bruce Ferden. — wikipedia
In Satyagraha, Glass is confident he has an enduring hit, People magazine reported. “We’ve had 70 years of pieces since Schoenberg that no one understands,” he argues, “so there’s nothing really wrong, is there, with a little contemporary music being appealing?”
• (Act 1) • Leo Tolstoy •
0:00:00 On the Kuru Field of Justice 18:35
0:18:35 Tolstoy Farm 13:38
0:32:33 The Vow 15:11
• (Act 2) • Rabindranath Tagore •
0:47:24 Confrontation and Rescue 15:52
1:03:16 Indian Opinion 15:28
1:18:45 Protest 17:26
• (Act 3) • Martin Luther King, Jr. •
1:36:11 Newcastle March 46:19
Performers:
Miss Schlesen — Claudia Cummings, soprano
Mrs Naidoo — Iris Hashishkee, soprano
Kasturbai — Beverly Morgan, contralto
Mahatma Ghandi — Douglas Perry, tenor
Mr Kallenbach — Bruce Hall, bariton
Parsi Rustomji — Richard Gill, bass
Mrs Alexander — Rhonda Lyss, contralto
Lord Krishna — Tom Heanen, bass
Prince Arjana — René Claassen, tenor
Choir of the Rotterdam Conservatorium
Utrecht Symphony Orchestra
Conducted by Bruce Ferden
Rotterdamse Schouwburg — September 5, 1980
Commissioned by the City of Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Dutch Radio Recording
Philip Glass - Music in Twelve Parts
Philip Glass — Music in Twelve Parts
Опубликовано: 1 авг. 2013 г.0:00
18:14
37:30
50:46
1:08:05
1:31:14
1:45:24
2:05:20
2:23:36
2:35:50
2:53:00
3:07:28
Music in Twelve Parts, written by Philip Glass in 1971-1974, is a deliberate, encyclopedic compendium of some techniques of repetition the composer had been evolving since the 60s. It holds an important place in Glass's repertory — not only historically (as the longest and most ambitious concert piece for the Philip Glass Ensemble) but aesthetically as well. Music in Twelve Parts is both a massive theoretical exercise and a deeply engrossing work of art.
In the past, Glass vociferously objected to being called a minimalist composer. He now grudgingly accepts the term — with the distinction that it only applies to his earliest pieces, those up to and including Music in Twelve Parts. It is difficult to see how such a mammoth work as Einstein on the Beach can possibly be called minimalist and Glass now speaks of himself as a composer of music with repetitive structures.
Part I remains some of the most soulful music Glass ever wrote, yet it is also one of his most reductive compositions: at any place in the music, reading vertically in the score, both a C# and an F# are being played somewhere in the instrumentation. Through skillful contrapuntal weaving, Glass creates a drone that is not a drone — an active, abundant, richly fertile stasis.
Part I leads directly into Part II, which introduces a different key, a faster tempo, greater rhythmic and melodic variety and the human voice. «A new sound and a new chord suddenly break in, with an effect as if one wall of a room had suddenly disappeared, to reveal a completely new view.»
Part III, one of the few self-contained movements, is a gurgling study in fourths, and one of the shortest. Part IV is extraordinary: after a brief introduction, it becomes a lengthy examination of a single, unsettled chord that sweats, strains and ultimately screams for resolution until the musicians suddenly break into the joyous, rushing catharsis of Part V.
Part VI is another example of how Glass can take what initially seems a standard chord progression and gradually build considerable interest on the part of his audience as he presents it to us, again and again, from different rhythmical perspectives. Part VII clearly derives from Music in Similar Motion, but the development is much more swift than that of the earlier work and it is infinitely more virtuosic (the soprano, in particular, does her best to avoid tongue-twisting and sibilance in the exposed, rapid-fire melismatic passages). And the close of Part VIII prefigures the «Train» scene in Einstein on the Beach, with its irresistible forward motion and sheer, «boy-with-a-gadget» fascination with a systematic augmentation and contraction of the soprano line.
«I had a specific purpose in mind when I set to work on Twelve Parts. I wanted to crystallize in one piece all the ideas of rhythmic structure that I'd been working on since 1965. By the time I got to Part VIII, I'd pretty much finished what I'd started out to do. And so the last movements were different. Parts IX and X were really about ornamentation.» Part IX, after a lithe, bouncing, broken-chord introduction, becomes a study in chromatic unison while Part X begins with a blaring, aggressively reiterated figure in the winds that is eventually softened cushioned — by the addition of complementary figures in the bass.
Parts I-X had all been based on stable harmonic roots that had remained constant throughout the movement. Part XI is just as rigorous in its application of an antithetical approach: the harmony changes with every new figure. In Part XI, which is essentially an aria for soprano and ensemble, there is more harmonic motion than in all of the mature works Glass had composed in the previous ten years put together.
Music in Twelve Parts ends with a musical joke that may be amusing to those who remember the musical politics of the 60s & 70s. Like most young composers of the time, Glass was trained to write twelve-tone music; unlike most of them, he rejected the movement entirely. And yet, in the bass line of Part XII, toward the end, the careful listener will discern a twelve-tone row, underpinning this riot of tonal, steadily rhythmic, gleeful repetition -underpinning, in other words, all the things that textbook twelve-toners shunned.
«It was a way of making fun not only of others but also of myself. I had broken the rules of modernism and so I thought it was time to break some of my own rules. And this I did, with the shifts of harmony in Part XI and then in Part XII, where, for the first and only time in my mature music, I threw in a twelve-tone row. This was the end of minimalism for me. I had worked for eight or nine years inventing a system, and now I'd written through it and come out the other end. I'd taken everything out with my early works and it was now time to decide just what I wanted to put back in — a process that would occupy me for many years to come.»
Опубликовано: 1 авг. 2013 г.0:00
18:14
37:30
50:46
1:08:05
1:31:14
1:45:24
2:05:20
2:23:36
2:35:50
2:53:00
3:07:28
Music in Twelve Parts, written by Philip Glass in 1971-1974, is a deliberate, encyclopedic compendium of some techniques of repetition the composer had been evolving since the 60s. It holds an important place in Glass's repertory — not only historically (as the longest and most ambitious concert piece for the Philip Glass Ensemble) but aesthetically as well. Music in Twelve Parts is both a massive theoretical exercise and a deeply engrossing work of art.
In the past, Glass vociferously objected to being called a minimalist composer. He now grudgingly accepts the term — with the distinction that it only applies to his earliest pieces, those up to and including Music in Twelve Parts. It is difficult to see how such a mammoth work as Einstein on the Beach can possibly be called minimalist and Glass now speaks of himself as a composer of music with repetitive structures.
Part I remains some of the most soulful music Glass ever wrote, yet it is also one of his most reductive compositions: at any place in the music, reading vertically in the score, both a C# and an F# are being played somewhere in the instrumentation. Through skillful contrapuntal weaving, Glass creates a drone that is not a drone — an active, abundant, richly fertile stasis.
Part I leads directly into Part II, which introduces a different key, a faster tempo, greater rhythmic and melodic variety and the human voice. «A new sound and a new chord suddenly break in, with an effect as if one wall of a room had suddenly disappeared, to reveal a completely new view.»
Part III, one of the few self-contained movements, is a gurgling study in fourths, and one of the shortest. Part IV is extraordinary: after a brief introduction, it becomes a lengthy examination of a single, unsettled chord that sweats, strains and ultimately screams for resolution until the musicians suddenly break into the joyous, rushing catharsis of Part V.
Part VI is another example of how Glass can take what initially seems a standard chord progression and gradually build considerable interest on the part of his audience as he presents it to us, again and again, from different rhythmical perspectives. Part VII clearly derives from Music in Similar Motion, but the development is much more swift than that of the earlier work and it is infinitely more virtuosic (the soprano, in particular, does her best to avoid tongue-twisting and sibilance in the exposed, rapid-fire melismatic passages). And the close of Part VIII prefigures the «Train» scene in Einstein on the Beach, with its irresistible forward motion and sheer, «boy-with-a-gadget» fascination with a systematic augmentation and contraction of the soprano line.
«I had a specific purpose in mind when I set to work on Twelve Parts. I wanted to crystallize in one piece all the ideas of rhythmic structure that I'd been working on since 1965. By the time I got to Part VIII, I'd pretty much finished what I'd started out to do. And so the last movements were different. Parts IX and X were really about ornamentation.» Part IX, after a lithe, bouncing, broken-chord introduction, becomes a study in chromatic unison while Part X begins with a blaring, aggressively reiterated figure in the winds that is eventually softened cushioned — by the addition of complementary figures in the bass.
Parts I-X had all been based on stable harmonic roots that had remained constant throughout the movement. Part XI is just as rigorous in its application of an antithetical approach: the harmony changes with every new figure. In Part XI, which is essentially an aria for soprano and ensemble, there is more harmonic motion than in all of the mature works Glass had composed in the previous ten years put together.
Music in Twelve Parts ends with a musical joke that may be amusing to those who remember the musical politics of the 60s & 70s. Like most young composers of the time, Glass was trained to write twelve-tone music; unlike most of them, he rejected the movement entirely. And yet, in the bass line of Part XII, toward the end, the careful listener will discern a twelve-tone row, underpinning this riot of tonal, steadily rhythmic, gleeful repetition -underpinning, in other words, all the things that textbook twelve-toners shunned.
«It was a way of making fun not only of others but also of myself. I had broken the rules of modernism and so I thought it was time to break some of my own rules. And this I did, with the shifts of harmony in Part XI and then in Part XII, where, for the first and only time in my mature music, I threw in a twelve-tone row. This was the end of minimalism for me. I had worked for eight or nine years inventing a system, and now I'd written through it and come out the other end. I'd taken everything out with my early works and it was now time to decide just what I wanted to put back in — a process that would occupy me for many years to come.»
Phillip Glass (b.1937): Cello Concerto. Full HQ
Phillip Glass (b.1937): Cello Concerto. Full HQ
Опубликовано: 1 дек. 2014 г.
Опубликовано: 1 дек. 2014 г.