concert not attended

[calimac]

I thought about attending Philip Glass's Music in Twelve Parts - a work that's only been performed in full about ten times, ever - on Monday. It was the prospect of the amplified volume and the likelihood (fulfilled) of a full house that kept me away. I'm very sensitive to volume - I even wear earplugs at folk festivals - and if I'm going to spend four hours absorbing a work of music, I don't want to feel that tightly boxed in.

But the music itself wouldn't have scared me. Music in Twelve Parts is the fullest expression of Glass's true minimalist period - the music he's written since then, including most of what he's known for, isn't really minimalist but is minimalism moderated for a broader audience. Glass's moderated minimalism and his true minimalism bear about the same relationship that A Brief History of Time does to Hawking's scientific papers.

This is why I'm so skeptical of claims that Glass's music is "endless noodling." (Nobody who's claimed this to me can tell me which pieces of his they've heard.) Unless they heard the rare early Glass, they don't even know what endless noodling actually sounds like! And even if they did hear it, a complaint like that is as beside the point as one that science fiction or fantasy novels aren't about the real world. Joshua Kosman, bless him, got the point in his San Francisco Chronicle review:

As blocky as the piece seems on the surface - a series of self-contained compositional etudes that begin and end with an unapologetic jolt - there is a gathering power that comes from experiencing this music in a single sweep. ... First there is a sense of motion and stasis all at once - the music, like water, is racing furiously along, but the patterns it forms never seem to change. But soon that stasis proves illusory, as Glass moves the parameters inch by surreptitious inch, and the endless repetitions provide the cover he needs. Space out for a minute or two - and I confess to having done so not infrequently during the performance - and you come back to find that the musical topic has changed, subtly but noticeably.

Yes it has, and that's one of the most remarkable things about it.

I've rarely heard a large-scale Glass work in concert, and much (not all) of his recent work strikes me as frankly not very good, but I have heard other minimalist masterworks, including Terry Riley's In C, live at serious length, and of one such concert featuring Steve Reich's Tehillim I wrote, "It was an odd-sounding piece, jumpy and irregular on the short term but so serene on the large that it had an intensely spiritually calming effect, of a kind that no other music produces in me as purely as do the masterworks of minimalism. Even the physical aches that had made me wonder if I should skip out just vanished for the length of the work. I sat there feeling completely content to just be. The longer the music went on, the more of it I wanted to hear."

That, if I hadn't been deafened, is what I expect I would have gotten out of Glass's Music in Twelve Parts.

Comments

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Great stuff, thank you. Makes me want to listen to all this music to see how it would strike me. I only know a few pieces of later Glass (such as the not very interesting symphony based on David Bowie's "Low"), and very little of Reich. On the other hand: four hours!