From Orchestras To Aphex Twin: The Beginner’s Guide To Philip Glass

When many of us call to mind classical tune, they call to mind historic establishments, backwards attitudes and fusty previous traditions. 

Although there might be a grain of reality to this preconception, it misrepresents a musical sphere that’s expanded exponentially over the last few a long time, because the boundary between classical and pop culture has crumbled and affect has begun to go with the flow freely between all sides. 

No composer has accomplished extra to facilitate this go with the flow than Philip Glass. Probably the most celebrated and influential figures in each twentieth and Twenty first-century tune, Glass has accomplished that uncommon feat of connecting classical traditions with the recent, the avant-garde, the digital and the preferred. 

His paintings has been carried out through the arena’s maximum prestigious orchestras, but he’s collaborated with Aphex Dual, David Bowie, Leonard Cohen and Mick Jagger, scored Oscar-nominated motion pictures (and an episode of Sesame Boulevard) or even remixed an acid area monitor. 

On a smaller, extra non-public scale, Glass additionally spent greater than 20 years composing his Piano Etudes, which he stated he started writing in a bid to enlarge his method as a pianist. Paintings on those began within the Nineteen Nineties and was once simplest completed in 2012, when the twentieth etude was once finished.

The entire etudes at the moment are set to be launched in combination as a clothbound boxset that comprises now not simplest newly engraved folios, but in addition a hardcover ebook, Research in Time, that includes essays on Glass’s tune from the likes of Nico Muhly, Timo Andres, Maki Namekawa, Alice Waters, Angélique Kidjo, Ari Shapiro, Ira Glass, Justin Peck, Laurie Anderson, Martin Scorsese, Pico Iyer, Jenny Saville, and Nathan Chen.

To rejoice the impending free up of this luxurious package deal – to be had from 7 November, priced at $150 and revealed through Artisan Books – we’re taking our personal glance again at Glass’s profession, tune and lasting affect.

Born in 1937, Glass studied on the prestigious Juilliard College of Tune within the ‘60s prior to decamping to Paris on a Fulbright Scholarship to check beneath famend conductor and trainer Nadia Boulanger. It was once right here that destiny positioned Glass within the trail of composer and sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar, a gathering that he described as the nearest he’d ever come “to a second when the ingenious mild activates”. That second would upend Glass’s musical considering and reorient his ambitions in a completely new path, enlightened through the cyclical, rhythmically additive nature of Indian classical tune. 

Uniting this affect together with his grounding in Western classical and a handful of recent concepts cherry-picked from serialism and the flourishing ‘60s avant-garde, Glass started to expand a musical language that, along the paintings of contemporaries reminiscent of Steve Reich and Los angeles Monte Younger, would in the end be named minimalism, a time period Glass would later reject. 

Minimalism prized rhythm above all else, that specialize in hypnotic ostinatos and arpeggios that will repeat in fractured, asymmetrical patterns over slowly moving tonal centres. To many, Glass is the face of minimalism, however describing Glass as simply a minimalist does a disservice to his kaleidoscopically various oeuvre, which itself is anything else however minimum.

From Paris, Glass ventured to India, then returned to New York, atmosphere about growing his newly found out concepts right into a daring and idiosyncratic taste. His development in the course of the ‘70s and into the ‘80s, ‘90s and past was once marked through adventurous experimentation and a willingness to use his skills to a large number of musical bureaucracy; symphonies, concertos, chamber tune and solo piano works have been adopted through tune for theatre, dance, movie and tv, as Glass’s profile started to develop. Not anything is off-limits in his wide-ranging ingenious imaginative and prescient, and the composer’s works were impressed through the entirety from Jap spirituality to Leonard Cohen’s poetry and his opposition to the Iraq Warfare.

As Glass’s profession flourished, his affect prolonged outward into pop, rock and, most likely maximum particularly, digital tune. Even supposing Glass hasn’t ever composed a purely digital piece, a lot of his performances and recordings have integrated synthesizers, amplifiers and more than a few items of tune era. 

Additionally, Glass’s works with acoustic tools steadily have the feeling of digital tune; their repetitive, mathematical constructions virtually sound as though they have been sequenced, moderately than notated on paper; their insistent, mechanical pulse remembers the perpetual thud of the dance ground; and the hypnotic state they evoke feels ambient through nature. 

Glass made complete use of ingenious manufacturing ways when recording his orchestral works: in his memoir, Phrases With out Tune, he remembers mixing synthesized sounds with orchestral tools within the studio. 

“A trombone section would possibly have an digital section added to it an octave under what was once firstly performed,” he says. “At the ultimate mixture of the document, as an alternative of listening to a trombone, the listener is listening to one thing extra like a super-trombone. Implemented to the entire orchestra, the result’s a valid past anything else an orchestra may just play are living.” 

Glass’s digital experimentation extends additional than many would be expecting, achieving its height in 1988 when the composer labored with Kurt Munkacsi to remix S’Categorical’s club-focused Sly & The Circle of relatives Stone quilt Whats up Tune Lover. In an interview with Purple Bull Tune Academy, S’Categorical’s Mark Moore remembers speaking over the remix with Glass, who requested to be introduced alongside to a membership night time with a purpose to higher perceive the tune he was once transforming.

“I take into account using up there,” Moore says. “We’re similar to, ‘We higher inform him… Philip, we simply wanna give an explanation for to you – we are hoping you don’t get dissatisfied or anything else – however we’re going to take medication. We’re gonna take some ecstasy…’ And he was once going, ‘Oh, you younger other folks suppose you’re the one individuals who’ve accomplished that type of factor.’ And he insisted on becoming a member of us.”

If anything else encapsulates Glass’s willingness to undertaking past the bounds of his classical roots into uncharted ingenious territory, it’s most definitely the psychological symbol of the then-52-year-old composer, a large of recent tune, shedding a tablet and having it huge at an acid area rave, all within the title of analysis. Philip Glass: a legend in each sense of the phrase. 

4 of Philip Glass’s maximum iconic works

1. Philip Glass – Tune in Twelve Portions (1971-1974)

A collection of 12 items written over 3 years, Tune in Twelve Portions was once written for the Philip Glass Ensemble, a gaggle based through Glass to function the efficiency outlet for his works. Glass has described Tune in Twelve Portions as “the tip of minimalism” in his musical development and the start of what he describes as a “post-minimalist” method to composition. “I had labored for 8 or 9 years inventing a device, and now I might written via it and are available out the opposite finish,” he says. 

One of the crucial purest distillations of Glass’s musical persona, this five-part solo piano composition is encouraged through Kafka’s well-known 1915 novella of the similar title and was once firstly composed for a staging of the tale. Certainly one of Glass’ most generally liked works, it strips again his taste to its maximum basic components, as cascading arpeggios and rousing chords upward thrust and fall above hypnotically repetitive basslines.  

3. Philip Glass – Koyaanisqatsi (1982)

Koyaanisqatsi is an experimental movie launched in 1982 that explores the connection between people, nature and era. Glass’s grand, portentous rating for the movie was once his first, and masterfully employs brass, strings, synths and choral textures to lend emotional weight to Koyaanisqatsi’s compelling message. 

4. Aphex Dual – Icct Hedral (Philip Glass Orchestration) (1995)

A gathering of 2 of recent tune’s maximum talented minds, Philip Glass’ Icct Hedral remodel is an orchestral tackle Aphex Dual’s paranoid-sounding unique. The tale of the collaboration was once informed in our very personal Long run Tune mag after we interviewed the pair in 1995. 

“What I heard in his tune was once the aim to find a other mode of expression,” Glass says of Aphex. “Whether or not he reads tune or studied on the conservatory isn’t necessary. It is a man who started construction his personal synthesizers when he was once a boy, placing items of junk in combination, making sounds and turning them into tune. That’s attention-grabbing to me.”