A Half-Century Celebration of Philip Glass’ Music

from the Amazon.com Web page for this recording

In his memoir Words Without Music, Philip Glass is a little bit vague on the date of formation of the Philip Glass Ensemble (PGE); but the first performance he explicitly associates with a date took place in May of 1968 in New York at the Cinematheque run by Jonas Mekas. That would mean that this month marks the end of the 50th anniversary of PGE. Orange Mountain Music has chosen to celebrate this occasion by releasing a two-CD set of some of the earliest commercial recordings of Glass’ compositions. The earliest of these was a single vinyl record consisting only of “Music with Changing Parts” (recorded on both sides), released by Chatham Square Productions in 1971, not long after the piece was first performed in November of 1970.

This was followed by another Chatham Square vinyl released in 1973 with “Music in Similar Motion” on one side and “Music in Fifths” on the other. Both of those pieces were first performed in January of 1970 in the downstairs recital hall of the Guggenheim Museum. (For the record, I was at the Guggenheim on that occasion. The concert was one of a series of three, the other two presenting performances by the Sonic Arts Group and Reich, respectively. As I have previously noted, I appeared as a “guest artist” with the Sonic Arts Group.)

The Guggenheim program also included a performance of “Music in Contrary Motion.” Two years later, the French Shandar label would release a vinyl with “Music in Contrary Motion” on one side and “Two Pages” (which Glass calls a “breakthrough” accomplishment) on the other. In 1994 Elektra Nonesuch would release two CDs of these five early compositions, “Music with Changing Parts” filling the entirety of the first CD and the other four compositions on the second. The Orange Mountain release basically reissues those two CDs in a single package, entitled 50 Years of the Philip Glass Ensemble.

It is virtually unimaginable that Elektra Nonesuch would have let those two CDs go out of print, but I suspect that those responsible for counting the beans came up with a good reason. Orange Mountain deserves nothing but praise for rectifying Elektra’s neglect. The fact is that the Guggenheim concert was a real shock to my system; and, even if Words Without Music claims, “Almost the entire audience was made up of my friends,” I am sure I was not the only one there to take a real jolt from that performance. Indeed, through these recordings I find myself reliving that jolt, as I did a little over a year ago when San Francisco Performances presented a full-evening concert performance of “Music with Changing Parts.”

To appreciate why this music has as strong an impact as it did when it was first performed, we would do well to revisit what Words Without Music has to say about these early compositions:

In composing these pieces, I made the musical language the center of the piece. By “language,” I mean the moment-to-moment decision made when a note of music is composed. To make that work, I had to find a music that would hold your attention. I began to use process instead of “story,” and the process was based on repetition and change. This made the language easier to understand, because the listener would have time to contemplate it at the same time as it was moving so quickly.

Those who have been following this site recently may have noticed that the writings of James Tenney have motivated my efforts to understand the nature of listening to music by appealing to the phenomenology of time-consciousness as a point of departure. When Tenney discusses the nature of listening to unfamiliar music in terms of experiences associated with composers such as Charles Ives, Arnold Schoenberg, and Anton Webern, I have to keep reminding myself that I am reading scholarly papers that predate those three concerts at the Guggenheim Museum. In other words Tenney’s approaches to analysis presumed a fundamental set of postulates about the nature of listening, and then composers like Glass and Reich came along and basically asked where logic would lead if those postulates were to be rejected.

(Those who know a bit about higher mathematics may see a parallel here with what happened when mathematicians chose to reject the “parallel postulate” of Euclidean geometry, which states that, given a line and a point not on that line, only one line goes through that point that never intersects the other line.)

As the very title of “Music with Changing Parts” suggests, listening is fundamentally a matter of being aware of changes that arise over the course of the flow of time. 500 years ago we could think about those changes in terms that would eventually become part of our vocabulary involving “recapitulation” and “development.” By the early twentieth century, composers like Gustav Mahler were pushing the scope of that vocabulary to cover symphonic music with durations on the scale of operas. Glass, on the other hand, rejected that framework and chose, instead, to think in terms of basic patterns of notes and mechanisms through which one pattern would gradually metamorphose into another.

The result was that the behavioral nature of listening had to change. In 1970 most of us were at most marginally aware that such a change was possible. Nevertheless, with subsequent exposure to both concerts and recordings, we began to accept the “new rules.” Thus, when San Francisco Performances chose to revisit “Music with Changing Parts,” I would argue that a large portion of the audience (perhaps even the majority) not only accepted those rules but knew how to engage them for the sake of a fulfilling listening experience.

50 Years of the Philip Glass Ensemble reinforces our recollection (or, perhaps for some, acquisition) of those rules; and we are all the better for having these recordings at our ready disposal again.