Glass Notes

Interview in Videowave 1983 - The Photographer

A Very interesting video of Philip Glass being interviewed about The Photographer in the early 1980s and the overwhelmingly interesting companion "music video" to A Gentleman's Honor

The Endless Scroll - By Alex Ross (The New Yorker)

Published in this week's New Yorker, Alex Ross' portrait of Philip Glass in his 70th Year. For those unfamiliar, Alex Ross writes an incredibly fascinating blog www.therestisnoise.com and has recently published a book of the same name about listening to the 20th Century which may be the best book of its kind.  In my estimation, he is the standard by which excellence in musical criticism is measured.

"Philip Glass is without a doubt America’s most famous living composer of classical music. In fact, he may be America’s only famous living composer of classical music—the single one who would draw nods of recognition (or irritation) if you were to start waving eight-by-ten glossies of modern-music masters at passersby in Times Square. His Hollywood film scores, his collaborations with pop stars such as David Bowie and Linda Ronstadt, his ubiquity as a purveyor of motorized musical melancholy, all have placed him at an altitude of celebrity that eludes even the loftiest of his colleagues—Steve Reich, John Adams, Elliott Carter, and the rest.
Yet Glass’s seventieth birthday, which fell on January 31st of this year...."(read the rest of Alex Ross' article here at newyorker.com)

Beckett Shorts

Playbill Reports on the new collaboration:

"Dates and designers have been announced for the upcoming JoAnne Akalaitis staging of Beckett Shorts — starring Mikhail Baryshnikov — at New York Theatre Workshop.

The evening of four Samuel Beckett one-act plays will begin previews at the Off-Broadway company Dec. 5 toward a Dec. 16 opening. The run is slated to conclude Jan. 20, 2008. Tickets will go on sale to the public Nov. 2."

Also, new reviews of Appomattox were added to the APPOMANIA (updated) post below

The Book of Longing....on iTunes/Amazon

They just added Book of Longing at iTunes...Amazon release date is Nov.27, street date in stores is Dec.11

Jose brought this video to our attention of this week's performance of BOL in Groningen, The Netherlands

 

Thoughts on Einstein...(by Andrew Sterman) ESSAY

Einstein at Carnegie….

For me, the answer to the old joke about getting to Carnegie Hall always is the E train.   I take it from 23rd street, near where I live, to 53rd and 7th, climb up the long steps, then walk up 7th Avenue to the stage door on 56th street.  You never feel like you’ve practiced enough in life, so for me, the subway is a welcome practicality.  There’s also the private enjoyment of using the subway to go to a place so special.  You sit on the train, holding your instrument cases, look around at everyone and realize that they would be knocked out to know that you’re on your way to perform Einstein on the Beach at Carnegie Hall.  Who knows what other wonderful things everyone else is going off to do?

Among New York musicians, it’s well understood that while a good concert is always good to be a part of, the same concert is more special at Carnegie.  There’s something about the room, something combining the acoustics and the lineage history of what has gone on there.  Simply put, it’s the place where even the world’s greatest performers make certain they pull out their very best, very deepest performances.

When the booking came in that we were to do Einstein On The Beach there, I was pleased, but as it came closer, I think the whole Ensemble began to think of it as a very special performance.  First of all, it was a one off—we had no opportunity to break it in and come up to speed with it.  Second, it hadn’t been performed in 15 years.  Third, it’s monstrously difficult for absolutely everyone involved.  And of course, it was Carnegie Hall, where even the most world-traveled or even blasé musicians feel humble and thrilled to be presenting what they do.

I had been very lucky; when I joined Philip’s Ensemble in ‘91/’92, it was shortly before the ’92 tour of Einstein.  (Lisa Bielawa joined the PGE at the same time, incidentally.)  I was therefore able to learn the piece, tour with it to Europe, Japan, Australia and Brooklyn, as well as do the Nonesuch recording.  On my very first tour with the PGE, we did the mixed concert repertoire and two performances of Music In 12 Parts, and shortly after being part of the new Einstein recording, I was able to be part of the re-recording of 12 Parts.  So I felt I had a perfect introduction to real membership in the Ensemble, by going deeply into those two crucially important pieces.  With EOB (and two performances of Music In 12 Parts) coming up in 2007, however, I felt that I had the opportunity to perform at a much higher level than I had in ’92; after all, those years have been tremendously transformative for me and I’m not the same player I was then. 

Although I had joined the PGE for a Spring tour of Spain/Portugal in ’92, I didn’t truly ‘join’ the group until half-way through that tour.  During a performance of Music In 12 Parts, in Oporto, Portugal, I believe, something happened on the stage.  The music is, to be understated, rather demanding.  The difficulties are in correctly locating your own part’s metric patterns within the overall complexity, and in sustaining the necessary mental and physical endurance through the full length of the piece.  With one slip of one’s concentration, you can miss a change.  Particularly in your first performances of 12 Parts, it can be difficult to find your way back to the figure if you miss the beginning of it, and this leads to a bit of tension which adds enormously to the mental strain as well as the formidable challenge of physically playing difficult music for four hours or more with virtually no rests.

But in that concert in Oporto, as I was concentrating as if for life and death, playing through rising shoulder strain, and overall hanging on for survival, all of a sudden something clicked in the group, and I felt as if we were floating.  I could feel each finger racing over the keys of my flute as if they were touching drums, and I could hear each other player’s ‘drums’ with total clarity.  The synchronization of seven people to that level felt ecstatic.  It was like a village drumming circle, but drumming with pitches within a tremendously complex and beautifully evolving metric world.  At that moment, I joined the PGE in my heart.  I remember vividly, while playing, looking over at Philip and thinking that this guy created this, this experience, with such a radically pared-down musical language—how incredible!  I felt a huge urge to invite the audience up onto the stage to feel it the way we were feeling it.  “You’ve got to come up here, you’ve got to sit in the middle of this, it’s unbelievable!”  After the concert, no one particularly said anything, but instead of splintering off, the Ensemble had a late dinner together.  Nothing needed to be said, but we wanted to say nothing together.

In the years since, I’ve gotten to know the music a great deal more deeply, of course, and to experience the continuing evolution of Philip’s use of his language.  It seemed for a while that Phil was not interested in revisiting his earlier music, which is very understandable.  It is repertoire at this point, obviously, and Phil is the last person in the world to look backward.  But in the last year or so he seems interested in his older work in a new way.  This year, we did two complete performances of Music In 12 Parts.  The second, in London, followed the current touring piece, The Book Of Longing; an early and a recent piece on consecutive nights at the Barbican Center, both sold out.

The 12 Parts performance in London was particularly focused and intense.  The next morning Philip grabbed my arm in the hotel restaurant and said that he sat up very late revisiting compositional choices that he had made while writing 12 Parts.  The performance had something original in it, and it had brought all those memories to the surface.  Those choices are done, and while there were many other ways he could have gone with this idea or another, he remembered the feeling from before the piece was set.

Jumping forward a few months to the Einstein performance last week at Carnegie, again I was chatting with Philip, this time onstage, while Michael was directing the soundcheck for the chorus.  He was saying that there were a lot of people who were upset that he didn’t repeat the type of piece EOB is in his next writing.  They had an experience with Einstein, and they wanted it again.  He said that while he was writing EOB, he had no intention of writing it again.  There was never an idea to do that.  As he put it, writing 12 Parts and Einstein was the act of putting together the tool kit, and after that it was putting the tools to use.  Sure, the tools develop, they continually take on new edges, but the fundamental language creation was largely complete.  We started talking about the difference between 12 Parts and EOB, which for me is the introduction of harmony as a renewed or refreshed musical element, in a very controlled way.  Although some may feel from the outside that EOB is harmonically monotonous, in fact it’s not at all that way.  Twelve Parts is the culmination of radically paring down the elements of conventional music, while finding other methods of forward motion and development.  While Part 12 itself has that great shift of harmony between C minor and A major (then more), overall, 12 Parts is a demonstration of how beautiful music can be while staying harmonically still, among other things.  In Einstein, however, there is the introduction, into that world of active metrics and harmonic stillness, of harmonic change.  So on the stage of Carnegie, while mikes were being tested and adjusted, Philip started explaining how he planned the harmonic structure of EOB.  Some sections have one chord, some two, some three, up to Spaceship and the end of Train, which have seven chords.  This, combined with the use of chorus and violin, and the enormous collaborative magic with Bob Wilson, is the essential evolution of EOB from 12 Parts.

Of course there was no staging from the EOB opera at Carnegie; hopefully we will do a full production in ‘09 with the NY City Opera.  But it is important to mention something here.  While Music In 12 Parts is a study in controlling the elements (while it is a compelling human thing to play the piece and to hear it performed, there is virtually no room for personalizing your part), in EOB there is this profoundly open acceptance of contributions from Wilson, from Lucinda Childs.  The work fits together perfectly, but there isn’t that normal thing of ‘this happens when that happens, and when we’re doing this, please mirror it with that.’  The work is juxtaposed, and Philip’s tolerance for juxtaposed reality is enormous.  That in itself is an artistic statement.  I found it amusing how reviewers and some bloggers were paying so much attention to which speeches from EOB were included in the concert version and which omitted.  It probably was best the way Philip and Michael worked it out, but honestly it wasn’t that important.  To put too much on it is somehow to miss the conceptual reality of EOB altogether.  This openness to juxtaposition is, of course, the explanation as to why there is a tenor saxophone improvisation on top of Building in EOB.  Philip isn’t an improviser per se, but he has deep respect for the masters of that world.  He has told me many times of hearing Coltrane, Rollins, McLean etc, in person (I never got to hear Coltrane personally, due to his early death and my relatively late birth- we overlapped only by a handful of years- but I have heard Rollins and Jackie McLean countless times. [Incidentally, the first time I heard Sonny Rollins was at Carnegie, when I was 13 or 14 years old—amazing and unforgettable concert, with Sonny roaming the stage, playing alone, tasting the great acoustics in different spots of the stage while he played such beautiful stuff.]  Listen to Philip’s Saxophone CD to hear his tribute to those guys, in Phil’s own language, of course.)  A friend asked me if I was nervous to play an improvisation to a sold out Carnegie crowd, on top of the insanely fast shifting-ostinato keyboard parts of Building, and that kind of surprised me.  There is so much to handle in EOB in my written part, there is no time for thinking ahead.  In any case, once the music begins, I don’t ever feel nervous.  When it was time to play Building, I just played what seemed right, in the moment, with the keyboards and the beautiful choral chords.  Since the keyboards were racing at top speed, it felt right for me to begin with chant-like melodies, based on the way my breath felt.  The ostinato is very ‘steady-state’, so I wanted to go up and down in intensity and speed.  The saxophone can’t connect lines without breathing, so I wanted to celebrate that rather than hide it.  Einstein, like 12 Parts, requires great precision, so I wanted to explore the depths of looseness while sustaining the focused intensity required by the evening as a whole.  It just seemed like the right thing to do, the right way to juxtapose my personal musical world with Philip’s.   

Back to talking with Phil during the sound check.  His next opera after EOB was Satyagraha (coming to the Met this Spring, as most are aware).  He was telling me how some people were really disappointed with it, with how different it is from Einstein.  Again, he told me that he never had the idea to stay put in the EOB language.  Twelve Parts and Einstein were works of building huge structures from highly disciplined and intensely lean methods.  It is not required to remain forever that lean.  I told Philip that for me Satyagraha shows a huge new factor, that of using the PG language for the purpose of painting very precise and powerful ‘images’ of specific human states of being.  This is, of course, what makes Philip so successful a film composer, which is certainly not what he originally aimed at accomplishing.  It accomplished itself, essentially, based on what first turned up in Satyagraha. Philip thought that was a bit interesting, and agreed with it.

With that, Michael called us to take our places and go through a few of the difficult transitions for the concert that evening.  Once everyone could hear well and the transitions felt good, Michael waived us out.  No sense tiring voices and arms prematurely.  If that meant that some of the internal changes, terribly intricate and precise, never actually got rehearsed, all the better.  After all, on one level it’s the live-wire of requisite concentration traveling off the stage that produces the thrills of a great Einstein On The Beach performance.

Andrew Sterman's latest CD, released on our Orange Mountain Music label, is now available. 
Click www.thepathtopeace.net for more information.
Click to purchase: http://www.amazon.com/Path-Peace-Kermit-Driscoll/dp/B000QGDJZQ/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1198126337&sr=1-1

Monsters of Grace, Part 10 up on iTunes

Monsters of Grace appeared today on iTunes

Please let me call attention to a beautiful track, Don't Go back to Sleep

Amazingly enough, OMM is up to Part 10 of Music in 12 Parts Live, in celebration of Philip Glass's 70th Birthday Year.  This new version was recorded last year in Italy. I refer to it as the Nishiki version as the other two were produced by long-time Philip Glass Ensemble members and Producers Michael Riesman (Music Director of the Philip Glass Ensemble) and Kurt Munkacsi (Philip Glass' long time Porducer).  This new version was recorded by Dan Dryden, and has been edited and produced by Ichiho Nishiki.

15 Minutes of Appomattox

Jose brought attention to the Audio Player on the NY Times page/review of Appomattox which includes 15 full minutes of excerpts from the opera. 

APPOMANIA! (updated)

A couple more reviews:

Wall Street Journal review

San Fran Bay Guardian review

-A Photo Journal of Appomattox from PlayBill Arts & some flash video from the SF Opera website or try here (top right)
-San Jose Mercury News review of Appomattox
-The Guardian (UK) review of Appomattox
-Bloomberg News did this review and it includes a TV schedule for a profile they did on Philip Glass
-Great interview with Dennis Russell Davies about his long and very fruitful collaboration with Philip Glass
-San Francisco Chronicle's review of Appomattox
-Contra Costa Times review of Appomattox
-The Examiner's thoughtful review of the opera
Click here for the New York Times review....
-The Sacramento Bee review...

NPR did this piece on Appomattox...

Meanwhile...The LA Times reports on Jonathan Haas performing the Concerto Fantasy October 13th with the Pasadena Symphony.

Thanks to Michael Strickland for the new photos he took at the premiere.  Check them out in the Fan Photos 07

The Next Generation

This past weekend Paul Barnes performed the Glass Piano Concerto No. 2 in Lima Ohio...while he was there he passed by his old elementary school to talk about music and hard work...in this report you get to watch Barnes play the Akhnaten section from his Trilogy sonata transcription.  The youth of America's heartland is gripped in rapt awe.

Closing in Italy, TIROL, Rascher, Mishima Qt., many more!

Please look at all of these if you have a chance. The documentary excerpts are particularly interesting to those who haven't seen them.

A video of Wendy Sutter and Philip Glass performing "Closing" this last summer in Italy. Thanks to Mark Walther for submitting it.

Also, There are new videos of:
a selection from a rehearsal of the Tirol Concerto which is very cool (gives you some idea of what a great pianist Dennis Russell Davies is when he's not conducting (I had the pleasure of being at this concert in 2001?) what a great piece (video from The Looking Glass documentary),
The Rascher Quartet playing the Saxophone Qt. Concerto, a
and the Fritz Quartet playing the Mishima Quartet.

and PG discussing Symphony No. 3 from the "Sounds like Philip Glass" documentary, as well as PG talking music from the "Four American Composers" documentary.