Philip Glass
Suite from "The Hours"
Philip Glass, along with Steve Reich, John Adams, and Terry Riley, must be
considered one of the standard-bearers for the minimalist movement in music.
Born in Baltimore, Glass's first exposure to music was through the unsold
records from his father's record store, including those of modern composers such
as Hindemith, Bartók, Schoenberg, and Shostakovich. He attended the University
of Chicago and then Julliard, where he met and studied with Reich. (Glass and
Reich played in an ensemble together, and at one point ran a moving company
together to make ends meet!) Other teachers have included Darius Milhaud, the
fabled Nadia Boulanger (in Paris), and the sitar player Ravi Shankar, who
introduced him to Indian music. Glass has been greatly influenced by Asian and
Middle-eastern music and culture, and converted to Buddhism. However, just as
his music is influenced by a wide range of eclectic sources, Glass describes his
religion as a mix: "Jewish-Taoist-Hindu-Toltec-Buddhist."
His early works, such as Two Pages (1968), follow minimalist principles,
adding and subtracting notes from a center "core." In the mid-70's he expanded
beyond minimalism; as he writes of that period, "I'd taken everything out with
my early works and it was now time to decide just what I wanted to put in." He
moved into more theatrical forms, composing his first opera, Einstein on the
Beach, in 1975. He continued writing operas, incidental music for theater, and
movie scores, for which he is perhaps best known (beginning with Koyaanisqatsi,
1982, titles include The Thin Blue Line, 1988; A Brief History of Time, 1991;
Kundun, 1997; The Illusionist, 2006). He also began writing symphonic works and
concerti in the 90's.
The suite from The Hours is taken from music written for the 2002 film of the
same name, based on a novel by Michael Cunningham. The book looks at the lives
of three women connected by Virginia Woolf's novel, Mrs. Dalloway (the working
title for that book was "The Hours"). Woolf's book and the movie both attempt to
represent "a woman's whole life in a single day." Glass's elegiac score captures
this sense of focus and concentrated emotion, a sense of broader harmonic
patterns encapsulated in his controlled musical palette. The suite is scored for
strings, celesta, and piano. All three movements share many of the same thematic
elements, including a series of rising and falling arpeggios played by one
instrument (or set of them) juxtaposed against a longer, drawn-out melody by the
other; strings or piano accompaniment moving on a repeated rising third;
repeatedly stroked chords in the strings that evolve and revolve harmonically
around a tonal center. Even when the tempo slows, as at the beginning of
Movement II, there is always a sense of motion. There is only one 'resolving'
major chord in the entire suite, that which ends Movement I. The entire suite
ends as it began, with those repetitive rising thirds, as if this music were
just a fragment of a never-ending whole.
November 23, 2008
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