GLASS: Music in 12 Parts – The Philip Glass Ensemble/ Michael Riesman, director – Orange Mountain Music OMM0049 (4 CDs), 204:20 total ***1/2 [Distr. by Harmonia mundi]:
The enigmatic Philip Glass practically defined minimalism between the years of 1965-75. At the time what seemed overtly simplistic (and even somewhat as a joke to the tired and well-worn halls of serialist academia) was in fact as bold and declarative a manifesto as the dissolution of tonality some 50 years earlier. The atonal, dodecaphonic world had become so completely self-absorbed and lost in itself that even the Babbitian statement of “Who Cares if You Listen?” divorced the audience—that absolutely necessary ingredient of any true artistic experience—from the act of composing music, as if music itself could exist in a void devoid of its hearers. How nonsensical!
It took a composer like Philip Glass, with his emphasis on the absolute basics of musical expression—tonal triads, elemental but shifting rhythms, curt and pert melodic fragments—to slap serialism and its adherents in the face with all five knuckles. For here was a music that dared to say to the establishment “you are wrong, and to prove it I am going to reverse the direction of 500 years of history and get back to the most primitive elements of musical discourse.”
Of course, Glass’s minimalism caught on with the public, especially the young, like wildfire, and he became a celebrity himself, hanging around the pop culture icons of the day, and hob-knobbing with film stars are others who joined the throngs flocking to his operas. His music was hardly immune to all sorts of criticism, but we must give it to him that his efforts halted the harsh and listener-hostile scores that had become the hallmark of emptying concert halls of the time. Hearing this music again (and there is no more firm staple of early minimalism than the Music in Twelve Parts) allows one to wax nostalgic for a moment, and then pronounce with some sense of smugness that the music served more as a catalyst for change than for any sort of inviting listening experience. [Back in the LP era I successfully returned to my local record store an album of excerpts from this very work – telling them the stylus stuck on it. Fortunately they lacked a replacement copy and I exchanged it for something else entirely…Ed.]
I put these discs on straight through, and it was a chore. There is something remotely seductive about the incessant repetition, though parts of the composer’s chord changes and melodic fragments are invariably attractive, but for the most part this is music of extreme sameness in emotive content, and very difficult to hear at one time. Tossing on any of the around 20-minte “parts” as part of a mixed session might prove stimulating (and Glass himself suggests that any combination of mixtures are just fine with him), but the music has become fairly stereotypical of an era, and will give lots of ammo to those who despise minimalism. Glass has moved far beyond these scores, though I dare say that anyone wanting an up-to-date version played crisply and with tons of endurance and energy will find all they need in this recording.
— Steven Ritter
