Philip Glass Music for the Ontological Being

` 06 December 2009 Philip Glass: Music for the Ontological Being As Ross does devote some pages of his book to a discussion of minimalist music in the twentieth century with reference to Philip Glass as well as Steve Reich and Terry Riley, my dissertation will be less (although somewhat) of a Rossian reduction and more of a preliminary staging of concepts relevant to the specific aspects of Glass’s music à propos my interests. Excerpt from The Rest is Noise— “Even as Stockhausen and Ligeti brushed against the counterculture, several younger Americans— Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass—made a different kind of break through. They simplified their harmonic language and rediscovered the pleasure of a steady pulse, devising a modern tonality that had nothing nostalgic about it.” –516 Philip Glass is considered to be one of the most prosaic composers of the 20th century. He has composed a breath of work that surpasses the quantity of any of his contemporaries, including opera’s, string quartets, films scores, and piano and violin solos. The controversy surrounding Glass’s music, as with much of the contemporary repertoire, is a discussion of the artistic value in his pieces. Some argue that the music of Philip Glass is limited. That once one has mastered his technique it is easily imitated. However, this superficial remark can only be made if one is not sensitive to the extreme subtleties of Glass’s compositional method. Glass began his musical studies at a young age then enrolled (at 15) at the University of Chicago graduating with a degree in philosophy. Having continued a serious pursuit of music all the while, Glass then moved on to Julliard in the years to follow. He earned a Fulbright scholarship allowing him to travel to Paris in order to study composition, as many rising composers did, with Nadia Boulanger. With her instruction, which was rooted in rigorous harmony and counterpoint, he studied the music of Mozart and Bach in depth. It was at this point that Glass, also found liberation in inspiration from Eastern music. After working to transcribe Ravi Shankar’s Indian music for western musicians for a film project, Glass’s own was writing for theatrical performances began to demonstrate the cyclical structure characteristic of the Eastern music. For our purposes, Escape is an example of rhythmic pulses based on a strand of two oscillating notes, repeated formally effecting the contradiction of a stasis in constant gestation. In 1971, Glass formed the Philip Glass Ensemble which began performing some of his early compositions including Music in Twelve Parts which is a 4 hour piece of slow alterations of repetition. Einstein of the Beach premiered in 1976 and was an opera that exemplified the radical change Glass was imposing on 20th century music. The opera put forth the idea of a “non-plot”. The libretto consisted of solfege and numbers. The music is characteristically repetitive and cyclical. Glass also took on the task of writing fresh scores for films made 60 years in advance. His scores for Beauty and the Beast and Dracula are examples of the influence of cinematic imagery on musical composition as his score was a direct reaction to a completed image. As Ross states, Glass, “simplified [his] harmonic language and rediscovered the pleasure of a steady pulse, devising a modern tonality that had nothing nostalgic about it” (Ross 516). Glass’s music although it can be traced in terms of functional harmony is less concerned with this directive. His music, is a study of an object—a sound object; a musical phrase or motif— in a process of spatial and temporal dynamism. In this manner, it is a direct opposition to serialism because “process here is the subject rather than the source of music” (Foreman 81). Glass’s music often associated with the term minimalism despite the fact that he himself has chosen to disassociate from the school. He prefers that he be recognized as a “Classicist” composer of “music with repetitive structures” in light of his foundation in the music of Bach and Mozart. In any case, intrinsically minimalistic of Glass’s music is its inherent need to be yoked with images. “It has always seemed to me that Philip Glass has written his best music in response to pictures” (John Story). This seems to be a manifestation of the nature of a sound object as parallel manipulations can be performed on images and music but is also a telling remark on cinema’s impact on music of the twentieth century. Liberated by images from the immediate demand to narrate or capture the attention of a spectator, the music is able to function on a higher level and explore the hidden recesses of human consciousness. Glass “processes” the sound objects in two dimensions, spatially and temporally. Inspired by Eastern music he developed a technique in which he composed rhythmic cells which would cycle repetitively. Alterations to the sound object are limited to two processes –a subtractive and an additive change in which one note was either removed or added respectively. In his essay on Glass, Richard Foreman introduces the idea of self and the preservation of identity into Glass’s music. “ The compositional exploration of addition and unison playing leads directly to a consciousness that the performers themselves are cellular units who maintain their identity, just as the musical phrase is added to but never manipulated and reshuffled. Unison playing reveals each player as a unit “added” to the next, contrary to the normal situation where performers intertwine their musical lines in such a way that they lose their identity in the service of a composition that exists as a kind of transcendental structure.” (Foreman 81) Glass’s representation of the self in relation to everything non-self is very different than, for example, Shostakovich’s rendering of the conflict between self and society in the Eighth Quartet. In Glass’s music the repeated motif is simultaneously the self and the whole. The two work in tandem, not in conflict, with one another. That is to say, if we imagine all of these repeating cells as an infinite number of “selves” resonating with one another, the piece itself is the wholeness of all mankind. Glass’s music is a setting into motion of process that vibrates in such a way that what grows in us is not greater knowledge of the self and its resources but the capacity to let the universe of consciousness (the non-I consciousness) work through us, to be more attuned to the ontological truths and categories. To determine the origin of the sound we are hearing it is necessary to comprehend the influence of cinema on Glass’s music. The implied images in Glass’s music come from the cinematic elements of the composition technique. At the root of Glass’s subtlety lies the influence of perspective. Through whose eyes are we receiving information? This question, I believe, designates Glass’s music as a work of art. This is not the music of the self – or even simply its process of transcendence into an ontological consciousness. But it is rather a different and more inclusive perspective. This is the music of the non-I consciousness, which I refer to as wholeness, working through us as Foreman would say. It is the penetrating sounds of unification which characterizes Glass’s music. Art and music before the twentieth century strove to create an arena into which the beholder was subject to enter. No matter how evocative of reality the music was, at the core of the art-experience it provided was a transmutation of the listener from his/her “present” to another place. Glass’s music doesn’t rely on this exchange to take place as his music “articulates a ‘mode of being-present’” (Foreman 80). To refer to the example we discussed in class, the music of Arvo Pärt seems to function in the same manner. The repetitive technique of tintinnabulation, rather than pulling the listener into a specific space that they can chose to accept or reject, expands their egocentric range of the universe into a shared universal consciousness. The Brahms violin concerto during the credits denies the viewer the heighten awareness they previously experience as it jolts us into a microscopic “zooming in” to a finite reality that we had transcended with the ethereal beating and thinness of the appegiated bells to which we’d previously been exposed. Spatially, Glass’s music doesn’t move us into a new world, but in a way disembodies the listener from their “I-consciousness” and changes the perspective to a macroscopic one in which we are still aware of the self however in a much larger schema of the universe. As John Story writes in a review of The Hours: The quality that Glass’s best music has always had for me is that it has seemed to capture a sense of isolation within its multitude. He captures the feeling of solitude as it exists in wholeness. The music also takes on a process of temporality. The subject-object never really changes in Glass’s music; therefore process is the implied subject in the movement of the piece. However, the process is not contingent on a means-ends relationship. It is a study of a soundobject passing through time. “Always just at the moment where the Soul ought to take flight, Glass leaves that trajectory [and]… just circles back mechanically” (Story). Glass’s pursuit is not to trace the progression of self within the music, but rather to respect the integrity of the soundobject as it encounters slight alterations through time. When asked to say a word about his artist vision Glass averted the question: “Well, that’s the hardest thing to talk about. You’ll find that I will talk more easily about all the other things. The struggle to develop an artistic language, a persona voice, all these things—those are very personal ones.” Despite Glass’s hesitance to characterize his own artistic vision, it seems linguistically the free indirect discourse of the music in The Hours speaks to the fact that this is music that flows within us and between us all, in unification. The music of the twentieth century is constantly zooming out to a greater and greater panorama of existence. Philip Glass is certainly at the forefront of this ontological philosophy of music. To end, an excerpt from The Rest is Noise— Glass and some of his colleges “set aside a premise that had governed classical composition for centuries—the conception of a musical work as a self-contained linguistic activity that develops relationships among discrete thematic characters over a well-marked period of time. This music was, by way of contrast, openended, potentially limitless.” –517 …potentially limitless…Infinite Works Consulted Story, John. “The Hours.” Fanfare – The Magazine for Serious Record Collectores 26:5 (MayJune 2003) p. 77-78. Writings on Glass essays, interviews, criticism. New York: Schirmer Books, 1997. Print. Specific reference made to Richard Forman’s essay Glass and Snow (1970). Grove Online Library Biography of Philip Glass Ross, Alex. The Rest is Noise. New York: Picador, 2007. Print.