PHILIP GLASS...rejects the notion of "minimalism" and defines his work...“music with repetitive structures”

“Through his operas, his symphonies, his compositions for his own ensemble, and his wide-ranging collaborations with artists ranging from Twyla Tharp to Allen Ginsberg, Woody Allen to David Bowie, Philip Glass has had an extraordinary impact upon the musical and intellectual life of his times.”









The operas, “Einstein on the Beach,” “Satyagraha,” “Akhnaten,” and “The Voyage,”  play throughout the world’s leading houses. Glass has written music for experimental theatre such as “The Hours” and Martin Scorsese’s “Kundun”.  “Koyaanisqatsi,” his initial filmic landscape with Godfrey Reggio and the Philip Glass Ensemble, has been said to be one of the most radical and influential mating of sound and vision since “Fantasia.” His associations and collaborations with leading rock, pop and world music artists began in  the 1960s. 

Glass is the first composer to win a wide, multi-generational audience in the opera house, the concert hall, the dance world, in film and in popular music -- simultaneously.

Dissatisfied with much of what then passed for modern music, he moved to Europe, where he studied with Nadia Boulanger (who taught Aaron Copland , Virgil Thomson and Quincy Jones) and worked closely with the sitar virtuoso and composer Ravi Shankar. He then returned to New York in 1967 and formed the Philip Glass Ensemble – comprising of seven musicians playing keyboards and a variety of woodwind instruments, amplified and fed through a mixer. 




The new musical style that Glass was evolving was eventually dubbed “minimalism.” Glass himself never liked the term and preferred to define his work as “music with repetitive structures.” “Much of his early work was based on the extended reiteration of brief, elegant melodic fragments that wove in and out of an aural tapestry.” 

Glass has composed more than twenty operas, large and small; eight symphonies (with others already on the way); two piano concertos and concertos for violin, piano, timpani, and saxophone quartet and orchestra; soundtracks to films ranging from new scores to the stylizing old classics; string quartets; and a growing body of work for solo piano and organ. He has collaborated with Paul Simon, Linda Ronstadt, Yo-Yo Ma, and Doris Lessing, among many others. He presents lectures, workshops, and solo keyboard performances around the world, and continues to appear regularly with the Philip Glass Ensemble.

                                                Here is a video showing a preview of the first movement of the new Glass Partita                                                         for Solo Violin which will be premiere in the fall of 2011. 
                 

Follow the link to read more about the latest and current news surrounding Philip Glass ...http://philipglass.typepad.com/glass_notes/      

JONSI- GO - "a musical palette"

Jónsi initially thought when he was working on the album ‘Go’ he would be making a low-key, acoustic album until, as he says, “somewhere along the line, it just sort of exploded.” That explosion resulted in sheer aural fireworks.  It is not a straight ahead pop record, nor rock, folk, ambient or electronic, it encompasses all of these to create an expansive musical palette that’s been brought to life by Jónsi alongside a number of free-spirited collaborators.

These include, Nico Muhly, the Philip Glass protégé who is renowned for his work with Björk, Antony & the Johnsons, Bonnie “prince” billy and Grizzly bear. Muhly has arranged all the songs on ‘Go’, bringing strings, brass and woodwind to dance playfully alongside his offbeat piano playing. In addition he incorporated into the mix the percussive genius of Samuli Kosminen, whose drumming powers many of the songs along, and you have a sonic landscape that bears little relation to anything else around today, yet explodes from the speakers with sheer happiness and wonder, wide-eyed and eager to be heard.

Within every colour of the palette in which this album paints for the listener there are wild cross- rhythms, syncopated flute harmonics, layering of delayed echo voices as if travelling across a vast landscape. The symphonic soundscapes are combined with a rhythmic sensation of train’s engine running.


An article by James Killingsworth describes Grow till tall "a beautiful, the moody, operatic drama" and Hengilas—"a track so intimately arranged that you can distinctly hear the steady-droning horn players gasping periodically for breath—tell an incomplete story." 


Although in the classical era the texture of works were typically known to be homophonic, here, in this album the texture is additive, which relates to rock music. However the components of this texture are typically from the classical period i.e. the piece begins with  monophony or homophony but gradually becomes polyphonic through the layering of timbres. Especially, as his voice unlike popular music today whereby the vocals seem to polish the song off by creating hook lines for audience members out there, his experimental vocal timbre (large range) just becomes another ingredient into the mix and is treated as a branch of the piece, an equal instrument.

Check out this article by James Killingsworth on Jonsi.. http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2010/04/jonsi-go.html