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Music review: Glass' 'Music in Twelve Parts'
Joshua Kosman, Chronicle Music Critic
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
For a full-body immersion in the early compositional world of Philip Glass, you can't do much
better than "Music in Twelve Parts," which had an exhaustive - not to mention exhausting - West
Coast premiere in Davies Symphony Hall on Monday.
Complex and single-minded, exciting and wearisome, Glass' landmark work from the early
1970s is a four-hour bundle of enticing contradictions. Monday's rare complete performance by
the composer and the Philip Glass Ensemble, presented by San Francisco Performances, was a
heady and often disorienting thrill.
"Music in Twelve Parts" is intended as a comprehensive catalog of Glass' fundamental musical
concerns - the repertoire of harmonies and repetitive formal processes that underlay much of his
formative early work. Each section runs about 15 or 20 minutes, and each one establishes and
mines a distinctive set of harmonic and rhythmic patterns.
The logistics of the performance were straightforward. The nine-member ensemble (seven
musicians onstage and two sound technicians) played the piece in groups of three parts, with a
pause in between each group and a welcome dinner break at the halfway point.
Still, the effect of the performance was cumulative. As blocky as the piece seems on the surface a series of self-contained compositional etudes that begin and end with an unapologetic jolt there is a gathering power that comes from experiencing this music in a single sweep.
For one thing, Glass' approach across the entire span of the piece echoes the formal processes of
each part individually. In each section, a group of basic musical elements is laid out - a rippling
arpeggio, a dense chord, a rhythmic motif - and then subjected to slow, painstaking addition and
variation.
Often the processes involved are so gradual that they're hard to detect. Repetitions are extended
by one beat, then two, then three. Harmonies sheer off into multiple versions of themselves.
Arpeggios expand and contract into unpredictable lengths.
The effect is reminiscent of watching a mountain stream coursing through its path. First there is a
sense of motion and stasis all at once - the music, like water, is racing furiously along, but the
patterns it forms never seem to change.
But soon that stasis proves illusory, as Glass moves the parameters inch by surreptitious inch,
and the endless repetitions provide the cover he needs. Space out for a minute or two - and I
confess to having done so not infrequently during the performance - and you come back to find
that the musical topic has changed, subtly but noticeably.
Some musical parameters are simply left out of the equation. Instrumental color is one - the
ensemble of electronic keyboards and amplified woodwinds and voice presents a nearly
monochromatic surface throughout - and dynamic level is another.
But the topics that Glass does address here are endlessly productive and nuanced. And to hear a
composer lay out his palette in such richly evocative detail is a rare and rewarding delight.
Philip Glass' "Music in Twelve Parts," a four-hour composition that's one of his landmark works
from the early '70s, finally had its West Coast premiere on Monday.