The Daily Swarm

Wall Street Journal:

…Mr. Glass’s recent works—many for solo string instruments—are far removed from the electronically enhanced early pieces he wrote for his Philip Glass Ensemble. While they retain the hypnotic quality that comes from the cyclical arrangement of rhythmic and harmonic building blocks, works like the “Songs and Poems for Solo Cello” or the “Sonata for Violin and Piano” are imbued with a lush sound and searching expressivity far removed from the mechanical pulse of his earlier works.

“With the Ensemble music,” he explains, “the issue was always about form and content. The thesis of the music was that the structure and the material were identical, in the same way that a Jasper Johns painting of a flag is identical with the flag. That’s it, end of story. When you get into chamber music, it’s a whole different thing. It’s a musical dialogue that happens between people. It doesn’t make one wrong or one right—it’s simply a different way of working.”

Last week saw the U.S. premiere of Mr. Glass’s opera “Kepler,” in a concert production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Written for the Upper Austrian State Theatre and first performed in Linz in September, the opera is a portrait of that city’s most famous son, the astronomer whose analysis of the motion of the planets provided the foundation for Newton’s discovery of the law of gravity.

“We’re in a period of music now which is a big reaction to the ideological modern music of the ‘50s and ‘60s. This is a music that is ahistorical. It doesn’t say, we are here and we must go there. That was the position of [Pierre] Boulez and [Luigi] Nono, and it wasn’t a bad thing—the music was beautiful. But it wanted to be like science where the present would disprove the past and would determine the future. The younger composers have totally abandoned that idea.”