Albert de Ruiter, bass voice; Western Wind Vocal Ensemble; Philip Glass Ensemble and additional instrumentalists; Michael Riesman, conductor
Antilles/Island Masters IMCD 98; 1 CD
There are films in which the music supports the images, and there are films in which the images and music become so completely entangled that it is difficult to say which one is carrying the other. Koyaanisqatsi belongs to the second category. Godfrey Reggio supplied the extraordinary images—clouds moving across deserts, crowds pouring through cities, factories processing food and people with equal indifference—but Philip Glass gave those images their nervous system.
The title is generally translated from the Hopi as “life out of balance,” although the accompanying notes offer several variations: crazy life, life in turmoil, life disintegrating, and a condition demanding another way of living. The film has no dialogue, characters or conventional story. Glass’s music provides all three. It gives the film its voice, creates its emotional progression and turns a collection of accelerated or slowed-down images into something resembling a tragedy.
The album begins with Albert de Ruiter intoning the title in a bass voice so deep that it seems to come from under the earth. An organ moves beneath him in heavy, descending steps. Nothing complicated happens, but the effect is immediately unsettling. Glass does not announce an apocalypse with screaming brass or pounding drums. He simply allows that voice to repeat the word until it ceases to sound like a title and begins to sound like a warning.
“Vessels” introduces the Western Wind Vocal Ensemble in rapidly overlapping syllables. The voices seem to be moving in several directions at once, while the instrumental patterns underneath them maintain their steady course. It is beautiful music, but the beauty has something mechanical about it. Human breath and human voices have been absorbed into a system that does not appear to notice them.
“Cloudscape” is lighter and more buoyant. Its quick keyboard figures rise and fall with the movement of clouds, demonstrating Glass’s remarkable ability to make repetition feel airborne. This is the kind of passage that led people to call his music hypnotic, but hypnosis suggests passivity. Glass keeps the listener alert by continually shifting the weight within the pattern. A note is added, an accent moves, a phrase is lengthened, and the entire surface seems to tilt.
Then comes “Pruit Igoe,” named after the disastrous St. Louis housing development whose demolition became one of the film’s defining images. The music begins with spacious, mournful brass and moves with the gravity of a funeral procession. Glass is often accused of emotional coldness, but there is nothing cold here. He avoids telling us precisely what to feel; instead, he creates enough space for grief, anger and bewilderment to coexist.
“The Grid” is the album’s centerpiece and one of Glass’s great achievements. For nearly fifteen minutes the music drives forward with scarcely a pause. Keyboard figures pulse, winds chatter, and brass lines appear and disappear as the tempo of modern life becomes increasingly frantic. The music accompanies highways, office buildings, assembly lines, video games, advertisements and crowds moving through city streets. Yet Glass does not write a simple denunciation of technology. The music is exhilarating. That is precisely the point.
We have not merely been trapped by the machine; we are fascinated by it. We enjoy its speed, its order and its power. “The Grid” captures that attraction so successfully that the listener can become intoxicated by the very world the film is questioning. The piece keeps accumulating motion until individual gestures disappear inside the larger mechanism. It is thrilling and frightening for exactly the same reason.
“Prophecies” brings the album back to the dark atmosphere of its opening. The deep voice returns, the tempo slows and the music seems to survey what the preceding pieces have built. In the film, it accompanies the unforgettable image of a rocket exploding shortly after launch. The camera follows a burning fragment as it tumbles slowly back toward the earth. Glass does not inflate the moment with melodrama. The measured music makes the image more disturbing because it treats technological catastrophe as something almost ceremonial.
This original album contains only six selections and runs about forty-six minutes. It is not the complete score, and “The Grid” and “Prophecies” are substantially shorter than the music heard in the film. Later editions offer more material, while the 1998 Nonesuch recording presents a fuller and more polished reconstruction. Even so, this 1983 release retains a directness that the later recording does not entirely replace.
The sound has some early-digital hardness, particularly in the upper keyboards and winds, but that hardness suits the subject. The performance has a driven, almost physical energy. Michael Riesman maintains the pulse without making it rigid, and the expanded ensemble gives Glass’s familiar keyboards and saxophones unusual weight and color. Brass, lower strings, organ and voices create a score that can move from private meditation to industrial spectacle without losing its identity.
Taken away from Reggio’s images, the music not only survives but reveals how much of the film’s structure originated in the score. The album progresses from warning through acceleration to catastrophe and reflection. It has no conventional narrative, yet it tells a recognizable story: human beings construct an astonishing technological civilization, become absorbed into its rhythms, and finally watch pieces of it fall burning from the sky.
Koyaanisqatsi is one of those rare soundtracks that changed the way films could use music. It is also one of the best introductions to Glass, because it contains nearly everything he does well: hypnotic repetition, large-scale accumulation, grave melody, rhythmic excitement and an ability to make modern life sound both magnificent and deranged.
The album is incomplete, but it is not insubstantial. These six pieces form a powerful sequence in their own right—and “The Grid” alone would make the recording essential.
Rating: 5 out of 5
