The Philip Glass Ensemble; Michael Riesman, musical director
Nonesuch 79324-2; three CDs
Philip Glass composed Music in Twelve Parts between 1971 and 1974, during the period when he was working out the musical language that would lead to Einstein on the Beach. The title sounds forbiddingly academic. The music can be forbidding too. It lasts nearly three and a half hours, employs a small collection of instrumental colors, and repeats short figures long enough to make a listener question whether anything is changing.
Everything is changing.
Glass originally intended Part 1 to stand alone. Its title referred to the twelve contrapuntal lines in the score, some played and others produced as acoustic by-products. After a friend heard the piece and asked what the other eleven parts would be like, Glass accepted the misunderstanding as a challenge. He spent the next three years answering her question.
The resulting cycle became a catalogue of the techniques he had developed since the middle 1960s. Rhythmic figures expand and contract. Notes enter a pattern one at a time, then disappear in the same manner. Chords shift while the pulse continues. A figure that seems fixed begins to turn inside out. Changes that would occupy a few seconds in another composer’s work may take several minutes here.
Part 1 is the quietest and most spacious of the twelve. Electric organs hold a soft, steady web of notes while winds and voice add thin lines of color. Overlapping frequencies produce tones that no performer is actually playing. The ear begins to invent its own music between the written notes. Played at a moderate volume, the piece can seem almost weightless.
That serenity does not last. Part 2 introduces the clipped, churning keyboard figures usually associated with early Glass. The music proceeds by addition, extending a phrase until its original shape has been altered. The ensemble plays with such precision that the internal changes remain clear even when the texture thickens. You may lose your place. The musicians never do.
Parts 3 and 4 increase the pressure. Saxophones bite into the organ texture, and Lisa Bielawa’s voice functions as another instrument rather than as a solo presence. She sings syllables and sustained tones without turning them into a song. Her cool, focused sound cuts through the amplified keyboards, especially when the instrumental lines have begun to blur.
A peculiar thing happens after an hour or so. The limited sonority stops feeling limited. Small differences acquire weight. The entrance of a soprano saxophone can change the temperature of the room. A new bass note feels like a structural event. When Glass moves to a different chord, the effect can be startling.
The work demands that kind of attention, although it does not demand uninterrupted concentration. There are stretches during which the mind wanders. Glass seems to have allowed for that. A listener drifts away, follows an unrelated thought, and returns to discover that the music has moved somewhere else without announcing the departure. The experience is closer to looking at moving water than following a symphonic argument.
Part 5, divided between the first and second CDs, exposes one weakness of the set. The disc break interrupts a process designed to unfold continuously. No practical alternative existed in 1996, and the break is placed as sensibly as possible. Still, the interruption reminds us that this is a physical edition of a work too long for its container.
The middle portions have the greatest rhythmic force. Parts 6 through 8 push the ensemble toward a hard, bright sound, with organ figures tumbling over one another and winds supplying sharp accents. Richard Peck’s alto and tenor saxophones bring some welcome abrasion. Jon Gibson and Andrew Sterman add the more penetrating colors of flute and soprano saxophone. The ensemble can sound less like seven performers than a single machine operated by several pairs of hands.
Yet this recording has little of the mechanical chill heard in the earlier Virgin version. That set has historical value and formidable precision, but its hard surfaces can become tiring. The Nonesuch performance, recorded in 1993, breathes more easily. Attacks are slightly rounder. The keyboards have more body, the winds sit naturally within the mix, and Bielawa sounds like a person standing among the players rather than a signal fed into the apparatus.
Michael Riesman deserves much of the credit. He keeps the pulse exact without flattening it. Glass, Martin Goldray, and Riesman play the keyboard parts with the confidence of musicians who understand where every added note is leading. Kurt Munkacsi and Riesman’s production also helps. The amplified instruments remain distinct even in the busiest passages, and the recording has enough warmth to be heard for long stretches without fatigue.
Parts 9 through 12 point toward the harmonic language of Glass’s later work. Chromatic notes disturb the earlier consonance. Patterns become less predictable, and the harmony begins to exert more control over the rhythm. Part 12 introduces a twelve-tone row, an idea that would have seemed foreign to Glass’s earlier diatonic music. He does not become Schoenberg. He absorbs the row into his own methods and keeps the rhythmic engine running.
That final part brings the cycle to an ending without offering conventional resolution. After more than three hours, an ordinary cadence would feel dishonest. The music stops because the investigation is finished.
Music in Twelve Parts is not the Glass recording I would give to a newcomer. Glassworks, the Violin Concerto, or Koyaanisqatsi would make a kinder introduction. This set asks for time, patience, and a willingness to hear repetition as a field in which minute events matter. A casual hearing will make much of it sound alike. Careful listening reveals how much ground Glass covers with so little material.
The Nonesuch recording is the version to own. It preserves the discipline of Glass’s early ensemble while giving the music warmth, depth, and human scale. Three and a half hours of electric organs, saxophones, flutes, and wordless voice may sound like a test of endurance. Sometimes it is. The test has a purpose.
Rating: 5 out of 5
