Glass (still) works

Published in

Cheeky Fest

4 min readJan 12, 2018

American composer Philip Glass has been one of my favourite composers since my college music teacher teased us with a snippet from ‘Knee Play 3’ from his 1975 opera “Einstein On The Beach” in 1997 and asked us what we thought they were singing.

Glass has composed many operas, film scores, symphonies, concertos, quartets as well as songs, ensemble works and solo piano music. And at 80 he’s still busy…

I’ve amassed a collection of ‘most’ of his music — mostly on CD but also on vinyl LP s of 1000 Airplanes On The Roof [also on CD], Solo Piano [also on CD], Parts 1 + 2 of Music in 12 Parts [also 2 recordings on CD], Koyanisqatsi [also on CD and DVD] and North Star.

I’ve seen @philipglass perform his solo piano music — some of his first 10 (now 20) Etudes [my parents bought me the sheet music for my birthday last year so that I could start to learn them], Wichita Vortex Sutra [the piano music he composed to accompany poet Allen Ginsberg’s reading of his poem of the same name which became part of their collaborative music theatre work Hydrogen Jukebox, and which is one of my go-to pieces to play from memory]

I experienced his band — The Philip Glass Ensemble, which he formed in the late 60s because no one else would play his music — perform his epic 1971–74 opus “Music In Twelve Parts” in London a few years ago. Playing his own music and retaining publishing / recording rights for his own music helps him to earn money and control the way his music is interpreted.

I went to see / hear director Phelim McDermott’s direction of Glass’ opera “Satyagraha” (which is based on part of the life of Ghandi, and forms part of his ‘portrait opera trilogy — along with “Einstein” and “Akhnaten”) performed by English National Opera in London (which incidentally, is being staged again during February).

I was amazed by the film Koyaanisqatsi — his collaboration with director Godfrey Reggio which came to be the first of 3 Qatsi films — at the Glasgow Film Theatre in 2002 in my final year of my BMus at Roehampton Uni — I was writing my thesis about Glass’ changing style from the mid/late 60s including his Portrait Opera Trilogy. I asked Glass, who was at GFT to answer questions, to sign a Score I had for part of the music in the film and he asked me where I got the score from.

Qatsi trilogy — Koyaanisqatsi — Powaqqatsi — Naqoyqatsi

I ordered some Philip Glass albums which arrived from Amazon.co.uk; 3 arrived a few days ago’ 2 more arrived today.