Dr. Colin Eatock, composer
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Philip Glass, Explained in Two Columns

6/7/2012

1 Comment

 
Picture
Confounding modernists since 1976.
Philip Glass’s 1976 opera Einstein on the Beach has come to Toronto, courtesy of the Luminato Festival. I’m planning to attend – and so I’ve gone into training: building up my stamina with excerpts from the opera on Youtube. Will I last through all five hours of the performance? We’ll see.

Every time I hear an early piece by Philip Glass, I find myself contemplating a fanciful little theory. It occurs to to me that one day in the 1960s he sat down with pen and paper, with the aim of defining his new musical style.

The first thing I imagine he did was divide the page into two vertical columns. Then, in the top left he wrote “The Modernists,” and in the top right he wrote “Philip Glass.” And then I like to think he proceeded to list the stylistic attributes of modernism (at its most extreme) on the left, and to describe each attribute’s polar opposite on the right. The list came out looking something like this:



Column A: The Modernists

totally atonal
major and minor chords are forbidden
no accompaniment figuration allowed
rhythms are obscure, complex or irregular      
heterogenous textures                
the more “extended techniques” the better    
no repetition: works are through-composed

Column B: Philip Glass

totally tonal
nothing but major and minor chords
wall-to-wall accompaniment figuration
clearer sense of rhythm
homogenous textures
play instruments in a normal way
take repetition to unimagined extremes


In short, Glass’s works – especially his early works – seem deliberately opposed to all the stylistic tenets of modernism.

And for a composer with iconoclastic ambitions, modernism was an easy target, back in 1976. Established in the early twentieth century, its tenets became an orthodoxy: “The Rules” for any composer who wished to be seen as up-to-date. (One hundred years later, there are still some composers who treat the stylistic attributes of modernism as a given.)

Personally, I agree with Glass’s view that by the 1970s it was time for a change. Yet at the same time, his early efforts, like Einstein, seem like the willful contrariness of a teenager denouncing his parents’ values, holus-bolus. Glass has matured, of course – and other composers have found other ways to move on from the modernist era without displaying a need to beat it to death.

So I am grateful to Philip Glass for boldly proposing that modernism was not the end of musical history. And I’ll try to focus on my gratitude as I sit through Einstein on the Beach.


© Colin Eatock 2012

1 Comment
Kaylee link
1/22/2014 01:01:40 am

Good article! I visited many sites, only the clear expression in addition to the author's experience. Read your article, I learned a lot of knowledge

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    Eatock Daily

    I'm a composer based in Toronto – and this is my classical music blog, Eatock Daily.

    When I first started blogging, Eatock Daily was a place to re-post the articles I wrote for Toronto’s Globe and Mail and National Post newspapers, the Houston Chronicle, the Kansas City Star and other publications.

    But now I have stepped back from professional music journalism, and I'm spending more time composing.

    These days, my blog posts are infrequent, and are mostly concerned with my own music. However, I do still occasionally post comments on musical topics, including works I've discovered, enjoyed, and wish to share with others.


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