Symphony No. 6 (2001). Philip Glass

Joshua Kosman reviews the latest Philip Glass:

There's something almost perversely admirable about the consistency with which Philip Glass keeps plowing the same musical acreage. His Sixth Symphony, a massive setting of Allen Ginsberg's "Plutonian Ode," presses his trademark arpeggios and two-against-three rhythms into slightly new shape as a lusty protest march.

Commenting on an interview with the composer, M. Keiser wishes Glass could escape the constraints of his style:

Glass realizes this. He said in the interview that he's been trying to escape his own compositional processes, and when faced with the reality of the sameness of his output- "its humbling" he says..... I'd say.

Glass on his symphony:

"This work is based on a poem of Allen Ginsberg called Plutonian Ode. Allen and I had devised a number of works for performance to-gether [including Hydrogen Jukebox] and this was something that we intended to do. Alan died too soon for us even to begin working on the work. After his death in 1997, I waited a number of years and finally de-cided to finish it. I decided to make it into a work for voice and orchestra. My original idea was a work for piano and narrator, but with him gone no one really reads poetry the way he did, so I went in a different direction altogether and wrote for soprano and orchestra."

Comments

[Stephen V Funk]

Interesting... I personally think the more Glass tries to "escape" his own processes, the less interseting the music becomes...

Here's a link to my own review of Plutonian Ode. Cheers!

http://serenadeingreen.blogspot.com/2006/02/first-listen-philip-glass-symphony-no.html