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Last Saturday night I caught a trio of Philip Glass’s slightly more obscure music, performed by a well-rehearsed Pacific Symphony and Pacific Chorale (based in Orange County, California) as part of their annual American Composers Festival.
The opening piece, “Meetings Along the Edge” from Passages (1990), featured Glass’s collaboration with Ravi Shankar, in which both agreed to each compose a melody for each other and write a new composition around it. Usually I cringe at the results at these attempts at cultural exchange and creative collaboration, but in this rare instance I was very taken with the way Shankar’s Indian melody combined with Glass’s signature contrapuntal and harmonic elements. It created a fascinating juxtaposition, that gave me new insights on how Shankar’s Indian musical elements integrated into his very recognizable compositional language.
This is the work where Shankar arranges Glass' themes and vice versa. It's been awhile since I've heard it since I only have it on cassette tape but what I remember was attractive and interesting, if not necessarily coherent.
Rdio has it (well, except for one track):
As long as you can enjoy it and it is meaningful in someway, I encourage people to blend new sounds! Thank you for this post, I will have to check out Glass’s collaboration with Ravi Shankar:)
Another artist that blends sounds and blurs genre lines is Michael Colina. His new release "Three Cabinets of Wonder" blurs the boundaries between jazz and classical, check it out on iTunes or Amazon! Also, you can enter to win a FREE copy of the album on his Facebook! http://on.fb.me/eYDaxB
Posted by: Cassandra | April 01, 2011 at 11:16 AM