Music in Twelve Parts (1971-74). Philip Glass

iPod shuffled up tracks from Reich's Music for 18 Musicians and Glass' Music in Twelve Parts. While the former is classic, I'm increasingly enamored of the latter. Keith Potter in Four Musical Minimalists begins to distinguish the parts:

One	Glass's first slow minimalist piece...a resulting pattern derived from from the interaction of its shifting counterpoint
Two, Five, Six, Eight	...unfold a process of augmentation and diminuition within a fixed rhythmic cycle.
Three, Four, Seven	...explore resulting patterns
Two, Seven, Eight, Nine	...more sectional and complex
Ten, Eleven, Twelve	...single processes once again, they chart a rising curve, the highly chromatic Part Ten leading to the harmonic motion of the concluding two movements

And from bloggers:

M. Keiser: Im writing with music in 12 parts in mind, particularly the 7th and 8th movements, which are the juicy ones.

David Toub: I don't think that was any more significant than Feldman placing a row here and there in his String Quartet #2 or Philip Glass writing a row in Part 12 of Music in Twelve Parts.

Arturo Vasquez: Both a theoretical exercise and spiritual journey, its length of over three hours will transport you to a new level of sound and feeling.

Tim Risher: It is a summation of all of his techniques in minimalism to that point, and at the end of the piece, breaking out into full fledged slinky tonality.

Since the aworks world is now dominated by MP3 files in 4 Gigabyte semi-random chunks, I only hear a couple parts at a time, right now the first two. This new MP3 world is also increasingly abstract  -- I don't remember if I am listening to the Eighties or Nineties recording since the tags are ambiguous. For that matter, which Reich recording was it?

On the other hand, I'm listening to a broader slice of my collection than ever before...

currently playing: bronchusevenmx24 by autechre (which complements the glass and the reich)

Comments

[david toub]

Nice post. I've always been a great fan of Music in Twelve Parts. For ages, all that was available was the first two parts on an old LP, and I then obtained reel-to-reel tapes from WNYC-FM of a live performance of the entire piece, and it's interesting to hear the difference from the CD set that is currently available. Obviously, with post-production, a lot of the gaps in the wind playing can be filled in (without circular breathing, it's not possible to maintain the repetitive streams for long, I would think). Part 4, with its second section that contains, I believe, some improvisation, sounds quite different in the older performance. I like them both, but it's striking to see how they differ.

Twelve Parts really laid a lot of the groundwork for Einstein, particularly Part 12, since there is considerable modulation. I'd also say the same for Another Look at Harmony, which is also an excellent work from that period. I miss the 70's, I guess.