Philip Glass, Alone Again

Two sets of solo piano recordings, 35 years apart

Philip Glass turns 87 today; he was born January 31, 1937. He’s indisputably one of the most important composers of the 20th century. I mean, the sheer volume of his output alone, never mind the recognizability of his general style, makes him a true crossover artist, someone whose name is likely known even to people who’d never set foot in a concert hall or opera house.

I first heard his album Solo Piano when I was 16 years old. A record store run by a friend’s family had a copy, and I remember it being cheap — I think it might have been in their discount bin, even though it was new. I bought it on name recognition alone. I had some vague idea of who Glass was, having read a review of Koyaanisqatsi but not seen it. (I still haven’t, though I own the soundtrack CD.)

I wasn’t someone who listened to a whole lot of classical music back then, whether new or modern, but there was something about the Solo Piano CD that called out to me. The cover art is certainly striking; Glass stares at you from behind the instrument as though he’s sizing you up, deciding whether you’re ready for his music. I felt like I was.

The album consists of just three pieces, though the first, “Metamorphosis,” is divided into five sections. The first and second are quite well known, having appeared in the movie The Thin Blue Line and on the TV shows Person of Interest and Battlestar Galactica. The second composition on the record, “Mad Rush,” was originally an organ piece written for the first public address by the Dalai Lama in New York in 1979. The last, “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” was written to accompany a reading of the 1966 poem of the same name by Allen Ginsberg.

What’s interesting to me about the music on Solo Piano is the way its execution undercuts its structure. Glass’s pieces are deceptively simple, consisting of cellular patterns that repeat over and over again with very minor variations, fitting together like Lego bricks. There’s almost no dynamism — pieces don’t rise to a thunderous crescendo, they just go for a while and then stop. At most, as on “Metamorphosis 1,” there’s a kind of gear-shifting effect, up and back, up and back. And the rhythm is constant, with zero swing.

But Glass’s playing inserts hesitations and pauses where there probably aren’t any in the score. There are times, during “Metamorphosis 1,” particularly during the “gear-shift” when he transitions from Cell A to Cell B, that it’s almost like you can hear him thinking and preparing to type out the next little bundle of notes, and I always find myself thinking, Dude, you wrote this shit! Shouldn’t you know how it goes? It makes me want to seek out other recordings of these pieces to see if other players have executed them with greater precision.

But at the same time, I’m pretty sure it would be possible to program these notes into Logic and have a computer execute the music with impeccable rhythm and no hesitation, and I don’t think that would sound nearly as good. There would be something off about it, like reading a text generated by artificial intelligence. And who am I to criticize his playing, anyway? It’s not like I can play the piano, or any other instrument. (I own a trumpet. If I try really hard, I can get it to make the same noise twice.)

This month, Glass has released a new solo piano disc, simply titled Philip Glass Solo, and it’s more than just a companion piece to its now 35-year-old predecessor; it’s almost a mirror image of the older record. It contains a new version of “Mad Rush,” at 16:35 nearly three minutes longer than the earlier recording, and re-recordings of four of the five movements of “Metamorphosis,” though he omits the fourth. But it also contains two pieces not on Solo Piano: “Opening,” which originally kicked off his 1982 album Glassworks, and “Truman Speaks,” a section of his score to the 1998 movie The Truman Show. (Glass actually appears on-camera performing the music in the movie.)

This album was recorded in Glass’s home studio during 2020 and 2021; it, like many other releases of the past few years, counts as “pandemic art,” though it does not seem like an attempt to grapple with isolation or mortality. In the press notes, Glass says it’s “both a time capsule of 2021, and a reflection on decades of composition and practice…a document on my current thinking about the music.” He also notes that the pieces were performed on the same piano he used to write them, “[in] the same room where I have worked for decades in the middle of the energy which New York City itself has brought to me. The listener may hear the quiet hum of New York in the background or feel the influence of time and memory that this space affords. To the degree possible, I made this record to invite the listener in.”

Perhaps recording at home, on the instrument he knows best, gave him a greater degree of comfort. Or maybe it’s because the Solo Piano recordings were premieres, and now he’s lived with these pieces for decades. But this is a warmer, smoother, more graceful album than its predecessor. The music still has a certain roughness; his repeated melodic cells sometimes feel hammered into place, and some of the more trilling passages don’t quite come off, but the hesitancy I perceive in the earlier recording is gone now. And given the similarities among the various pieces, it registers as more of a single 53-minute piece in seven movements than a collection of discrete works.

Philip Glass Solo may wind up being considered a minor footnote in his vast catalog. I doubt it will supplant Solo Piano in my affections. I’ve been listening to one for 35 years, and the other for less than a week, and I don’t listen to his music all that often in any case, though that’s because I have many other demands on my listening time, not out of distaste. He’s still working — apparently, he’s in the middle of writing his 15th symphony, and he composed the score for the 2023 movie Once Within a Time, which was directed by Godfrey Reggio, who also made Koyaanisqatsi and its two sequels. So it’s not like this is some end-of-life revisiting of past glories, like when Miles Davis performed the music he’d made with Gil Evans at the 1991 Montreux Jazz Festival, and died three months later. But it is a nice collection of music that deserves to be heard at least once by anybody who likes Philip Glass’s work.

That’s it for now. See you next week!