A Birthday For Philip Glass: A Mathematician Composer or a Composer Mathematician

The American composer, Philip Glass, turns 75 today. For a long time his work has been  described as minimalist, but it seems anything but "minimal." Listening to Glass is often more an experience where one can get "into" the music as a participant rather than merely observe. Even at its simplest, his work has complexities in tone, harmony, tempo and orchestration. For one thing, Glass counts. He plays by the numbers, practicing his musical arithmetic adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing, and even solving some algebraic formulas here and there. In the end, music to Glass seems like mathematics. Perhaps that's as it should be - he studied mathematics and philosophy at the University of Chicago. Fortunately for our culture, popular as well as haute, he became an extraordinary, prolific composer and a significant international influence in the music world.

Here are three selections from his vast and still growing output. The first comes from his Academy Award nominated original score for the film, The Hours (2002)

Next is "Knee 5", the concluding "scene" from his first opera, Einstein on the Beach, composed in 1975.  Readers will find the lyric here. After the first listen, you may want to repeat the piece with lyrics at hand. An Einstein revival overseen by Glass began an international tour on January 20, 2012 in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

We conclude with Glass's work for Koyaanisqatsi (1982), one of the most remarkable experimental documentary films of our time. The film, the first in Godfrey Reggio's Qatsi Trilogy, has entered cult status. This segment reminds OTR of the visual images in Blade Runner and Tron, convincing him that we're already living "the future."

OTR imagines by now that many readers will view the appreciation of Philip Glass as an acquired taste. He does after all take his listeners to the edges of creativity. OTR agrees and hopes readers will persevere. The reward is there - just takes a bit of time to discover it. He also hopes that readers who are unfamiliar with the Qatsi Trilogy and Reggio's other work in film will enjoy exploring them.

Photo: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en