Our Glass Runneth Over

Glass opened the show with a '79 piece, Metamorphosis I through IV, a suite of four similar pieces based on an oscillating base line on a minor chord. Actually, the minor third seems to be Glass's most fav interval evah, it's everywhere. Against the steady alternated notes in the left hand, the right would play either a Satie-like epured melody (in I), or a sequence of block chords (for II), or some arpeggios (III). One could see the pieces -and indeed Glass's music- as hypnotic. They evoked Physics 101 to us, with the minor key center as the bottom of a potential well where attempt to escape are doomed to come back to the equilibrium. Changing tonality would be like breaking away from gravity. We found something vaguely masturbatory to the monotonous back-and-forth of the bass which, eventually, after many reps, resolves out of its tension.

Our companion viewed the music as an underwater atmosphere, where sometimes light comes through, but is usually muddled and half dark. She actually completed the under-the-sea metaphor by comparing the slim and long-limbed cellist Wendy Sutter to an octopus. Philip Glass introduced the next piece, Songs and Poems for Cello (2006), a solo cello set by saying "there are seven movements, but the first two blend together, so if you're counting, it's only six." Then he added with a sly smile, "if you're counting, then you're not listening." The audience was obviously listening, since we applauded three times and were off by either three or four in any count estimate. Sutter's passionate playing and her deep cello sounds really gave life to music. The amplified sound would catch her breathing, inhaling with emergency, as if she was going to sing the music. Glass's palette for the cello made full use of the range of the instruments: playing the same note on different strings to create an oscillating sound texture, using double stops or harmonics. The first song recalled the first few notes of the famed Bach cello suite #1, except in, surprise, surprise, in G minor instead of major, and repeated ad infinitum.

Sutter was joined by Mick Rossi for a tune out of the Naqoyaqatsi sound track, a movie by Godfrey Reggio (check out the picture of Glass with Reggio here, we find it hilarious). Glass deadpanned last night "Godfrey is here tonight. I don't think he knows we were doing this. I don't think he has heard this before. These pieces are for his movie, though." Actually, his dry humor was displayed again for the last piece, "Closing" from Glassworks. "There are two pieces in Glassworks, opening and closing, one at the beginning, and one at the end...they are very similar." We laughed at that, we're easy to please. Rossi provided a surprisingly varied backdrop with an array of percussions, from a giant gong to xylophone, even playing a celesta.

Again, in all these pieces, the music was haunting, captivating, the simple chords working like primary colors, the atmosphere elegiac and melancholy, yet without artifice. As Glass said (in the pilates interview), there "nowhere to hide" in his music. Yet this simplicity is an abyss in itself, where it's easy to lose oneself.