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Post by the Scribe on Mar 24, 2020 9:44:15 GMT
PHILIP GLASS NYC 1987 EBET ROBERTS  In 1985, composer Philip Glass began a new musical journey. Already an accomplished
composer of opera and instrumental music, never before had he attempted to compose song. As
he states in the preface of the musical score of Songs from Liquid Days, he began by asking
David Byrne, with whom he had worked once before, to write texts that he could then set to
music. Naturally, the project evolved and Glass set out to compose his first (and, to date, his
only) song cycle. For Glass the importance of the relationship between words and music was
prime. Thus, his priority was to ask popular singer-songwriters of the time to pen the texts for
the cycle because he felt they would understand the importance of the relationship between
words and music, as he states in his preface to the musical score. After Byrne, Glass chose
American singer-songwriters Paul Simon, Suzanne Vega, and Laurie Anderson to supply the rest
of the texts.
Songs from Liquid Days is difficult to categorize as a song cycle in the traditional sense.
A formal song cycle would typically incorporate texts from only one poet; it would follow a
hierarchy in which a narrator tells a story with a beginning, middle, and end; and it would
contain, at least to some degree, recurring thematic elements, musically and/or textually. Songs
from Liquid Days displays none of these characteristics. Using four poets, each song tells its own
story, incorporating no recurring motifs from one song to the next. There are, however, elements
that cohesively tie the work together. Foremost, the texts speak of related concepts of surrealism
and ambiguity. These elements make for a fitting opus title. In addition, the smooth key
transitions from one movement to the next, creates a work that seems to function as a cycle. In
his preface to the musical score Glass twice refers to Songs from Liquid Days as a cycle.
Therefore, it should be the performer’s responsibility to follow in that tradition in his/her
preparation of the piece.
Lynn Goldsmith
Once Songs from Liquid Days was finished in 1986, Glass began the arduous task of
casting the ensemble for its premiere album recording (it was the composer’s tradition to release
a professional recording upon the completion of each new composition). The long established
Philip Glass Ensemble and the famous Kronos Quartet, with whom Glass had collaborated
previously, were the most obvious choices for the instrumental ensemble. Glass then chose a
diverse group of vocalists to bring the words to life. Rock singers Bernard Fowler, Janice
Pendarvis, and Linda Ronstadt; folk trio The Roches; and operatic tenor Douglas Perry; each
brought their own unique characterizations and vocal techniques to the recording project.
Glass’s choices in casting his vocal ensemble for the album might give a classically
trained singer the notion that this song cycle is intended as pop music. Naturally, a classically
trained vocalist may not feel inclined to even listen to this work, much less consider it an option
for his/her repertoire. While the recording remains one of the composer’s most popular albums to
date, most classically trained singers have since dismissed the cycle. The intention of this
document is to analyze the music and the texts in Songs from Liquid Days, and in so doing,
discover Mr. Glass’s canny ability to compose for the classical singer.
digitalcommons.lsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5268&context=gradschool_dissertations
Lynn Goldsmith
1000 Airplanes On The Roof
Year Of Release: 1989
Label: Venture
Genre: Classical
This collaboration with playwright David Henry Hwang and visual artist Jerome Sirlin premiered in a Viennese airport hangar in 1988, and it beats John Adams. Since Glass took to the stage and screen as his main career in the 1980s, he's repeated chord changes and arrangements to the point of hackwork. Even here, in fact, bits of dramatic musical emphasis are as fussy as his usual orchestral soundtrack work, some of them featuring Linda Ronstadt's high ooh-ing. Moments of pure schlock are crafted from the same old ostinatos, obbligatos, and harmonies once lit up by the electric Philip Glass Ensemble. But most of it works. For one thing, it contains more chord changes than the usual Glass stage or work. Another reason is that this is the last score Glass recorded exclusively with electric keyboards and woodwinds. The composer blends his numerous motifs into one galactic "Grey Cloud Over New York," rendered without a moment's hesitation by PGE vets Martin Goldray,Jack Kripl, Richard Peck, and Jon Gibson. They immediately reprise the nervous title overture into the relaxed schmaltz of "A Normal Man Running." With the sinister voice sampling in "Labyrinth" as a lone reminder that this is a piece for the stage, this it's one of Glass' superior stand-alone works.
www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIoFxSeC9xA63c8ytrsnjbWJqzXdvdKqn
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Post by the Scribe on Apr 10, 2020 7:56:21 GMT
Another interesting fact is that while she worked with Philip Glass on Songs For Liquid Days that same year (1986) she appeared on Hail Hail Rock and Roll with Chuck Berry.
The very next day she appeared on the Johnny Carson Show (Tonight Show) singing selections from her third American Standards album "For Sentimental Reasons",
was finishing up the first Trio album with Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris AND was brushing up on her Spanish language skills while learning the songs she would record the following year for Canciones de mi Padre,
also released the song Somewhere Out There (song of the year)
AND was first prize on VH1's WIN A DATE WITH LINDA RONSTADT (where I was one of the "runner ups"...sigh). (notice the outfit on the Chuck Berry special and Somewhere Out There) |
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Post by the Scribe on Jul 3, 2021 16:53:44 GMT
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Post by the Scribe on Oct 25, 2023 22:38:09 GMT
the Village Voice has the worst music critics in music history so anything they print needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Occasionally there are good interviews like this one.Q&A: Philip Glass On Black Music And African-American History
www.villagevoice.com/qa-philip-glass-on-black-music-and-african-american-history/
by STEVEN THRASHER
February 7, 2012
Every day this month, in conjunction with our Feb. 1 cover story “Philip Glass, An East Village Voice,” Sound of the City will post excepts of interviews with Glass and his collaborators, as well as reviews of several concerts celebrating his 75th birthday.
Today we’re publishing the portion of our interview with Glass where we talk about black music, African American history, and how he views his music interacting with both.
I wanted to ask you musically: I’m black (or, like the president, I’m mixed), and I write sometimes about black culture. There are two albums [baesd on your music] which I love. Glass Cuts, which I think your record label put together, and Glassbreaks, which I know is not officially sanctioned. But I really love the way they mix in with hip-hop and DJ-ing, and I wanted to ask you how you view your music in terms of the African American musical tradition?
Steven, that’s an interesting question. Part of my own personal history has been my participation as a listener in other people’s music. I lived in Chicago in the fifties. I went to school there, in Chicago in 1952. I heard Billie Holiday singing at the Cotton Club. I heard Ben Webster, and I was very young. I heard Bud Powell. I couldn’t hear Charlie Parker because they wouldn’t let me in. I was too small. [Laughs]
But when I came to New York, one of the first people that I met was Ornette Coleman. We’ve known each other for years.
So, I think for me, the experiences of creativity, and we have composers, Anthony Davis, from the African American community who were writing operas. And writing what we call “Serious music,” as if other music isn’t serious. [Laughs]
You know what I mean, right? “Art” music. And some people have been friendly, very friendly, some not so friendly. It’s a question of temperament.
I grew up, if you want to talk about this kind of thing, I grew up in Baltimore, which was a totally segregated city. Washrooms, schools, swimming pools, golf course, the whole works. The whole works. Movie houses, restaurants.
Your father owned a record store, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Was it segregated? Or did people come from both sides?
Oh yeah. In fact, my brother and I, we were kids, we were 15 or 16, we had an R&B record shop in the other part of town, and we used to listen to the music, and I think my father sent us there because it was the summer time and he didn’t know what to do with us. So he put opened up a storefront, and we had a record player and a Coke machine, and a lot of people came and listened to music. I don’t think we sold any records.
But I got to hear a lot of music. So I grew up. The city may have been segregated, but my taste in music wasn’t segregated. I understood that very quickly, and when I was in Chicago at the age of 15, I was out listening to music. So I have real friends in that world, and a real connection to that music.
The funny thing is that I don’t improvise. And people say, can you sit in and play with us? And I say, you know, I just never learned how to do that. I don’t know if it’s because I had some kind of mental block, but I’d always been a writing composer. Pencil and paper composer, and I think I just tried it out. By the time I was asked to do it, I was too far along in a different direction. So I didn’t play jazz. On the other hand, I feel that something like Einstein on the Beach, when I listen to that, I think the energy of that comes right out of the modern jazz world. And it’s a black and white world. It can be Lenny Tristano, too… It doesn’t have to be John Coltrane. Do you know Lenny Tristano’s music?
A little bit, yeah.
He was an amazing player. The energy was formidable.
So there has always been an issue, and I don’t know if it’s ever gone away. I’m very good friends with Wynton Marsalis. We’ve talked about doing something together but we haven’t done it yet.
But we don’t, to be truthful, when I go and look at an orchestra, I look and see, there are a lot of women in the orchestra now. A lot of Asian people. But not many black people in the orchestras. There are a few. But the music world is still is not that different form a long time ago.
I think partly that’s because there is an indigenous music that is connected to [that] community which has been very successful, very powerful, very creative…and so, Anthony writes operas. He does very interesting things, and he’s not the only one. But I think there has not been a lot of incentive to be a part of the concert world, and maybe there has, but not with very many people. So that, integration of the arts – it’s happened in the dance world.
Yeah.
And it’s happened in the art world. But it hasn’t happened in the music world, not really.
There are one or two black conductors, and there are great singers, fantastic singers, who have made great names for [themselves]. Not only Jesse Norman. But in Einstein, this production of Einstein [which will be at BAM in September], I’m looking at the stage; we have, for an American theater company, a pretty integrated cast. We have African American performers. Not just one or two, but you see them in the dance company, you see them on stage with the singers, two of the principal players are African American. So in Einstein, Bob is from Texas, I’m from Baltimore, we’re very aware of that.
When I saw that the other day, I said, “Oh good, we can be a part of the world now.” But we didn’t even have people for the first production- people didn’t even audition for it, you know what I mean? So, this time around, we did have people, and we’re starting to, and it should look like the people on the subway! If you look at it that way, we’re way behind, aren’t we? [Laughs]
Are you laughing?
Yeah.
But that’s what it is. It’s an issue. I think people are aware of it. But then again, there is such a struggle…the work of those players have been so powerful and some formative, some people say, “Why bother?” and some people say we want to bother. I like that [and] I said I didn’t want to be in the “new music world of uptown,” only doing one kind of music. I wanted to be able to do what I wanted to do.
How do you see the kind of music that you write affecting and setting the stage for DJs and sampling? How do you feel about your work being sampled in other people’s music?
Well I think that’s a very open door, and I am totally up for it. [Note: this is a change from what Glass’s people told dj BC, the man behind the above video, several years ago.]
I’m not one of these people, the kind of guy who says, “Yes I figure this is where” [my music belongs]. A guy I know came up to me recently and said, “Look I’m doing a documentary. Would it be OK if I used your music?” I said, “Look Josh, when people want to use my music, I always say yes.” What do I – why wouldn’t I say yes? If it doesn’t work out, it will disappear. If it does work out, the music has another life. I am extremely, I would say, on the most progressive side of that question. I will let anyone, if they want to make arrangements [to use my music].
Sometimes the arrangements are mind-bending. I heard a steel drum band [which] made an entire record of my piano etudes. Now, let me tell you, that is a stretch. But he sent the record, we have a little record company, and I didn’t listen to it for a long time, because I wasn’t sure if I wanted to hear it. After the record was out, I finally listened to it, and I said, “Oh my God, they’re actually playing the piano songs on these steel drums!” [Laughs]
It’s very funny. Anybody plays Bach. You can have an accordion and play Bach. You can have a penny whistle and play Bach. And we love it because it’s Bach. Something different works, and if it doesn’t, it’s not going to be played very much, and if it does, it has a different personae.
Yesterday was the day, of course, we observe Dr. King’s birthday, and I wanted to ask you about how you came linking him and having him be the focus of the third act of Satygraha.
I was looking from the point of view of Gandhi. Very simply, I was talking about Gandhi’s past, his present and his future. In Indian philosophy, that is called “the three times”…The first, second and third act should be about the three times. So the past is for him would have been Tolstoy. He was an old man. But he was in correspondence with Tolstoy. They never met, they only knew each other by letters. There were six or seven letters exchanged. Tolstoy, he referred to Gandhi as “a brother in the first [seval], and he had no idea what Gandhi was doing, but Gandhi knew who he was.
Right.
And then [the Indian poet] Tagore, which was contemporary. And then of course the future had to be King. And so the whole third act is about King. And so basically, I took the opera from segregated South Africa to the Civil Rights movement. I did the same thing recently, I did an opera called Appomattox. Do you know about that that one?
Yes.
And it ends with the murder of three civil rights workers. It ends with their murder. Appomattox is the signing of the surrender [of the Confederacy], in the Appomattox Courthouse. That happens in Act I. Act II is what happens afterwards. It’s an opera, I wanted it to be done in other parts of America, it’s only been done in San Francisco. I’m glad it was done in San Francisco. You need a chorus of 50 black guys in a chorus, because I have black chorus.
Right.
Because there are black soldiers in the Union Army, and there were some in the fighting on Confederate side, too.
And when I got David Gockley… and he wanted to do it in Houston, and I wanted it to be done in the South. Houston isn’t really in the South, but it’s close enough. It’s not that far from Louisiana, and I wanted it to go there. Then he moved to San Francisco, and he took the opera with him.
And he saw what I needed, and he said, “What’s this in the score?” And I said, “David,” this is the Civil War! We’ve got to have black people on stage!
“Yeah, but where am I going to find them?”
Well, he found them. We had a whole chorus. The only problem was [laughing] they weren’t as black as I wanted them to be!
Laughing.
You know, because, you know what’s happened in the last 40, 50 years. We’re not black anymore! We’re somewhere in between. Something like that. But it was a black chorus. And they were there, I wrote the piece for them. I got, it’s funny, I’ll talk to you about this because you are interested in the topic, between Satygraha and Appomattox, there was a connection. Personally, I thought it was something I wanted to write about. I wasn’t going to leave it to Anthony Davis [laughing] to write about it by himself, we were going to write about it, too.
Previous articles in our series on Philip Glass at 75:
Philip Glass, An East Village Voice (February 1 cover story)
Q&A: Koyaanisqatsi Director Godfrey Reggio On Dragging Philip Glass Into Film Scoring
Q&A: Glassbreaks Auteur dj BC On Mashing Up Philip Glass With The Beastie Boys, Kanye And The Fugees
Q&A: Kronos Quartet Founder David Harrington On Collaborating With Philip Glass
Live: The Premiere of Glass’s Symphony No. 9 at Carnegie Hall
Happy (Happy Happy) 75th Birthday, Philip Glass, From South Park
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Post by the Scribe on Oct 25, 2023 23:03:17 GMT
41,993 views Apr 22, 2020
1000 Airplanes on the Roof is a so called “science fiction music drama” with music by Philip Glass, story by David Henry Hwang and holographic set projections by Jerome Sirlin’s. And an incredible lead vocal performance from Linda Ronstadt.
Tracklist:
0:00 1000 Airplanes on the Roof
5:55 City Walk
8:08 Girlfriend
14:05 My Building Disappeared
15:51 Screens of Memory
19:24 What Time is Grey
21:41 Labyrinth
27:51 Return to the Hive
32:42 Three Truths
36:32 The Encounter
45:14 Grey Cloud Over New York
47:05 Where Have You Been asked The Doctor
51:00 A Normal Man Running
Music by Philip Glass.
Text by David Henry Hwang.
CAST:
Actor (speech only) S; fl (pic, bcl, wind syn). fl (ssx). ssx (asx, tsx)/ 2 syn
COMMISSION:
Commissioned by the Donau Festival Niederoesterreich, the American Music Theather Festival, Philadelphia, PA and Berlin, Cultural City of Europe 1988
PREMIERE:
July 15, 1988 at the Vienna International Airport, Hangar No. 3
SYNOPSIS:
The character “M” recalls encounters with extra-terrestrial life forms, including their message, “It is better to forget, it is pointless to remember. No one will believe you.” Are the surrealistic details an accurate recollection of a voyage through space, part of a drug-induced nightmare, or the beginning of a mental breakdown?
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Post by the Scribe on Oct 26, 2023 1:10:37 GMT
companion thread conservatism.freeforums.net/thread/6972/forgettingFORGETTINGThe Music Aficionado
QUALITY ARTICLES ABOUT THE GOLDEN AGE OF MUSIC
musicaficionado.blog/2016/01/27/forgetting-by-philip-glass/
JANUARY 27, 2016 • 4
Forgetting, by Philip Glass
In the mid 80s Philip Glass was looking for a different way to present his music. He experimented with various types of mediums including Dance (Glass Pieces), Theater (two Samuel Beckett adaptations: Endgame and Company) and Film (Mishima). He then decided to tackle an area far removed from the large scale operas and orchestral works he was famous for: the popular song. He was used to set music to librettos, but this time he needed help from folks who wrote short-form lyrics. A true New Yorker, he turned to fellow music artists around the city to write lyrics for him. He then proceeded to write music to these lyrics and cast various singers to sing them. The outcome was Songs From Liquid Days, which might be considered one of his more accessible albums, but definitely not typical radio material, and I would argue not pop either. It is an unmistakable Philip Glass album, flourishing with his signature repetitive themes that you can spot a mile away. But the lyrics and the singers make this album unique in his rich catalog.
songs-from-liquid-days-cover
songs-from-liquid-days-booklet
The lyricists Glass selected include David Byrne, Paul Simon, Suzanne Vega and Laurie Anderson, who contributed my favorite song on the album, Forgetting. Setting his brand of music to Anderson’s lyrics proved to be a new type of challenge for Glass: “I had that series of words to set. They came in groups of three. but I set them in rhythmic groupings of four. That meant that every line of three had a space in it. It would go one, rest, two, three; or rest, one, two, three; or one, two, tree, rest, and so forth. I remember looking at the words and seeing that she had so consistently used this group of three that I could fit three into the four and form a kind of rhythmic tension between the words and the phrasing. That’s how I began writing that song, I set the actual words at the end. Then I took the second group “They rushed slightly by, these lovers” and I used that same music again. That left me the first group to set up. That became the narrative part of the song.”
Laurie Anderson
The instrumental performance was given to the Kronos quartet who worked met Glass when they were performing the music he set for the play Company, and later played a concert version of Mishima. Forgetting was the first piece of music Glass wrote specifically for the Kronos quartet. He later wrote a major work for them, his fifth string quartet shortly after his wife died from cancer.
Kronos Quartet
What makes Forgetting a special song for me is the vocal performance by Linda Ronstadt and the Roches. Ronstadt has a great voice, and while she is mostly known for her rock/pop hits from the 70s, she has a wide range of other musical interests that showcase her voice even better than the hits. Listen to her vocal interpretations of jazz standards on her recordings with Nelson Riddle and you get the idea. Ronstadt also performed a decade earlier on Carla Bley’s avant garde musical project Escalator Over the Hill. Two years after the release of Songs From Liquid Days she appeared on another Philip Glass album, 10,000 Airplanes on the Roof, although her vocal contributions there were limited to oohs and aahs. Recalling her experience singing the song Forgetting she said: “Glass’ stuff was really hard to sing. He didn’t write singer-ly stuff, he wrote eccentric stuff that would make odd jumps in a human voice.”
Linda Ronstadt
In contrast to Ronstadt’s vocals, The Roches contribute an operatic part on top of a signature Glass ensemble and keyboards repetitive build up. If you like Glass’s operas like Einstein On The Beach, Akhnaten or Satyagraha but you find the vocal performances on them hard to take, you may like this song better as it is a perfect match between the operatic Glass and a great vocal performance.
The Roches
Songs From Liquid Days was released in 1986, a good year for the contributors to the song. The Kronos Quartet released their interpretations to the music of Bill Evans, Laurie Anderson put out her wonderful multimedia performance Home of the Brave, and Ronstadt released the third of her recordings with Nelson Riddle, For Sentimental Reasons. But their combined work on the song Forgetting remains unique, an unclassified gem in their collective careers. |
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Post by the Scribe on Oct 26, 2023 1:15:06 GMT
companion thread
conservatism.freeforums.net/thread/10461/music-illumanati-interview-linda-ronstadt
excerpt:
JM: How did you get involved with that, and what was that experience like?
LR: You know, all I remember about Carla Bley is that she smoked a corn cob pipe. She was very eccentric and extremely talented, and I didn’t know what her songs were about. I didn’t have a clue. I was trying to fit them into something of my own. I remember “Escalator over the Hill”, that line. I thought that was kind of a neat line. But I was singing to her direction, the best I could. I wasn’t using my own instincts quite so much. Sort of same way as it was working with Philip Glass years later.
JM: Yeah, that was another thing I wanted to ask you about. How did you get involved with that?
liquid
LR: Again, I can’t remember how I met Philip Glass [laughs]. He asked for me. I thought there were some really nice things on Songs from Liquid Days. The Roche sisters, what they sang really worked, I thought. Paul [Simon] wrote an interesting piece about the hum in a room that was pretty subtle – too subtle for the room. But Glass’ stuff was really hard to sing. He didn’t write singer-ly stuff, he wrote eccentric stuff that would make odd jumps in a human voice.
The opposite of him would be Brian Wilson, who writes stuff that just so beautifully fluid for the human voice. He really knows how to write for singers. I love him the best. He’s one of favorite composers. Maybe not more than Paul Simon, but he’s right up there. I love his work. Musically, he’s unbeatable.
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Post by the Scribe on Nov 26, 2023 6:18:22 GMT
Linda Ronstadt & Philip Glass Ensemble - November 23, 1986
Out Of Order 2
74 views Nov 23, 2023 CENTURY CITY
Audience recording from Universal Amphitheatre in Century City, California on November 23, 1986. Thanks to D.M. for the recording.
Songs played:
1. Freezing
2. Forgetting
3. Forgetting (reprise)
CONCERT: THE PHILIP GLASS ENSEMBLE AND GUESTS
www.nytimes.com/1986/11/23/arts/concert-the-philip-glass-ensemble-and-guests.html
By John Rockwell
Nov. 23, 1986
CONCERT: THE PHILIP GLASS ENSEMBLE AND GUESTS
Credit...The New York Times Archives
See the article in its original context from
November 23, 1986, Section 1, Page 86
THE Philip Glass Ensemble has become a fixture of our concert life. But Friday evening's concerts at Avery Fisher Hall - two of them, both sold out, as usual - were different, or at least the second half was.
Before the intermission, Mr. Glass's regular ensemble - instrumentation and personnel basically unchanged from years past - offered two pieces, both new to New York. In the second half a host of extra instrumentalists and seven guest singers were added for the first live public performances of Mr. Glass's recorded cycle ''Songs from Liquid Days.'' The presentation is being repeated tonight in Los Angeles and tomorrow and Tuesday in San Francisco.
One might have assumed that tickets sold so handily because of the presence of pop and folk stars like Linda Ronstadt and the Roches. But it was Mr. Glass who won by far the most applause at the end.
Up until 10 years ago, Mr. Glass's music was almost purely abstract -subtly shifting, slowly evolving tapestries of sound. Since ''Einstein on the Beach,'' however, he has devoted his best energies to opera - ''Satyagraha,'' ''Akhnaten'' and several more to come. But he has also continued to pour forth instrumental pieces, in part to provide fresh material for the ensemble.
This practice limits him in that he must continually write for the same musicians. He tries to break that bond by adding extra instrumentalists and using ever-more-colorfully-varied synthesizers. But there is a tendency in these post-1976 ensemble pieces to fall back on formula. Too much of his later work seems choppy, stiff and predictable.
At Friday's early show, Mr. Glass began with Dance No. 9 from a new score for Twyla Tharp called ''In the Upper Room,'' first danced (to taped accompaniment) last summer and due to be seen in Brooklyn in February. This was followed by a 25-minute score for the choreographer Molissa Fenley and the director Matthew Maguire entitled ''A Descent into the Maelstrom,'' based on Poe.
Both these pieces had their moments, enlivened by some thunderous synthesizer effects and sweeping the youthful audience along with their propulsive energy and sometimes deft coloristic juxtapositions. But they were also deafeningly loud (courtesy of Kurt Munkacsi, Mr. Glass's longtime engineer) and simplistically four-square.
Mr. Glass courts suspicions of disingenuousness when he pretends that ''Songs from Liquid Days'' was meant as a pure art-song cycle. Surely in asking Paul Simon, Suzanne Vega, David Byrne and Laurie Anderson for lyrics, and Ms. Ronstadt and the Roches, among others, to sing, he had crossover dreams.
Still, the combination of different methods of vocal production is interesting. And the music has its moments, too, even if it may ultimately seem most valuable as practice for Mr. Glass's first English-language opera. Beethoven tossed his early drafts to the floor; Mr. Glass sells out Fisher Hall with his. Twice.
The lyrics range from the enigmatic (Mr. Simon's ode to an electronic hum reads like a parody of Minimalism) to the moving (Mr. Byrne) to the inspirational (Ms. Anderson). Mr. Glass offers some genuinely effective instrumental textures, some nice contrasts, some rudimentary musical responses to the textual specifics and a dogged lack of wit with the Simon and Vega lyrics.
The performances were a first, in that the record was pieced together in separate takes, layer by layer. Vocally, the Roches, with their close harmonies and energetic freshness, shone the brightest, as they do on the record, although Ms. Ronstadt had her moments, too, especially her high-soprano wordless caroling at the end - an expanded finale to the last song for everyone, preferable to the abrupt and anticlimactic conclusion on the record.
Otherwise, though, things were pretty much like the album, albeit with everything overlain with electronic coloration from the amplification system. There were nicely soulful contributions from Bernard Fowler and Janice Pendarvis, slightly effortful singing from the tenor Paul Sperry (replacing Douglas Perry from the record) and well-coordinated instrumental backing (the Kronos Quartet was replaced here by four individual string players). Michael Riesman of Mr. Glass's ensemble was the conductor.
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Post by the Scribe on Nov 26, 2023 6:31:07 GMT
PHILIP GLASS TURNS TO THE SONG
www.nytimes.com/1986/04/20/arts/philip-glass-turns-to-the-song.html
By Stephen Holden
April 20, 1986
PHILIP GLASS TURNS TO THE SONG
Credit...The New York Times Archives
April 20, 1986, Section 2, Page 25
New York Times subscribers* enjoy full access to TimesMachine—view over 150 years of New York Times journalism, as it originally appeared.
What is a song? In order to be called a song, must a piece of music have a recognizable melody? Philip Glass's often hauntingly ethereal ''Songs From Liquid Days'' (CBS Masterworks 39564; album, cassette, compact disc) is a record that raises such questions. After many listenings, one can hear the textures of the music resonate in the mind and recall many of the lyrics by Mr. Glass's four collaborators but still not be able to call up more than a few snatches of melody. Yet Mr. Glass specifically designates as songs this sequence of vocalized poems performed mostly by ''pop'' singers.
''Songs From Liquid Days'' is also an interesting example of how a composer's style can dictate lyrical tone and subject matter. In creating this cycle, Mr. Glass enlisted as lyricists four of New York's most respected pop songwriters with poetic leanings - Paul Simon, Suzanne Vega, David Byrne and Laurie Anderson. On their individual records, these four have highly distinctive literary personalities. Mr. Simon's lyrical style interweaves powerful surreal images with a vestigial rock and roll slanginess and whimsy. Miss Vega freezes hot emotions in miniature, precisely detailed still-lifes. Mr. Byrne's nervous, fragmentary observations are infused with a sense of crisis as they view the human predicament from multiple perspectives. Laurie Anderson likes to explore the ironic resonances beneath the surface of pop slogans.
But despite these writers' varying points of view and styles of diction, the lyrics of ''Songs From Liquid Days'' might almost have come from same hand. Or at least the composer treats them so similarly that the authorial voices blend into one. Mr. Glass characteristically subverts the narrative implications of a lyric by setting the words in short, arbitrary bursts that ignore the dynamics and inflections of colloquial speech. The album's several guest vocalists perform in the oratorical, unmodulated manner of the singers in a Glass opera, the object being to achieve an overall seamlessness of tone that is supposed to be more profound than conventional expressiveness.
The album's six songs are short, oracular reflections on time and love, with imagery that explicitly evokes mystical connections between people and objects, the living and the dead, and portrays dreams as portholes into eternity. The composer has sequenced these reflections into a voyage that begins with mysterious apprehension and culminates in ecstatic affirmation.
The cycle begins with Paul Simon's ''Changing Opinion,'' a mock-solemn meditation on the possible sources of an electrical hum in a room. It could be anything from distant ancestral voices to prayers in a foreign language, Mr. Simon muses. A song about hearing, ''Changing Opinion,'' serves as a formal introduction to a cycle that is about cosmic perception. But as performed by the pop-soul singer Bernard Fowler, the song becomes slightly silly, since Mr. Fowler's gruff, earthy voice communicates aggression rather than quiet receptivity.
The theme of attunement quickly gives way to revelation in two songs with lyrics by Miss Vega. The narrator of ''Lightning'' is awakened by ''a blinding bolt of sleeplessness'' into an apocalyptic apprehension of a great fire that leaves her ''in the ashes of time, burned away.'' In ''Freezing,'' a similarly dread-filled world-view invades an elliptical he-said-she-said dialogue. ''Lightning,'' the record's most hard-driving song, demands the technique of either a Wagnerian soprano or a gospel virtuoso. Unfortunately, the pop-soul singer Janice Pendarvis simply cannot effectively soar above the twittering full-tilt gallop of the Philip Glass Ensemble. And Linda Ronstadt's performance of ''Freezing,'' backed by the Kronos String Quartet, fails to match the conversational clarity of Miss Vega's lyric. Miss Vega's own cool, vibratoless alto would have suited the song better.
Things improve markedly on side two, in which the voices, instrumentation and poetry mesh into music that is often gorgeous and at times emotionally gripping in the distant, pulsing, music-of-the-spheres way that the finest Glass tends to be. David Byrne's lyrical companion pieces, ''Liquid Days'' and ''Open the Kingdom (Liquid Days, Part Two),'' contrast images of earthly and celestial love in strikingly different literary styles. The lyrics for the first song speak of ''desire, blood and sleep'' and a love that ''takes its shoes off and sits on the couch.'' This physical, everyday world is juxtaposed with another realm of pure spirit, of ''being in air'' and ''losing our way.''
Mr. Byrne's ''Open the Kingdom'' resolves the distance between the commonplace and the mystical in a Zen-like lyric whose abbreviated phrases imagine death as a rush into eternity in which sounds become words - a ''distant roar, turning to speak, turning to hear.'' Laurie Anderson's lyric for the final song, ''Forgetting,'' brings back the images of listening and sleeplessness from Mr. Simon's ''Changing Opinion'' and Miss Vega's ''Lightning.'' It incorporates them into a prayer that allays mortal anxiety with a repeated litany of heroic human qualities: ''bravery, kindness, clarity, honesty, compassion, generosity, dignity.''
The performances of these three songs are incandescent. In ''Liquid Days,'' the Roches' pure, high harmonies pour through the instrumental texture like beckoning rays of sunlight. Douglas Perry, the masterful tenor who played Gandhi in Mr. Glass's opera, ''Satyagraha,'' sings ''Open the Kingdom'' in a voice that crackles with holy fire. And in ''Forgetting,'' the Roches' angelically harmonized recitation of noble human aspirations, answering Linda Ronstadt's delicately frayed portrayal of an anxious insomniac, suggest a universe in which all prayers are heard and answered with affirmatives.
But with all its charms, ''Songs From Liquid Days'' is still minor Glass. In the composer's sweeping scores for ''Einstein on the Beach'' and ''Satyagraha,'' the breadth and sustained urgency of the music express an enlightenment that is the fruit of rigorous spiritual discipline and unending heroic struggle. Instead of spreading out a visionary feast, ''Songs From Liquid Days,'' offers only tantalizing bonbons.
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