Composition Description by Jeremy Grimshaw
Many of Philip Glass' works seem to find themselves in a confrontational relationship with musical history, intentionally or otherwise: his "Low" Symphony answers 200 years of entrenched orchestral tradition with tunes by David Bowie; Songs from Liquid Days aspires to the status of a kind of pop music Liederkreis. Glass' monumental Music in Twelve Parts positions itself at what was, at the time of its composition, the culmination of a musical style with an uncertain future. Composed between 1971 and 1974, the three-and-a-half hour work stands as a comprehensive compendium of the compositional techniques that Glass had developed up to that point in his career -- a sort of "Oxford English Dictionary of Minimalism" -- and as such, effectively marked the end of the period for which Glass thinks the term "minimalism" applies to his music. By cataloging his style, he codified it, resulting in the search for new sounds that eventually resulted in the groundbreaking opera with Robert Wilson, Einstein on the Beach.
As an encyclopedia of musical techniques, Music in Twelve Parts places itself in company with other famous catalogs, like the Magnus Liber Organi, J.S. Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier -- a gesture that might seem more than a little audacious for a composer who had all but apostatized from his academic, serialist indoctrination and his French traditionalist studies under Nadia Boulanger. The confrontation here is not as direct as it seems, however. In fact, it started out as an accident. Glass had begun work on what would become Part I, which he intended eventually to score for three keyboards (six hands), three winds, and three additional parts then undetermined, for a total of 12 polyphonic lines -- thus the title Music in Twelve Parts. Upon playing the piece-in-progress for a friend, she responded favorably, but asked what the other 11 parts would sound like. Glass took the misunderstanding as a challenge, and set out to compose a large scale work that would demonstrate, in detail, his entire battery of additive/subtractive rhythmic techniques, augmentational/diminutive melodic operations, canonic metamorphoses, and textural transformations. There is a bit of historicism, too: the harmonic progressions of the last movement are underscored by a curiously chromatic line in the bass, which turns out to be an antithetically applied twelve-tone row.
The piece was composed for the forces of the Philip Glass Ensemble, which around this time had graduated from an ad hoc group of players to an organized institution. Twelve Parts thus stands as a prime exemplar of Glass' mature minimalist style. A crucial component to the sound of the piece is the precise dynamic balance of the heavily amplified instrumental ensemble, whose overall blend is controlled by a sound engineer manning a mixer board (often occupying the position on the stage where the conductor would normally stand). The effect is a shifting, electrified wall of sound whose surface and opacity slowly changes within each of the 12 movements.
Review by "Blue" Gene Tyranny
Philip Glass is renowned for his style of pattern music, presented in its most developed form in this early work, still one of his best. Glass developed a method of writing that simultaneously retained the sense of the timeless "present" while bringing new thoughts about melody and harmony in a non-virtuosic sense. On Music in Twelve Parts (as well as his opera Akhnaten), these ideas are very elegant and profound, while at times Glass verges on the direct appeal of a movie-music sensibility as in 1000 Airplanes on the Roof. For having this range, he remains a very controversial composer.
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