What's in a Melody?

By Annalyn Swan

The structure's the thing, says Philip Glass

It could be called a space-age music of the spheres, or "the motor on a space machine," as its avant-garde composer, Philip Glass, 41, calls it. Miked wind instruments and voices circle rapidly through repetitive musical patterns. An electronic organ throbs heavily in the air. In this stripped-down music, there are no melodies, no dynamic changes and no lyrics. What sounds at first like one continuous pulsing sound, however, gradually reveals all sorts of inner voices: treble runs on the organ, colorful flutters of saxophone and flute, a lone soprano voice that floats on top. The music is mesmeric, lush and buoyant, and it was greeted with cheers at Glass's major appearance to date: his sold-out Carnegie Hall debut.

For years, Glass--an intense, slightly wild-eyed composer and performer--has been something of an underground secret in New York's SoHo, the center of the avant-garde art world. In 1976 Einstein on the Beach, a five-hour opera by Glass and Robert Wilson, was staged in several European cities and at New York's Metropolitan Opera House. Last year North Star, his most recent album, sold all 20,000 initial copies on Virgin, a British rock label.

Glass's music is not a likely candidate for record charts. It has been labeled everything from "minimalist" and "hypnotic" to "neoprimitive." It contains elements of classical music--conventional notation, pieces composed in recognizable keys--but borrows from rock its blasty amplification, electronic organ and its huge electronic sound mixer. Glass insists he is a serious musician: "Pop music can be very good, but it is packaged and recycled. I'm creating a new language."

Classical-music critics have been skeptical of Glass for not following the avant-garde academy into twelve-tone, atonal or dissonant music, or John Cage's music of random procedures. ("I didn't accept the Schoenberg-Boulez-Stockhausen tradition, and that's threatening to them," retorts Glass.) The rock side has shied away from Glass's harmonic complexities; he has no distributor for his Einstein records. To date, his support has come mostly from the far-out fringes of progressive music: such art-rock musicians as David Bowie and Brian Eno. Says Eno: "I'm attracted to the textural density of his music. Either you can hear it as slow music with rapid ornaments or as fast music with slow underpinnings."

The Carnegie Hall concert is an important step toward Glass's acceptance by a larger audience. Alternating between electronic organ and electric keyboard, Glass directed two sections of Einstein as well as the American premiere of his latest work, Another Look at Harmony, Part 4. Sung by the Gregg Smith Singers, a group that specializes in contemporary music, Part 4 had an airy quality new to

Glass's work. The effect was spacious and oddly religious, like a new form of Gregorian chant. In its quiet way, it was as powerful as the dense, throbbing texture of the Einstein work, performed by the Philip Glass Ensemble (Winds Richard Landry, Jon Gibson and Richard Peck, Organist Michael Riesman, Soprano Iris Hiskey, and Kurt Munkacsi as sound engineer). Both works evoked frenzied ovations from the audience.

There is no Mick Jagger swagger to Glass, onstage or off. He evades questions about his private life. At Carnegie Hall, he appeared in blue jeans and seemed embarrassed by the applause. "I love it when people cheer, but I never know what to do," says Glass. His ensemble has no polish and even bumbles its bows, but Glass feels that the best act is no act. "I don't want to kowtow to popular culture -- break my instruments onstage."

Glass's musical background is strictly classical. When he was eight, he began flute lessons at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, his home town. At 14, he passed an early entrance exam for the University of Chicago and subsequently enrolled. After Chicago came five years at Juilliard as a composition student. Glass copied the cutting-edge modernists and won some prizes. But he wasn't satisfied. "To me, all of modern music sounded terrible," recalls Glass."It was purely theoretical, and I saw music as more accessible, as a sense of community."

Looking for some "alternative avenue," he won a Fulbright scholarship to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger, one of the most famous of modern composition teachers. On a vacation in North Africa, he first heard Eastern music. Says Glass: "I saw the repetitive element of non-Western music as another way of organizing music." He worked with Ravi Shankar on a film score, traveled through India and returned to New York in 1967, determined to create a new Western music built not upon melody but structure.

Glass is now at work on an opera, "a continuation of Einstein's dense harmonies." Titled Satyagraha, it is based on the life of Mahatma Gandhi and has been commissioned by the city of Rotterdam for a Netherlands Opera performance in 1980. But Glass also wants to pursue the quiet vein of Part 4: "I don't have to break the sound barrier every time."

It is too soon to tell whether Glass's music is the sound of the future or merely a lush amalgam of classical and rock traditions. Still, he is undeniably one of the more innovative composers today. In a time of cold experimental music, his sound is both pleasing and powerful. "Something about my repetition and harmony seems to hit people right away," he says. Whatever that something is, it works.

Annalyn Swan

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