The Music of Philip Glass

We are excited about our opening concert for so many reasons! Anne Manson’s work with Philip Glass on his Orange Mountain Music disc Orfée has led not only to this concert, but to a new recording project of our own with OMM.

Talk about going to the source: pianist Michael Riesman joined the Philip Glass Ensemble in 1974 and has played a key part in much of the American composer’s music. The multi-talented composer, conductor, keyboardist, and record producer has also conducted and/or performed on albums by music legends Paul Simon, Mike Oldfield, Ray Manzarek, David Bowie & Gavin Bryars.

Riesman will perform the Suite from The Hours on the MCO recording, which will be made at the Glenn Gould Studio in Toronto. Additional concerts are planned en route in Guelph and Waterloo.

Pre-concert event

Season preview with Anne Manson
— a subscriber-only event, with box dinner option; 5:30 pm.

Programme

Philip Glass
Suite from Dracula

Philip Glass
Symphony No. 3

Philip Glass
Suite from The Hours

Concert sponsor: Wawanesa Insurance

Michael Riesman

As the innovative musical director of the world-renowned Philip Glass Ensemble, the multi-talented composer, conductor, keyboardist and record producer, Michael Riesman, has influenced many of today's greatest talents. Riesman has had a long-lived collaborative relationship with Philip Glass. Indeed, when Glass received his Golden Globe Award in 1999 for The Truman Show score, he publicly proclaimed Riesman "a genius."

Riesman has been playing keyboards in the Philip Glass Ensemble since 1974, and has served as its Musical Director since 1976. In addition to conducting the Oscar-nominated scores Notes On A Scandal, The Truman Show, and Martin Scorsese's Kundun, he is the conductor of the revolutionary Einstein on the Beach (both recordings), Glassworks, The Photographer, Songs From Liquid Days, Dance Pieces, The Illusionist, Hamburger Hill, Music in 12 Parts (all three recordings), Passages, Koyaanisqatsi (both recordings), Mishima, Powaqqatsi, The Thin Blue Line, Anima Mundi, The Secret Agent, A Brief History of Time, La Belle et la Bête, Candyman, Naqoyqatsi, Taking Lives, Secret Window, and numerous other soundtracks and albums. Riesman was the pianist on the Oscar-nominated score for The Hours, and has also released an album of his arrangement of that music for solo piano.

In addition to his work with the Philip Glass Ensemble, Riesman has also conducted and performed on albums by Paul Simon (Hearts and Bones), Scott Johnson (Patty Hearst), Mike Oldfield (Platinum), Ray Manzarek (Carmina Burana), David Bowie (Black Tie/White Noise), and Gavin Bryars (Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet).

Along with interpreting the music of others, Riesman also finds time to create original works. He has released an album on the Rizzoli label, Formal Abandon, which he wrote, produced and performed entirely, and which originated from a commission by choreographer Lucinda Childs. In the theater, he collaborated with Robert Wilson on Edison (presented in New York, Paris, and Milan). His film scores include Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, Pleasantville (1976), and Christian Blackwood's Signed: Lino Brocka.

Philip Glass

Through his operas, his symphonies, his compositions for his own ensemble, and his wide variety of collaborations with artists ranging from Twyla Tharp to Allen Ginsberg, Woody Allen to David Bowie, Philip Glass has had an extraordinary and unprecedented impact upon the musical and intellectual life of his times.

The operas — Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha, Akhnaten, and The Voyage, among many others — play throughout the world's leading houses, and rarely to an empty seat. Glass has written music for experimental theater and for Academy Award-winning motion pictures such as The Hours and Martin Scorsese's Kundun, while Koyaanisqatsi, his initial filmic landscape with Godfrey Reggio and the Philip Glass Ensemble, may be the most radical and influential mating of sound and vision since Fantasia. His associations, personal and professional, with leading rock, pop and world music artists date back to the 1960s, including the beginning of his collaborative relationship with artist Robert Wilson. Indeed, Glass is the first composer to win a wide, multi-generational audience in the opera house, the concert hall, the dance world, in film and in popular music — simultaneously.

He was born in 1937 and grew up in Baltimore. He studied at the University of Chicago, the Juilliard School and in Aspen with Darius Milhaud. Finding himself dissatisfied with much of what then passed for modern music, he moved to Europe, where he studied with the legendary pedagogue Nadia Boulanger (who also taught Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson and Quincy Jones) and worked closely with the sitar virtuoso and composer Ravi Shankar. He returned to New York in 1967 and formed the Philip Glass Ensemble — seven musicians playing keyboards and a variety of woodwinds, amplified and fed through a mixer.

The new musical style that Glass was evolving was eventually dubbed 'minimalism.' Glass himself never liked the term and preferred to speak of himself as a composer of 'music with repetitive structures.' Much of his early work was based on the extended reiteration of brief, elegant melodic fragments that wove in and out of an aural tapestry. Or, to put it another way, it immersed the listener in a sort of sonic weather that twists, turns, surrounds, develops.

There has been nothing 'minimalist' about his output. In the past 25 years, Glass has composed more than twenty operas, large and small; eight symphonies (with others on the way); two piano concertos and concertos for violin, piano, timpani, and saxophone quartet and orchestra; soundtracks to films ranging from new scores for the stylized classics of Jean Cocteau to Errol Morris's documentary about former defense secretary Robert McNamara; string quartets; a growing body of work for solo piano and organ. He has collaborated with Paul Simon, Linda Ronstadt, Yo-Yo Ma, and Doris Lessing, among many others. He presents lectures, workshops, and solo keyboard performances around the world, and continues to appear regularly with the Philip Glass Ensemble.

Suite from 'Dracula'
Philip Glass (arr. Riesman)

Ever since he appeared in Irish author Bram Stoker's novel in 1897, the Transylvanian vampire, Count Dracula, has been the regular subject of films, television programs and stage adaptations. One of the most enduring versions is the early sound film that Hollywood's Universal Studios released in 1931. Directed by Tod Browning and starring the seasoned, flamboyantly theatrical Hungarian actor, Bela Lugosi, the sensation it caused quickly led to the production of many more horror films, beginning with the first sound edition of Frankenstein less than a year later.

The Lugosi/Browning Dracula film has no original music score, a typical practice with Hollywood films of the day that weren't musicals. The only music in the film is a brief quote from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, heard under the opening titles. In 1998, Universal Family and Home Entertainment decided to re-release the film, and they commissioned Philip Glass to compose a full-length score to go with it. He elected to use a string quartet, and engaged the celebrated Kronos Quartet to perform the music.

Glass has written, "The film is considered a classic. I felt the score needed to evoke the feeling of the world of the nineteenth century — for that reason I decided a string quartet would be the most evocative and effective. I wanted to stay away from the obvious effects associated with horror films. With Kronos we were able to add depth to the emotional layers of the film." Kronos played the Glass score live to the film on tour in 1999 and 2000. Later the music was added to the film's soundtrack for release on home video.

The suite from Dracula that you will hear at this concert is an arrangement by Michael Riesman for piano and strings.

Symphony No. 3
Philip Glass

Symphony No. 3 was commissioned by the Wurth Foundation for the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra. The premiere took place on 5 February 1995 in Kunzelsau, Germany, with Dennis Russell Davies conducting.

The composer notes: "Written for the 19 string players of the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra, using them all as individual (or solo) players, the work in four movements has still the structure of a true symphony. The opening movement, a quiet, moderately paced piece, functions as a prelude to movements two and three, which are the main body of the symphony. The second movement mode of fast-moving compound meters explores the textures from unison to multi-harmonic writing for the whole ensemble. It ends when it moves without transition to a new closing theme, mixing a melody and pizzicato writing. The third movement is in the form of a chaconne, a repeated harmonic sequence. It begins with all three cellos and four violas, and with each repetition more voices are added until, in the final variation, all 19 players have been woven into the music. The fourth movement, a short finale, returns to the closing theme of the second movement, which quickly reintegrates the compound meters from earlier in that movement. A new closing theme is introduced to bring the symphony to its conclusion."

Suite from 'The Hours'
Philip Glass (arr. Riesman)

Suite from 'The Hours,' co-commissioned by the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra and Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra, is a concert suite arranged by Michael Riesman for piano, strings, harp and celesta from the motion picture soundtrack to the film The Hours (2002). Directed by Stephen Daldry, the film was adapted from Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, and starred Nicole Kidman (in an Oscar-winning performance), Julianne Moore, and Meryl Streep. The music received an Oscar nomination and won a British Academy of Film and Television Arts award.

The film tells how the English author Virginia Woolf's 1925 novel, Mrs. Dalloway, affects the lives of three women, including Woolf herself. They live in different time periods (1941, 1951, 2001), and their lives are connected not only by Woolf's book but by the impact that suicide has upon them.

"We kept on referring back in our temporary score to Philip Glass, who was not on board at the time," director Daldry said. "It seemed an incredible stroke of luck when he agreed to write the full score."

"It's a film about how art affects life, which is quite rare," Glass said. "It's a very challenging job for a composer. How is the music going to function in this? It seemed to me that somehow it had to convey the structure of the film. The film is very complicated, and I felt that the music could play a very important role in it, to make it comprehensible. It had to be the thread that tied the movie together.

"You might have thought that you could have different music for each of the periods, but I wrote the same music to go through all three. As the characters reappear, variations of these themes appear. When you first hear the music, it seems to start and to stop, and the next time you hear it, it just keeps going. It's that feeling you get in the morning that you're not quite awake yet.

"I chose the piano because I wanted an instrument that could cross periods very easily. I combined it with a large string orchestra to give it weight and density of sound. There's no question that the emotional point of view is conveyed by the music. Images are surprisingly neutral. It's not that they don't have an emotional content of their own, but they can be easily manipulated, depending on the music. The direction the music takes is the arrow you shoot in the air. Everything follows that."

In the compact disc notes for the soundtrack of The Hours, Michael Cunningham writes:

"Each novel I've written has developed a soundtrack of sorts; a body of music that subtly but palpably helped shape the book in question. I don't imagine most people who've read any of my books could readily see their connections to particular pieces of music, but I have long been aware of that… The Hours (derived) from Schubert (particularly Death and the Maiden), Brian Eno's Music for Airports, Peter Gabriel's Mercy Street, and for reasons I can't explain, Radiohead's OK Computer. The one constant since I started to write novels, however — my only ongoing act of listening fidelity — has been the work of Philip Glass.

"I love Glass's music almost as much as I love Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, and for some of the same reasons. Glass, like Woolf, is more interested in that which continues than he is that which begins, climaxes, and ends; he insists, as Woolf did, that beauty often resides more squarely in the present than it does in the present's relationship to past or future. Glass and Woolf have both broken out of the traditional realm of the story, whether literary or musical, in favour of something more meditative, less neatly delineated, and more true to life. For me, Glass can find in three repeated notes something of the strange rapture of sameness that Woolf discovered in a woman named Clarissa Dalloway doing errands on an ordinary summer morning. We are creatures who repeat ourselves, we humans, and if we refuse to embrace repetition — if we balk at an art that seeks to praise its textures and rhythms, its endless subtle variations — we ignore much of what we mean by life itself.

"I first listened to Philip Glass in college during the early seventies, when I bought a copy of Einstein on the Beach after hearing an excerpt on the radio… I played it for anyone who could be persuaded to listen… It was an experience I would find repeated as I pressed copies of Mrs. Dalloway onto people, who were often as baffled by it as I was, in turn, baffled by their bafflement.

"The last 30 years have served to move Glass in from the margins, just as time has moved Woolf from aberration to mainstay of world literature. I have been reading Woolf and listening to Glass most of my adult life, and have never tired of either of them. I will listen sometimes to Glass's music, often first thing in the morning, before I start my writing day. His music is, to some degree, part of everything I've written.

"So, when I heard he'd agreed to contribute the music to the film version of The Hours, it seemed both inevitable and too good to be true. I'm not sure I can offer any higher praise than this: When I saw the movie with the music added, I thought automatically of how I could use the soundtrack, when it came out, to help me finish my next book."