PHILIP GLASS MUSIC IN FIFTHS PRIVATE 1973 CHATHAM LP

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PHILIP GLASS
"MUSIC IN FIFTHS"
PRIVATE 1973 CHATHAM LP!
MINT!



During the late '60s, Philip Glass undertook a series of pieces that together constitute a kind of "research and development" phase for his subsequent minimalist style. These pieces come across as extremely austere and focused, as if Glass were conducting a set of controlled experiments, each one having a distinct purpose. Composed in 1969, Music in Fifths is one of Glass' unrelentingly obsessive and procedural works, exploring as it does Glass' emerging "additive/subtractive" compositional technique within a rigidly limited collection of pitches that are organized in a very limited number of ways. The tight control of pitch materials, unchanging texture, and uninterrupted rhythmic flow draw the listener's attention almost exclusively to the expansions and contractions of line taking place within the static modal space. The work utilizes the same collection of pitches used in Glass' Two Pages, with one minor modification: instead of the wide-rising diad G to C, which was followed in Two Pages by a scalar ascent D to E flat to F, the G is shifted to the top of the collection to create a simple rising and falling scalar collection akin to a pianist's warm-up figure. As the title suggests, however, this contour is replicated below, beginning on the F and following in exact parallel motion. (The addition of lines moving together in this fashion would be explored later the same year by Glass in Music in Similar Motion). The full scalar figuration, consisting of simple up and down motion in balanced groups of four eighth notes, stands as the kind of "normative" melodic cell on which the piece is based. The piece does not begin with this figure, however, but rather eventually arrives at it before expanding beyond it. At the piece's opening, the general contour is presented in a kind of stilted version that rises along the scalar incline, but can't seem to find its way back down, resulting in a constant shift of metrical emphasis. Several different configurations of the ascending/descending gesture are attempted before finally arriving at the metrically stable and modally filled-out "normative" cell. Subsequently, each half of the cell is gradually augmented through the repetition of small constituent segments (two or three notes at a time), until the figure spans several measures. By the end of the work, the pitches and sonorities become nearly invisible while the unpredictable shifts of meter, direction, and contour become increasingly unsettling.

By the end of the twentieth century, minimalist music was one of the most pervasive influences in American musical culture. Only a few decades earlier, however, it was considered an austere, aesthetically challenging experiment. During the 1960s, Philip Glass, the composer among the downtown New York minimalists who would ultimately achieve the greatest commercial success developed one of the most streamlined and obsessively Spartan approaches; this stage in Glass' development is exemplified in the stark economy but rich sonority of his ensemble work from late 1969, Music in Similar Motion. Consisting of simple melodic cells subjected to continual formulas of expansion and contraction within an uncomplicated diatonic field, the piece represents the height of Glass' initial fixation on the extrapolation of large-scale form from simple procedural applications, as well as his emerging interest in applying his simple procedures to increasingly involved harmonic schemes. Music in Similar Motion may be seen as representing the breaking point of Glass' early formalist obsessions; during the early '70s, while still infusing his compositions with additive procedures and blocks of harmonic stasis, Glass focused his attention less on the rigor of his processes than on the expressive possibilities that they created within dramatic structures. At the core of the piece is a set of five pitches, initially arranged into a melodic curve eight notes long. The figure, consisting of two rising gestures and a short descent in steady eighth notes, is expanded and contracted into lines as long as 41 notes and as short as four. The segmentation of the figure and expansion of its constituent two- and three-note parts affords a surprising amount of variety; although the pool of pitches remains the same, they likewise remain unpredictable, as the irregularity of segment lengths creates a constantly unstable metric terrain. Likewise, the focus of attention gradually shifts from one part of the melodic module to another, creating subtle emphases of certain pitch areas. Most of the first half of the piece, for example, consists of reiterations of the initial ascending figures, with only occasional descents; likewise, while the appearance of the fifth and lowest note in the set serves in the beginning of the work to mark off the ends of melodic strings, the last section of the work compulsively hammers at the lower notes while almost entirely avoiding the upper pitches. Certainly, within some other context, these melodic inflections would be unremarkable; within the microscopic music world into which Glass pulls the listener, however, such tiny changes become major events. Of course, the element that lends the work its strongest sense of shape and trajectory, as well as its title, is the gradual introduction of voices moving at different pitch levels but along the same contours as the main line. The first additional voice to depart from the unison line outlines the same descents and ascents at a remove of a perfect fourth; a bass line is eventually added below and the work finally culminates in a sonorous parallel-motion chordal texture. -- All Music Guide

BOTH PIECES COMPOSED IN 1969 AND PERFORMED HERE FOR LP IN 1973.

THIS VERY LIMITED PRIVATE PRESSING IS IN MINT CONDITION INSIDE AND OUT!

CLEAN AND STRONG SEAMS ON ALL SIDES.

VINYL SPARKLES WITH NEWNESS!!

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