Phillip Glass

Since this is my first post on this thing, I thought I'd take a different tack. On my casual look-throughs of all the posts, I've seen little to no incidences of classical music (although, to be fair, I didn't look at every single post). Not a criticism, just a comment. So I thought I'd throw some in, just for fun.

Philip Glass is one of the pre-eminent and most influential classical composers alive today. He's perhaps most famous for his film scores, having earned himself three Academy Award nominations, most recently for Notes On A Scandal, but this by no means constitutes the bulk of, or even his best, work. He has been described as minimalist, and during his formative years, he was. However, recently, he has taken great pains to distance himself from that characterisation, calling himself a composer of "music with repetitive structures." He is one of the few classical composers alive who could be considered a household name, even having made a brief guest appearance in an episode of South Park.

For an easy introduction to Glass, I highly recommend the Robert Shaw recording of his cantatas Itaipu and The Canyon. The CD has to be my single favorite classical recording (no small feat, considering I've been listening to the Halo 3 soundtrack nonstop for about 3 months now).

Itaipu is easily Glass' most lyrical work; the music follows the course of the Parana River as it flows over one of the world's largest man-made lakes, the world's largest man-made dam, and the world's largest waterfall. The music needs to be suitably epic to evoke images of such awe-inspiring sites, and Glass does not disappoint. From a dark and brooding first movement, echoing the troubled region of Matto Grosso in Brazil, where the headwaters of the river are located, the music turns haunting in the second movement, evoking images of the river. The beginning of the third movement, entitled "The Dam," will leave shatter your ears and leave you as awestruck as the site of a dam nearly as tall as the Chrysler Building in New York City. The movement then turns happy and cheerful, celebrating the promise the dam brings to the nations of Paraguay and Brazil. In the fourth movement, the music suddenly drops off, suggesting the drop over the waterfall that puts Niagara to shame. After a quietly turbulent minute or two, evoking the rapids immediately following the falls, the music becomes serene as the river winds its way through the plains of Northern Argentina into the Atlantic Ocean. The lyrics to the piece are in a language native to the people of Matto Grosso, and they tell those people's primary creation myth.

The Canyon is much shorter (a quarter of the length) and decidedly less epic, but there is no shortage of quality. Glass mainly ignores most of the orchestra, opting to go for percussion and brass for most of it. The cantata is supposed to bring to mind a canyon, any canyon. While not as mind-blowing as Itaipu, the rhythms in this piece are fantastic, and the piece serves as an intellectual counterweight to the crashing line of chords in Itaipu.

Even if you've never liked classical, I urge you to give Glass a try. If the music in Lord of the Rings moved you at all, or if you have a particular taste for the epic, then Itaipu should be an enjoyable thirty five minutes. Here's a link to samples. Enjoy:
http://www.amazon.com/Itaipu-Philip-Glass/dp/B00000277F/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1204524491&sr=8-1