The Philip Glass sound is easily caricatured in the minds of some listeners: a few minor-key notes are rattled off, and then repeated. By proposing to leave it at that, the composer’s critics reveal they haven’t listened to very much of his music. Insistent arpeggios are a common feature of many Glass compositions, but the overall shapes of lush, late-career works like Symphony No. 9 or Songs and Poems for Solo Cello typically bear little similarity to his hypnotic first opera, Einstein on the Beach, or to the earlier hardcore minimalism that helped Glass establish his name.
After working under Ravi Shankar and writing music for a Samuel Beckett play produced in Paris, a 30-year-old Glass arrived back in New York, in 1967. Upon his return, he started to play alongside his onetime Juilliard classmate Steve Reich, who was already far along in developing his own approach to minimalist composition. By the following year, Glass had honed a distinct method of creating music via minimal means: He discovered that a small unit of melody could be spooled into longer lines, if you took those notes through a complicated process of addition and subtraction. The resulting music could prove spellbinding, if that’s the experience you wanted. But it also rewarded obsessively close listening.
This “additive” approach yielded a succession of important works, between 1968 and 1971. These compositions gave Glass’ minimalism a new, more strictly patterned sound, one that would define the rest of his purely minimalist period. Five of these items—“Two Pages,” “Music in Fifths,” “Music in Similar Motion,” “Music in Contrary Motion,” and “Music with Changing Parts”—were also key pieces in the repertoire of the composer-keyboardist’s pioneering own ensemble, which he formed in 1968. And they were some of the first Glass opuses issued on LP. Because Glass and his ensemble were still learning to master this new aesthetic, their iconic early recordings sometimes have a harried vibe, as they learned how to speak their own language.The fact that every rhythmic addition isn’t always faultlessly executed by the group can be charming, though this quality tends to come at the expense of Glass’ compositional ideas. (Glass later said he always thought “Changing Parts” was too “spacey” for his own taste.)
Various modern-classical groups have embraced portions of Glass’ early catalog in recent decades, taking advantage of the fact that the instrumentation is often not specified. But the Cluster Ensemble—a group of talented young players from Slovakia—is the first one to record all the core works from the composer's great-leap-forward period, and to rely on the same instrument that drove the original Glass Ensemble: electric keyboards. (Like the Glass Ensemble, they use woodwinds and brass, too, but it’s clear which instrument dominates.) Cluster’s triple-album survey of this music, issued on Glass’ own label, offers a rare chance to follow the composer’s early-period innovations with consistent precision. And in terms of production, the engineering of Cluster’s keyboard textures is admirably crisp throughout.
This resulting collection offers fresh experiences of several Glass milestones. Two of Cluster’s keyboard players launch “Two Pages,” the earliest work here, with a faster tempo than is heard on the original Glass recording. And they also indulge in more repeats of individual phrase-units. (The Glass Ensemble had LP side-length restrictions to contend with). The resulting transparency is stunning, making Glass’ innovations easier to understand. Amid all the dizzying patterns birthed from the five-note beginning of “Two Pages,” each strike of G lands with an easily identifiable authority. As Keith Potter notes in his valuable book Four Musical Minimalists, that’s part of the score's design.
Thanks to Cluster's rigor, this isolated note thumps harder than it ever has on record. And as you track the prominence of that ringing leap, “Two Pages” can seem like an early example of experimental techno. The ensemble’s clarity also gives the climax a potent sense of emotional release. The traditional line on Glass’s music from this period is that it took on greater and greater suppleness each time out, but Cluster’s version of “Two Pages” makes a strong argument that this early composition was at least on par with the two that followed.
As its title suggests, “Music in Fifths” presents one keyboard part that is shadowed by another at the interval of a perfect-fifth (breaking a cardinal rule of music theory, in a bit of private joke to one of Glass’s old teachers). “Music in Contrary Motion” is dominated by an inverted tonal relationship between another pair of keyboard lines. These two emphatically conceptual pieces receive devoted performances at the hands of Cluster’s pianists, though the comparatively limited nature of the works can’t be disguised. While provocative and energetic, there were only so many pieces for Glass to write in this vein. To find a new one, he’d need some fresh ideas.
“Music in Similar Motion” breaks up this static feel, as it’s where Glass starts to find a place for harmony. The final section offers one of the most sublime harmonic progressions in the early Glass catalog. And then, in an almost perverse move, the composer sets the resulting melody up for destruction. In the space of a few minutes, the music can suggest a stuck-groove, then motorik rock, before briefly offering something danceable again—and finally resolving in a fit of minimalist joy. Cluster’s steady-but-fast playing helps bring out every distinct quality embedded in this climactic rush.
The third CD here is devoted to the magnum opus of this Glass period. “Music with Changing Parts” builds on the harmonic invention of “Similar Motion” by giving instrumentalists the option of contributing sustained pitches drawn from its modes, a choice that adds a contrasting sense of calm, as the rest of the ensemble motors along. In doing this, Glass was opening up his aesthetic to some of the prior innovations of pioneering minimalists like La Monte Young and Terry Riley. Rather than diluting the Glass brand, this expansion of texture helped point the way toward some of his later triumphs, such as Music in Twelve Parts.
During Cluster’s performance, there’s less pitch-bending throughout “Changing” than on Glass’ first recording. As a consequence, this performance seems less wild, more orderly—and thus Earth-bound in a way that counteracts the composer’s onetime diagnosis of this as a “spacey” product. The focused take on “Changing” falls in with Cluster’s general rigor. The composer-performer’s original recordings will always have a place in the catalog, but this impressive survey of his early pieces holds value for multiple groups of listeners. Those who already admire these works will likely find new aspects to treasure. And for those who’ve only regarded the composer through a pop culture filter, this may be the perfect place to begin encountering his steadily changing music on its own terms.
