The Glass Quodlibet

[Jim Morrison <jim_morrison@sprynet.com>]

Hi list, just a little more on Glass and I'll get off the subject.
What follows are pieces from the liner notes, available online, to Glass's
monumental Music in 12 parts, which lasts, oh I guess, four hours, about the
length of a Wagner opera.  The humor he displays here seems to me not too
far from Gould's own sensibilities.

Jim




"Music in Twelve Parts ends with a quodlibet - a "musical joke" - that may
be
especially amusing to those who remember the musical politics of the '60s
and '70s. Like most young composers of the time, Glass was trained to write
twelve-tone music; unlike most of them, he rejected the movement entirely.
And yet, in the bass line of Part XII, toward the end, the careful listener
will discern a twelve-tone row, underpinning this riot of tonal, steadily
rhythmic, gleeful repetition -underpinning, in other words, all the things
that textbook twelve-toners shunned.

"It was a way of making fun not only of other people but also of myself,"
Glass said in 1993. 'I had broken the rules of modernism and so I thought it
was time to break some of my own rules. And this I did, with the shifts of
harmony in Part XI and then in Part XII, where, for the first and only time
in my mature music, I actually threw in a twelve-tone row. This was the end
of minimalism for me. I had worked for eight or nine years inventing a
system, and now I'd written through it and come out the other end. My next
piece was called Another Look At Harmony and that's just what it was. I'd
taken everything out with my early works and it was now time to decide just
what I wanted to put back in - a process that would occupy me for many years
to come.'"

- Tim Page