75 repetitive years

Happy birthday to one of my very favourite composers, Philip Glass. I love his strict, gruelling minimalism and his more expansive post-minimalism. I heard him play at Lichfield Cathedral a few years back - he was so enthusiastic that he played for an hour longer than scheduled and then came out to chat to everyone.

I first heard the minimalists with Philip Gale, a friend from school who was light years ahead of the rest of us. The rigour, the mathematical clarity and the wonder paradoxically produced from anti-romantic music just astonished me (this is why I'm an atheist too: a seashore or a galaxy is beautiful and inspiring because physics can do anything). I know people - mostly women, for some reason - who hate minimalism. The repetition really sets their teeth on edge, whereas I can get lost in it. Perhaps it's my autism…

Some of my favourites:



Music for Voices: postmodern polyphony:





Glass's work is both cerebral - pushing the definition of music as far as it will go - an emotional, somewhat paradoxically. But he's also a deeply humane man: his operas have tackled terrorism, urban alienation, environmental collapse and our determination to separate ourselves from nature. He's one of the good guys:

The contradictions inherent in presenting a Gandhi opera at one of the world’s most richly endowed performing-arts institutions, even as protests against income inequality erupted downtown, inspired a notable demonstration on the last night of the run. A group allied with Occupy Wall Street gathered at the edge of Lincoln Center Plaza, berating the police, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and the right-wing billionaire David H. Koch, a Lincoln Center donor. When “Satyagraha” ended and operagoers left the Met, some defied a police barricade and joined the protest. Glass did as well, and he addressed the crowd, making use of the “human microphone” of call and response. All he did was to utter the final lines of his opera: “When righteousness withers away and evil rules the land, we come into being, age after age, and take visible shape, and move, a man among men, for the protection of good, thrusting back evil and setting virtue on her seat again.” He said those words twice more, mingled for a little while, got into a cab, and went home. 

#Occupy Goes To The Opera

How cool is this? The Occupy crowd went to the Met Opera House in New York last night, to point out the injustice of the 1% claiming that philanthropy excuses them from paying taxes. I love opera myself, but the problem with philanthropy is that it gets spent on things that make the rich feel good: opera, donkey charities, art funds while claiming that they're doing good. With taxes, democracy decides where the money needs to go.

But I digress. The Occupy people don't hate opera either. And, it turns out, the opera people don't hate Occupy. The performance was Philip Glass's Satyagraha, his sprawling minimalist eco-conscious, democratic masterpiece based on Ghandi's early life. When it was all over, the composer himself strolled past the police blocks - with some of the opera-goers - to quote the Bhagavad-Gita to the multitude (from about 3.00):

"When righteousness withers away and evil rules the land, we come into being, age after age, and take visible shape, and move, a man among men, for the protection of good, thrusting back evil and setting virtue on her seat again."

As slogans go, that's not bad.

Homage?

I'm listening to Jónsi's album - he's the singer from Sigur Rós, and he's made an anthemic solo album.

Here's 'Tornado':


He's clearly been listening to an awful lot of Philip Glass… This song sounds like so many of Glass's piano lines, with Jónsi singing over the top.