Love-Hounds-request@GAFFA.MIT.EDU (09/11/89)
Really-From: claris!netcom!wasilko@ames.arc.nasa.gov (Jeff Wasilko)
Here is an article from the Philadelphia Inquirer about Steve Reich and Phillip
Glass:
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PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
DATE: SUNDAY April 24, 1988
PAGE: L10 EDITION: FINAL
SECTION: FEATURES ENTERTAINMENT LENGTH: MEDIUM
SOURCE: By Daniel Webster, Inquirer Music Critic
MEMO: CLASSICAL RECORDS
2 MINIMALISTS GOING DIFFERENT WAYS
Lumping Steve Reich and Philip Glass into one discussion is like pairing
Mahler and Bruckner. They are hardly alike, but they are contemporaries and
they do share ground-floor space in the tower of minimalism.
That term, minimalism, has been applied too broadly. Both Glass and Reich
have been part of that movement and continue to use elements in their music,
but the two have moved in contrasting directions and levels of commercial
appeal.
Reich's 25-year life as a composer began with explorations of rhythmic
patterns performed first in unison, then gradually moving out of phase and
eventually returning. His recent record returns to those days of the 1960s
when he was a musical explorer and less a symbol (Nonesuch 79169). Here are
Clapping Music from 1972, It's Gonna Rain from 1965, Come Out from 1966 and
Piano Phase from 1967.
Two of these now seem prophetic, for in It's Gonna Rain and Come Out, Reich
used voices taped and processed through tape recorders. The voice is heard in
unison with itself, over and over, the taped sounds gradually drawing apart
until only the essence of speech, the words long vanished, remain in a
rhythmic insistent progress.
In the first, it is the voice of Brother Walter, a charismatic preacher; in
the second, the voice of a young murder suspect describing a moment after the
beating he absorbed in a New York police precinct station. In both, the vivid
words give way to sound and pulse, enlarging a moment's drama through purely
sonic means.
Two decades later, Reich is returning to spoken words as the basis for
music but now using sophisticated electronic means to ''play'' voices at a
keyboard.
In Piano Phase, Reich develops, over 20 minutes, the implications of note
patterns played on two pianos, the patterns slowly moving apart and back. The
music stands alone, but it also has a didactic element. Reich is always
demanding that listeners hear the possibilities within minimal materials,
implying that other composers may be wasteful in their use of similar
material. Nurit Tilles and Edmund Niemann are the pianists.
The Clapping Music is one of Reich's most appealing works. Performed by
Reich and Russ Hartenberger, this is music of the elements. The two stand
together, clapping a rhythmic pattern and changing its tempo. The result is
formally arresting and musically revealing as a single idea expands as its
inner rhythmic possibilities emerge.
Reich's most extended work, Drumming, distilled in 1970 from his earlier
visits to West Africa to study drumming, has been newly recorded by Reich and
his ensemble (Nonesuch CD 79170-2).
Here, percussionists play for nearly an hour, expanding on a metrical and
melodic pattern so spare that it hardly makes spots on the score. Over the
length of four sections, the players suggest melodic developments, and trace
emotional landscapes that are comparable to those of symphonies. This work is
pivotal in Reich's minimalism. The means are minimal - repetition of tiny
elements - but the result validates Reich's role as an artist, for the music
is complex, subtle and expressive.
Philip Glass has been the more visible of the minimalist founders because
of his application of his music to theatrical works. His latest recording is
the sound track for a film to be released later this week, Powaqqatsi,
(Nonesuch 79192-1).
For this score, Glass studied South American and African music, and his
music includes the voices of Indian chanters, a Hispanic children's choir as
well as his usual synthesizers and percussion ensemble.
This is commercial Glass, music meant to underline visual elements, to
attract rock fans through his big beat approach and portent-laden electronic
booms. With the film, the music will seem vastly more important than it does
alone. On the record, it sounds like Glass imitating Glass.Love-Hounds-request@GAFFA.MIT.EDU (09/11/89)
Really-From: claris!netcom!wasilko@ames.arc.nasa.gov (Jeff Wasilko)
A quick article about Phillip Glass' latest soundtrack (not really latest,
but some more minimalist trivia):
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THE LOS ANGELES TIMES
Copyright Times Mirror Company 1988
DATE: SATURDAY May 7, 1988
EDITION: Home Edition LENGTH: MEDIUM
PART-NAME: Calendar PAGE: 8
PART-NUMBER: 6 COLUMN: 1
TYPE-OF-MATERIAL: Motion Picture Review
DESK: Entertainment
SOURCE: MICHAEL WILMINGTON
MOVIE REVIEWS
'POWAQQATSI' OFFERS FEAST OF SIGHT AND SOUND
Godfrey Reggio's ''Powaqqatsi'' (selected theaters), like his earlier
''Koyaanisqatsi,'' is a lyrical documentary that turns the instruments of
technology against it. In some ways, the new film is less effective, but it's
also more visually spectacular: a mesmerizing cascade of sensuous sights and
sounds.
Shot on several continents--in Peru, Brazil, Kenya, Egypt, Israel, Hong
Kong, Nepal, India, West Germany and France--''Powaqqatsi'' creates its own
global village, linking it all with the hypnotic repetitions of Philip Glass'
score. And instead of ''Koyaanisqatsi's'' focus on geography and the
mechanical, ''Powaqqatsi'' shows a new fascination with the human face
--usually from the Third World, usually poor.
These are people at work, people in transit, people cast off on the shoals
of the cities, with faces alive and buoyant, or dead and shattered. Over and
over, we see shots of water, of landscapes parched or exploding with heat. The
thousands of faces seem drenched in light, blazing, joined together in a mass
communion with the sun.
One of the more powerful images in the film is a tiny boy walking along a
highway, heat rising in waves and the crushing mass of a truck swallowing up
the rest of the frame. Later we see a wrecked car on a highway divider and
ghostly superimpositions of other cars racing by on either side. Both frames
suggest a leading theme: the domination of man by his tools, the tyranny over
humanity by its extensions.
Koyaanisqatsi is a Hopi word meaning ''life out of balance.''
''Powaqqatsi'' refers to a life lived at others' expense, a life of
exploitation. The subject matter is less cosmic, more personal and elusive
--and, as before, there's a paradox.
Reggio attacks the excesss eof modern life by using one invention--the
motion picture camera--which seems most typical of the new technology. And he
consciously distorts many of his images, speeds them up, slows them down, uses
time lapse photography and--especially in ''Powaqqatsi''--opticals and
telescopic lenses.
Majestic mesas tower up against scudding, racing clouds in
''Koyaanisqatsi,'' and in ''Powaqqatsi'' rapturously slowed bodies swim
through lacquered-looking sunlight. With his new cameramen, aerial photography
specialists Graham Berry and Leonidas Zourdoumis, Reggio creates the illusion
of a godlike technological eye, watching over the eternal seas and hills, the
mad hubbub of the cities.
Glass' score, as before, knits together the images and gives them
resonance. Here, the music is more complex and various, with an insistent
percussion that suggests heavy metal mixed with a plangent stew of ethnic
instruments, winds, strings and a children's chorus.
Is ''Powaqqatsi'' (MPAA-rated: G) a matter of personal taste? Reggio's
sensibility--mixing spirit and machine, meditation and pop, idealism and
iconoclasm, the universal and the particular, the symbolic and the real--seems
at times a kind of '60s revival. But, even so, Reggio and Glass offer
something that most narrative movies or documentaries can't: a true feast for
the eyes and ears.