Kevin Stutton wrote, in response to John Sisk:

>I think you are pushing it a bit to claim Glass is one of America's
>"finest composers." He is indeed a very popular composer, but he's a
>one trick pony.

Which was more or less my point:  see the following section of my post:

>that is to say, one must be able to combine sequences of rapid arpeggios
>in various instruments with the polyrhythm 2 against 3.  (See "Symphony No.
>5, Company, the Violin Concerto, Einstein on the Beach, Koyaanisquatsi,
>etc.) Then and only then can one claim to have attained Glass' level of
>achievement.

Which section was entirely sarcasm.  Seriously, I apologize to all
the members of the mailing list who were mislead by my error; it didn't
occur to me that that sarcasm wouldn't be obvious to people reading plain
text messages, which, of course, we all are.  Thinking back, I have had the
same problem with the letters of Shostakovich to Isaac Glikman.  It's
hard if you don't know someone to pick up on their societal and personal
perceptions of the ridiculous, which sarcasm basically relies on.

>Please.  I can get a group of third graders >to play two against three
>polyrhythms in about ten minutes.  That's no >great musical feat.  Now,
>if Glass could keep up with Allah Raka and >Ravi Shankar in the polyrhythm
>department, then I would be impressed.

Heh!  Yep!  My training is as a percussionist, as yet, so that comment
about 2 against 3 being indicative of great talent was especially ascerbic,
though as you say, if he could keep up with Alla Rakha, I'd be impressed.
Heck, if anyone could keep up with Alla Rakha, I'd be duly impressed.

Which discussion leads me to a point:  I find that the Phillip Glass
pieces that I like the most, and that live up to repeated listening, are
his collaborations:  the "Passages" disc with Ravi Shankar, "The Screens"
with Fuday Musa Suso, and above all "Aguas de Amazonia" with the Brazilian
ensemble Uakti - the latter being simply gorgeous.  I understand he also
did a record with Allen Ginsberg.

Generally, Glass' boredom factor is alleviated by the presence of these
other creative personalities, at least in my opinion; while *all* of the
music on these discs may not be classic, I think there are some moments
that deserve to be acknowledged as beautiful and important.  For sheer
richness of timbre, "Aguas de Amazonia" (featuring Glass'music arranged by
Uakti) has few rivals; maybe, as Shostakovich said of Debussy's "La Mer,"
it's just a "drop of candy in the mouth," but that doesn't make it a bad
thing.  It's not even as *good* a piece of candy as Debussy's piece, but
its tasty now and then, especially at first.  "Passages" is interesting
mostly for the Shankar pieces, but those are worth the price of the disc,
I think.

Here would be the place, also, to give props to Glass' "Symphony No.  5,"
for massive symphony, soloists, and multiple choruses, and with a text
synthesised from religious texts as diverse as the book of Job, African
folklore, the Rig Veda, and the Tibetan Book of the Dead.  I find this
piece's libretto itself to be very interesting; it was constructed to
show similiarites of thought and myth in the diverse (and, as we all have
learned the hard way recently), often infighting religions of the world.
Also, with the large symphonic and vocal palette avaliable to him, Glass
finds inventive, at times almost *lush* (Zeus forbid!) textures and large
dynamic and thematic contrasts.  As I think about it, maybe the fact that
he has to have at all times a *melody* for the vocalists to sing made him
gravitate more towards the Romantic end of the spectrum than is his norm.
Glass himself hates the term "minimalism," and certainly applied to this
specific piece, it is a ridiculous label in the extreme.  Now, I mean, I've
grown tired of this piece, too, but its taken me a year or two of fairly
regular listening.  I could even be found singing bits of his settings of
Job or the Mahabharata around the house - something that, given the general
anti-Glass tendency which this list and I have, I feel a brave man to
admit.  ;-)

>But I will say that I did find Akhenaten (did I spell that right?) to be
>pretty darned >interesting music.  (Once or twice)

Well, here I have to come clean with another admission, brave too in
that I've taken it upon myself to criticize Glass' work:  I haven't heard
Akhnaten *or* Einstein on the Beach (though I have heard the final aria
from Akhnaten in organ arrangement).

I once read a pan of a Glass recording, in which the author claimed that
the recording made him want to "rub his antennae together," as it was
music for "intelligent insects" such as himself.  I guess that mechanistic
element the real issue in consideration with composers such as early Glass
and early Reich, and with, in principle, all music-generating systems which
operate according to an automatic, mechanical process.  It seems to me to
be a paradox:

1.) On the one hand, human creativity works largely according to
subconscious and unconscious processes (insert gratuitous joke about Glass,
the proverbial red-headed stepchild of this list, writing music while
asleep, forehead on the "print copy" button of the ditto machine) ; it's
the experience of many creative artists that many of their ideas come to
them unbidden, and apparently at random, operating according to some Muse
which we don't yet understand.  And yet

2.) Humans require organization of some kind, some grammar, to understand
anything intellectually; certain elements of this grammar may be inborn
(Chomsky's "deep structure" theory of human language), and some elements,
maybe all, are learned.  This grammar, by its nature, is mechanistic to a
degree, which conflicts with the more aleatoric way the messages themselves
came into being.

Clearly, we've backed ourselves into a bit of a Cage.  (Excuse the
gratuitous pun.)

However, the messages themselves need not be random in content; they can,
and do, have structure, just as the technique the artist uses to express a
given idea has structure.

Another element that must be dealt with is this assumption, or premise:
that music, rather than being appreciated only emotionally, is or should
be appreciated entirely/in some part intellectually.  I think this is
true.  Certainly it *can* be appreciated in this manner, even when its
inappropriate to do so (e.g.  dance halls {Schoolmarm:  "Inappropriateness
in dance halls? Never!"}, or in compositions where the artist consciously
eschews intellectuality as a basis of construction.) Personally, I think
there is room for a wide variety of expressive and theoretical systems in
art generally.  I wouldn't want to limit the world to just one theory on
what music means, or should be made of.  If someone wants to write Gangsta
rap, fine; if someone is Bach, well, that's simply heavenly(!); if Ligeti
wants to write music for 100 metronomes, that's cool, too; it all adds to
the richness and diversity of the world and of music, those two things
which we all here may probably be said to love in the fullest meaning of
the word.  Obviously, though, one doesn't have to *like* or *approve of*
all of these systems or theories; one especially doesn't have to like
impassioned pundits like Pierre Boulez (a man whose musicianship I admire
to no ends) saying that any [20th-century] composer who "doesn't write
music in the dodecaphonic system" is "useless, because they do not
understand the peculiar impetus of their times," [paraphrased from memory].
One can't sit on the fence and accept all systems equally, - can one? I
certainly don't know how to.  But this is a bit of a tangent...

My point was that, in short, I personally think the music that is greatest
is that which combines intellectual interest *and* emotional interest
successfully.

Of course, the "emotional" qualifier is so vague as to be almost useless.
A layperson not familiar with Hindusthani music might react to it
emotionally by feeling that it's "spacey," or "mysterious," or what have
you, whereas a person familiar with that music might be able to identify
which emotion of the moods (was it 9? 12?) the theories of that tradition
acknowledge the piece in question calls forth, and point out other pieces
in the same category.  To the old-time classical Hindusthani theoretician,
then, and interestingly, moods are both strictly delimited *and*
subjectively felt.

(As a side note, the feeling of many Westerners and classically-trained
Western musicians upon the exposure of the West to Hindusthani music was
that it was horrible, and unlistenable, having no harmony to speak of,
and no Sonata form, and limited timbral contrast in the course of a
given piece, etc.) Conversely - well, what generally do/did Hindusthani
laypersons think of Western music when they were exposed to it? I've never
heard an account, but I imagine the general response would be similarly
unsympathetic as the Western, but maybe not, because of the cultural
effects of Hinduism or something else as opposed to Western-Colonial
hubris and pomposity?)

Ultimately, though, who is right? It depends on your rubric for
appreciation - your grammatical expectations.

So here we are again; as usual, I have more questions than I have answers,
and I have darn few answers.  In this realm, can there even be concrete
answers? If not, is the field worthwhile at all?

And so on ad infintum ad nauseam:  loops and sussurations of gyrating
madness!:-)

But sleep is calling...I think I'll put on "Koyaanisquatsi."

(*canned laughter goes here*)

- John Sisk ([log in to unmask])