The ups and downs of repetition.

   Broken Glass

   By JOHN ROCKWELL
   [from The New Republic, March 10, 2000]

   Philip Glass's recent music not only seems tired; it is tired.  His
   early innovations are largely unrecognized or forgotten, and premieres
   of his new works--and they keep on coming--are no longer anticipated
   with excitement, or even with hostility.  They are ignored, except
   by the general public, which still sort of likes his music, and by
   professional beat critics, who routinely dismiss the new works as
   inherently simplistic or, less often, as tedious recyclings of earlier
   tricks.  Some writers, denying their own early opposition to Glass,
   profess that he has fallen off from his more creative youth; others,
   more honestly, never saw much there to start with, apart from nagging
   arpeggios and mind-numbing repetition, which is all that they still
   see.  But in truth it is Glass who has changed, not the critics.
   His music, outwardly similar to what came before, has declined in
   quality, and that decline can be described.

   I, too, once found much to admire in Glass's music, and in his
   salutary position in a musical culture that still prized hermetic
   modernism.  Twenty years ago, the polemics between the modernists
   and the postmodernists, between the uptowners and the downtowners,
   were at their height.  Glass's music, inspired by John Cage's manifestos
   of liberation and by the spiritual exercises of Asian meditation,
   was a stirring circumvention of the dense dissonance of mainstream
   contemporary music, a blast of fresh air into a musty artistic temple.
   His music proclaimed that complexity was not the same thing as
   excellence, and that an ornate, virtuosic mastery of technical craft,
   in composition as well as in performance, would inevitably provoke
   a retort.  Glass's success, far from a sellout to commercialism, was
   a reconnection of the serious artist to the broader public that had
   recoiled from the further reaches of modernist abstruseness.

   Yet memories of his past glories do little to explain his present
   failings.  A recent run of performances of Glass's opera Akhnaten
   at the Boston Lyric Opera, in a coproduction with the Chicago Opera
   Theater, offered a welcome occasion for assessing Glass's development.
   A live confrontation with this work, in a vivid production from the
   Chicago director Mary Zimmermann, provided a tangible test of one's
   loss of pleasure in Glass's work.  Is this declining interest in
   Glass's music the result of changes in his style? Or is it, rather,
   a listener's exhaustion with his trademark musical devices? Would
   even Akhnaten, an opera that was exciting and moving at its Stuttgart
   premiere 16 years ago, now seem tepid and trite?

   ...

For the complete text of this very long article, go to

   http://www.thenewrepublic.com/041000/rockwell041000.html

Scott Morrison