Philip Glass
Music in Twelve Parts (disc 1)

THE REVIEW

One day in the early '70s, Philip Glass played for a friend a piece he was working on, to which he had given the title "Music in Twelve Parts," as the piece itself contained twelve parts or voices, meaning twelve lines of counterpoint. The friend commented, "It's beautiful. What will the other eleven parts be like?" Glass found the misunderstanding interesting and decided to compose eleven more pieces to be added to the original movement. Thus, starting from the 18 minutes of the "first part," Glass composed a total of 3 hours and 25 minutes of music: "Music in Twelve Parts," the greatest sound architecture of what would be called minimalism in music.

Seven musicians are needed to bring this composition to life: a female voice, two performers each playing flute and soprano sax, one on alto and tenor sax, three on keyboards. Each of the twelve parts is a standalone piece of music, with characteristics that make each piece autonomous and different from the others. There is no cause/effect relationship in this music, there is no concept of development that had constituted the DNA of Western music since its inception. Instead, there are small melodic-harmonic structures repeated hundreds of times, sound cells that chase and overlap one another, seemingly identical to themselves but at intervals undergoing slight changes in texture, almost like slight seismic shocks of adjustment. The tempo is always very fast (except in the "first part") and the pulsating rhythm is the most immediately recognizable feature of this music.

Here is minimalism, the journalistic label used to name a musical movement born in the United States in the '60s, which would have in Philip Glass perhaps its most authoritative representative. "Music in Twelve Parts," composed between 1971-74, is the summation of the compositional techniques based on repetition used by Glass until then, and a watershed compared to his subsequent production.

This is not difficult music to listen to. It is based on the tonal system, the same as a pop song. It is catchy, yet at the same time impressive. It makes you move on your chair during listening, but it's as if you are being put through a wringer. They should have called it maximalist music, and perhaps even that wouldn't have been enough to give the idea.