P.!GLASS! Concertoforviolinand!! OrchestraNo.1! Violin concerto No. 1.pdf ·...
Transcript of P.!GLASS! Concertoforviolinand!! OrchestraNo.1! Violin concerto No. 1.pdf ·...
P. GLASS Concerto for violin and Orchestra No. 1
Phillip Glass was born in 1937 and grew up in Baltimore. He studied at the University of Chicago, the Juilliard School and in Aspen with Darius Milhaud. Finding himself dissatisfied with much of what then passed for modern music, he moved to Europe, where he studied with the legendary pedagogue Nadia Boulanger (who also taught Aaron Copland , Virgil Thomson and Quincy Jones) and worked closely with the sitar virtuoso and composer Ravi Shankar. He returned to New York in 1967 and formed the Philip Glass Ensemble – seven musicians playing keyboards and a variety of woodwinds, amplified and fed through a mixer. The new musical style that Glass was evolving was eventually dubbed “minimalism.” Glass himself never liked the term and preferred to speak of himself as a composer of “music with repetitive structures.” Much of his early work was based on the extended reiteration of brief, elegant melodic fragments that wove in and out of an aural tapestry. Or, to put it another way, it immersed a listener in a sort of sonic weather that twists, turns, surrounds, develops. There has been nothing “minimalist” about his output. In the past 25 years, Glass has composed more than twenty operas, large and small; eight symphonies (with others already on the way); two piano concertos and concertos for violin, piano, timpani, and saxophone quartet and orchestra; soundtracks to films ranging from new scores for the stylized classics of Jean Cocteau to Errol Morris’s documentary about former defense secretary Robert McNamara; string quartets; a growing body of work for solo piano and organ. He has collaborated with Paul Simon, Linda Ronstadt, Yo-‐Yo Ma, and Doris Lessing, among many others. He presents lectures, workshops, and solo keyboard performances around the world, and continues to appear regularly with the Philip Glass Ensemble. Violin Concerto No. 1 was commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra for soloist Paul Zukofsky and premiered in New York City on 5 April 1987. The work was composed with Glass's late father in mind. The piece quickly became one of Glass's most popular works. It is usually around 25–30 minutes in duration when performed. Glass's original concept was for a five-‐movement work, and Zukofsky requested a slow, high finale. As the composition process developed, however, Glass decided that five movements were too many and settled for a more conventional three-‐movement format. According to Glass, this traditional structure was not a concession to formality but simply a result of the work finding "a voice of its own" as the first and second movements developed into longer pieces than he had originally conceived. The work was composed with Glass's father, Ben, in mind, despite the latter's death some sixteen years earlier: "I wrote the piece in 1987 thinking, let me write a piece that my father would have liked [...] A very smart nice man who had no education in music whatsoever, but the kind of person who fills up concert halls. [...] It's popular, it's supposed to be — it's for my Dad." The piece quickly became one of Glass's most popular works, and appears on a number of recordings. Gidon Kremer, the first soloist to record the work, says the concerto "is a work typical of Glass, in which a certain enigmatic drive allows the performer to feel both bound to strict rhythm and free in his fantasy."[8] The success of the concerto inspired Glass to branch out into yet more orchestral writing: his first fully formed work for orchestra alone, The Light, emerged in the same year as the violin concerto and was followed by a proliferation of concertos and symphonies over the following years.