8 ms·

What Philip Glass and J. S. Bach have in common (2018)

46 points by tintinnabula 6y ago

jancsika 6y ago
I enjoy Philip Glass' music. But if J.S. Bach were Philip Glass, there would be a Philip Glass subreddit with 100,000 members dissecting every single section of each peculiar new album. One section of a piece would consist of the melody of Lee Greenwood's "Proud to Be an American" somehow fittingly trudging along below Philip Glass music. Another section would overlap three Philip Glass musics with staggered entrances, turning each upside down for a subsequent section. Yet another piece would have just one Philip Glass music, overdubbed with a Disney movie theme, a Lady Gaga song, and some generic hip hop music he heard while watching a dance competition at the mall. One double album would consist solely of sophisticated mashups of songs chosen exclusively from the tin pan alley era-- one for each common tempo on the metronome-- served over a nice bed of Philip Glass ostinatos. After getting banned from SNL for going overtime with a tasteless tin-pan-alley style freestyle rap/dj'ing experiment, Philip Glass would have moved to Dayton, Ohio to write weekly 45 minute religious services in the style of golden age Broadway musicals for a small evangelical church. (Edit: he would also personally perform Philip Glass music at the piano for the service's prelude and postlude.)
- swagadoo 6y ago
  The funk museum is in dayton ohio. So i imagine that would be a draw.
- alanbernstein 6y ago
  It sounds like the real modern-day bach must be girltalk, then?
tgv 6y ago
Shoddy writing, meant to hype up a recording. They could just as well have written that Bach was significant in establishing the tuning of the same 12 notes that Philip Glass uses today. Saying both use "patterns" is almost an insult to the reader.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- diydsp 6y ago
  I'm aghast at this article and wish I could finish a bottle of wine on a rooftop agreeing with you, but that's nigh impossible and sitting here writing all of my negative thoughts would be a huge waste of time, so here's a recording I made recently of movement 8 of Bach's WMV 4 "Christ lag in Todesbanden" on an instrument, the Pyramid Eel 2, I've been developing: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aXbkDKGa8wf4iQ4P_kt0KZOco_b2adU9/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aXbkDKGa8wf4iQ4P_kt0KZOco_b...
  - tgv 6y ago
    Excellent response.
jspash 6y ago
I listen to both Bach and Glass somewhat regularly. ie. they pop up in my Spotify "made for you" list form time to time. The clear difference to me is that compositions by Glass never stop me in my tracks, make me think, make me feel anything. It's background music, full stop. I've had the pleasure to see Philip Glass perform on two occasions. I would rate it with the time I saw The Blue Man Group. An entertaining evening. Never bored. Couldn't wait to get to the restaurant afterwards. And the concert wasn't discussed as much as the appetizers. Just one man's opinion.
- abrowne 6y ago
  This mean Glass makes a great movie soundtrack!
  - adamkittelson 6y ago
    I only heard about Glass because he was used in this Battlestar Galactica scene. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCrxDsuwXjI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCrxDsuwXjI
  - nicklaf 6y ago
    Indeed. In particular, when OP said he wasn't moved emotionally by Glass's music, I immediately thought of the track "67 Cities" from Errol Morris documentary, The Fog of War: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOCYcgOnWUM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOCYcgOnWUM Glass's score makes this a very powerful scene, IMO.
    - abrowne 6y ago
      Yeah, I was thinking of that film as well as Elena by Andrey Zvyagintsev. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drDu9Ta1JWc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drDu9Ta1JWc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elena_(2011_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elena_(2011_film)
- gnulinux 6y ago
  I have the same opinion, but imho this is not on Glass. Bach is simply something else, even within his own generation, his music transcends everyone else. Maybe my music knowledge isn't very wide but I spent some decent time dissenting many baroque composers to find something, even remotely remotely close to, e.g. BWV 1004 (especially Chaconne). Open to suggestions here! I don't have a formal music theory education but I've been playing violin (classical training) since my childhood.
Gendun 6y ago
For me their greatest similarity is structural, and it is not so much that they are similar to each other; rather, they both differ in similar ways from what we usually think of as the canonical form of composition in classical music - specifically, the sonata form, which prevailed precisely during the period just after Bach and just before Glass. In the music of Mozart or Beethoven, for example, you have a primary leading melodic voice, and the music is organized by the progression of chords that support the main melody. This is why they wrote such good concertos. In Glass and in Bach, the music is more "textural" as it were, but for different reasons. In Bach's case, owing to his use of polyphony, the shape of his musical ideas is distributed in the harmonic interactions between independent voices, each with its own melody. In Glass's case, we don't typically find voice leading, but repeating arpeggios. For what it's worth, in my opinion pretty much everything of value in Glass he took from Steve Reich, and I have yet to meet a single Glass composition that doesn't seem implicit in Reich's "Piano Phase".
- Rochus 6y ago
  Well, there is not much similarity, i.e. no more similarity than with any other randomly selectd composer. But Bach certainly was no "minimalist", and he apparently lived in another epoch. And both undoubtedly have a lot to do with music. The article is probably meant more as a homage than as a scientific treatise. Actually, I neither see much similarities with Steve Reich (besides both are known to be "minimalists").
- Slow_Hand 6y ago
  I agree with everything you say until the last paragraph. My perception of Reich and Glass as composers is that despite coming from the same city, during the same period, and being lumped together by history they feel like two composers whose style and methods run parallel but never quite meet. They've both built reputations around styles reliant on repetition, but the ways they employ it and the character of their music are very different. While the musical motif of Reich's 'Piano Phase' - an ostinato arpgeggio - is something that Glass also employs in his own music, their individual uses of such a fundamental and common musical figure diverges tremendously. Reich (for the most part) fixates on that single motif and the patterns that appear by "phasing" it in and out with it's copy. Glass' typical approach for this period is to develop the figure through harmonic development or through the contraction or expansion of the phrase's length. While you could argue that Glass' style developed from Reich's initial idea. To suggest that Glass' entire catalog of the period is somehow fully contained and found in the content of 'Piano Phase' and never added anything new is a major stretch. That would be like arguing that everything Led Zeppelin wrote was already implicit in 'Johnny B. Goode'.
Sandra44444 6y ago
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GhilipSass 6y ago
Philip Glass' music is repetetive. It's always the bee-swarm horror overtones that make all his music sound extremely sloppy and cheap. I mean when 99% of your core of songs are just focused around a cheap effect, then it sounds all the same. Sure we have to have certain scticks, some times, but, I mean, every Philip Glass composition is really more or less identical to every other. And I'm not saying this to lessen things, the One Philip Glass Song (tm), which is thus Every Philip Glass Song (tm), is really pretty great. But it's really just One Song Dudes (tm).
- Synaesthesia 6y ago
  I don't think that's quite fair, I've listened to quite a lot of his compositions, there's definitely something in there.
nicholast 6y ago
I was just playing my way through Bach's miscellaneous keyboard works, and there was a particular piece that struck me as could have easily have been written by Glass, but only that one bore the resemblance to my eyes.
FpUser 6y ago
Frankly I do not find much in common between their music.
motohagiography 6y ago
There is a specific Glass style that is a repeated and evolving arpeggio syncopated against an Alberti bass, which sounds more like some Handel (e.g. Zadok the Priest vs. Glass' Mishima V) than a lot of Bach, but Handel was a Bach contemporary. Dinnerstein is a master, so I have no doubt she hears structure and form between the two I can't appreciate yet. Though I know more than one Bach specialist who would literally spit if you compared Glass to him as well. But there is something about both Bach and Glass where the music has an effect. It's not about a performance or a spectacle, it's a very intimate conversation. It's like it loads up part of your brain so you can't focus on anything else, and then uses your attention to reveal these little subtleties. When you listen to Glass, you can hear how he understands human attention and form. I think we're going to discover a lot about music in this century.
- kimi 6y ago
  Bach (JS) was not a Bach contemporary. His music felt rather "old-school" at his time. In his life, he was considered the master of all masters only as an organ tuner.
  - motohagiography 6y ago
    I had thought that Bach (JS) was influenced by Handel, but then read they were born the same year and did not meet. In terms of the influence of early and baroque music on Glass, Bach's giant and diverse catalogue could contain specific influential pieces (Vivaldi also wrote a massive number of pieces in the same era that apparently influenced Bach), but when you listen to the Handel's styled and less formal music, that's the baroque music I would say has more in common with Glass' style.
every 6y ago
Glass has a shtick and he sticks to it, for better or worse...

46 points by tintinnabula 6y ago

I enjoy Philip Glass' music. But if J.S. Bach were Philip Glass, there would be a Philip Glass subreddit with 100,000 members dissecting every single section of each peculiar new album. One section of a piece would consist of the melody of Lee Greenwood's "Proud to Be an American" somehow fittingly trudging along below Philip Glass music. Another section would overlap three Philip Glass musics with staggered entrances, turning each upside down for a subsequent section. Yet another piece would have just one Philip Glass music, overdubbed with a Disney movie theme, a Lady Gaga song, and some generic hip hop music he heard while watching a dance competition at the mall. One double album would consist solely of sophisticated mashups of songs chosen exclusively from the tin pan alley era-- one for each common tempo on the metronome-- served over a nice bed of Philip Glass ostinatos. After getting banned from SNL for going overtime with a tasteless tin-pan-alley style freestyle rap/dj'ing experiment, Philip Glass would have moved to Dayton, Ohio to write weekly 45 minute religious services in the style of golden age Broadway musicals for a small evangelical church. (Edit: he would also personally perform Philip Glass music at the piano for the service's prelude and postlude.)

swagadoo 6y ago
The funk museum is in dayton ohio. So i imagine that would be a draw.
alanbernstein 6y ago
It sounds like the real modern-day bach must be girltalk, then?

tgv 6y ago

Shoddy writing, meant to hype up a recording. They could just as well have written that Bach was significant in establishing the tuning of the same 12 notes that Philip Glass uses today. Saying both use "patterns" is almost an insult to the reader.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
diydsp 6y ago
I'm aghast at this article and wish I could finish a bottle of wine on a rooftop agreeing with you, but that's nigh impossible and sitting here writing all of my negative thoughts would be a huge waste of time, so here's a recording I made recently of movement 8 of Bach's WMV 4 "Christ lag in Todesbanden" on an instrument, the Pyramid Eel 2, I've been developing: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aXbkDKGa8wf4iQ4P_kt0KZOco_b2adU9/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aXbkDKGa8wf4iQ4P_kt0KZOco_b...
- tgv 6y ago
  Excellent response.

jspash 6y ago

I listen to both Bach and Glass somewhat regularly. ie. they pop up in my Spotify "made for you" list form time to time. The clear difference to me is that compositions by Glass never stop me in my tracks, make me think, make me feel anything. It's background music, full stop. I've had the pleasure to see Philip Glass perform on two occasions. I would rate it with the time I saw The Blue Man Group. An entertaining evening. Never bored. Couldn't wait to get to the restaurant afterwards. And the concert wasn't discussed as much as the appetizers. Just one man's opinion.

abrowne 6y ago
This mean Glass makes a great movie soundtrack!
- adamkittelson 6y ago
  I only heard about Glass because he was used in this Battlestar Galactica scene. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCrxDsuwXjI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCrxDsuwXjI
- nicklaf 6y ago
  Indeed. In particular, when OP said he wasn't moved emotionally by Glass's music, I immediately thought of the track "67 Cities" from Errol Morris documentary, The Fog of War: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOCYcgOnWUM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOCYcgOnWUM Glass's score makes this a very powerful scene, IMO.
  - abrowne 6y ago
    Yeah, I was thinking of that film as well as Elena by Andrey Zvyagintsev. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drDu9Ta1JWc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drDu9Ta1JWc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elena_(2011_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elena_(2011_film)
gnulinux 6y ago
I have the same opinion, but imho this is not on Glass. Bach is simply something else, even within his own generation, his music transcends everyone else. Maybe my music knowledge isn't very wide but I spent some decent time dissenting many baroque composers to find something, even remotely remotely close to, e.g. BWV 1004 (especially Chaconne). Open to suggestions here! I don't have a formal music theory education but I've been playing violin (classical training) since my childhood.

Gendun 6y ago

For me their greatest similarity is structural, and it is not so much that they are similar to each other; rather, they both differ in similar ways from what we usually think of as the canonical form of composition in classical music - specifically, the sonata form, which prevailed precisely during the period just after Bach and just before Glass. In the music of Mozart or Beethoven, for example, you have a primary leading melodic voice, and the music is organized by the progression of chords that support the main melody. This is why they wrote such good concertos. In Glass and in Bach, the music is more "textural" as it were, but for different reasons. In Bach's case, owing to his use of polyphony, the shape of his musical ideas is distributed in the harmonic interactions between independent voices, each with its own melody. In Glass's case, we don't typically find voice leading, but repeating arpeggios. For what it's worth, in my opinion pretty much everything of value in Glass he took from Steve Reich, and I have yet to meet a single Glass composition that doesn't seem implicit in Reich's "Piano Phase".

Rochus 6y ago
Well, there is not much similarity, i.e. no more similarity than with any other randomly selectd composer. But Bach certainly was no "minimalist", and he apparently lived in another epoch. And both undoubtedly have a lot to do with music. The article is probably meant more as a homage than as a scientific treatise. Actually, I neither see much similarities with Steve Reich (besides both are known to be "minimalists").
Slow_Hand 6y ago
I agree with everything you say until the last paragraph. My perception of Reich and Glass as composers is that despite coming from the same city, during the same period, and being lumped together by history they feel like two composers whose style and methods run parallel but never quite meet. They've both built reputations around styles reliant on repetition, but the ways they employ it and the character of their music are very different. While the musical motif of Reich's 'Piano Phase' - an ostinato arpgeggio - is something that Glass also employs in his own music, their individual uses of such a fundamental and common musical figure diverges tremendously. Reich (for the most part) fixates on that single motif and the patterns that appear by "phasing" it in and out with it's copy. Glass' typical approach for this period is to develop the figure through harmonic development or through the contraction or expansion of the phrase's length. While you could argue that Glass' style developed from Reich's initial idea. To suggest that Glass' entire catalog of the period is somehow fully contained and found in the content of 'Piano Phase' and never added anything new is a major stretch. That would be like arguing that everything Led Zeppelin wrote was already implicit in 'Johnny B. Goode'.

Sandra44444 6y ago

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GhilipSass 6y ago

Philip Glass' music is repetetive. It's always the bee-swarm horror overtones that make all his music sound extremely sloppy and cheap. I mean when 99% of your core of songs are just focused around a cheap effect, then it sounds all the same. Sure we have to have certain scticks, some times, but, I mean, every Philip Glass composition is really more or less identical to every other. And I'm not saying this to lessen things, the One Philip Glass Song (tm), which is thus Every Philip Glass Song (tm), is really pretty great. But it's really just One Song Dudes (tm).

Synaesthesia 6y ago
I don't think that's quite fair, I've listened to quite a lot of his compositions, there's definitely something in there.

nicholast 6y ago

I was just playing my way through Bach's miscellaneous keyboard works, and there was a particular piece that struck me as could have easily have been written by Glass, but only that one bore the resemblance to my eyes.

FpUser 6y ago

Frankly I do not find much in common between their music.

motohagiography 6y ago

There is a specific Glass style that is a repeated and evolving arpeggio syncopated against an Alberti bass, which sounds more like some Handel (e.g. Zadok the Priest vs. Glass' Mishima V) than a lot of Bach, but Handel was a Bach contemporary. Dinnerstein is a master, so I have no doubt she hears structure and form between the two I can't appreciate yet. Though I know more than one Bach specialist who would literally spit if you compared Glass to him as well. But there is something about both Bach and Glass where the music has an effect. It's not about a performance or a spectacle, it's a very intimate conversation. It's like it loads up part of your brain so you can't focus on anything else, and then uses your attention to reveal these little subtleties. When you listen to Glass, you can hear how he understands human attention and form. I think we're going to discover a lot about music in this century.

kimi 6y ago
Bach (JS) was not a Bach contemporary. His music felt rather "old-school" at his time. In his life, he was considered the master of all masters only as an organ tuner.
- motohagiography 6y ago
  I had thought that Bach (JS) was influenced by Handel, but then read they were born the same year and did not meet. In terms of the influence of early and baroque music on Glass, Bach's giant and diverse catalogue could contain specific influential pieces (Vivaldi also wrote a massive number of pieces in the same era that apparently influenced Bach), but when you listen to the Handel's styled and less formal music, that's the baroque music I would say has more in common with Glass' style.

every 6y ago

Glass has a shtick and he sticks to it, for better or worse...