P. Glass performed on the Island for the first time tonight and it was hard to know what to expect from the guy. I mean what was he going to wear for starters? Small ads in the local weeklies had listed Glass with a little photo in their calendars along side next week’s rock and punk acts at the local pubs. Glass looked like a cadaver there, all dark-fro of Eraser head-hair and gothic eyeliner. As in, he looked pretty cool. And what would this 70-odd-year-old, this classical pop star of film scores and epic operas, play for us? Would it be one of those multimedia showcases, Koyaanisqatsi film clips, aloof and effaced artist silhouetted behind the screen? Looped background synths, audience-conscious pauses?
After brief blurbs by the venue — the creaky and/but charming Conservatory church-concert hall in downtown Victoria — P. Glass pulled himself on stage. His hair is grey, not black, nor froed, and matches his bottoms, which are definitely slacks not pants. His shoulders slump forward while his back hunches up under his thin burgundy sweater. There isn’t even a stylishly-high collar to offset the grey jowls. In all, he fit the look of a hermit pianist. And the only other promising eye-and-or-ear candy in sight was the solo grand, two chairs and a mic on stage. Maybe it will be amplified?
First up in what Glass says will be a 90-minute set is Mad Rush (1979-80). And without a lot of background in any sort of classical music, modern or otherwise, you know it’s a P. Glass tune. It’s the “na NA na NA na Na” two finger two note oscillation theme that permeates his minimalist, repetitive work, and which brings him the praise of the masses. It’s the kind of music you pretty much like, even if it’s in the back of your mind, because you’ve heard it before in, well, the background. It’d be hard not to, what with a roster of film scores like Dracula, Kundun, Truman Show and pre-mentioned Godfrey Reggio Qatsi trilogy of cinematic essays.
This first go lets you know what you’re in for. The tune sort of transcends the room. What’s actually great about the oscillation, the repetition: it lets your mind drift. It conjures up all those associations you have with a song and you feel cinematic and look around the room and you know everyone else feels like they’re in a movie, too.
Soundtrack two for the evening is literally that, from Errol Morris‘ engrossing sort of pomo-like documentary about a man sentenced to die for a crime he didn’t commit, The Thin Blue Line. It’s really the same music, and you’re still making a film in your head, but with this piece (actually titled Four Metamorphoses, 1989) you interject the feeling of Morris’ film: the head-shot interviews cut with fiction-film-like re-enactments under Glass’ score. The film is brilliant, but like many of the flicks Glass scores, it’s really less of a “So-and-So Director’s Film” than a “Film that Philip Glass did the music for.”
And so by the time he finishes his eight Etudes an hour in you don’t notice your feat are asleep, or that you’ve been staring at the stained glass rosette windows with your mouth open, story-boarding your first epic short film in your head. And you think you haven’t been paying much attention. You rub the eyes and strain your head around one of the annoying balcony poles to watch P. Glass in action and get that nice inspirational feeling that musicians give. Thoughts like, man, I could totally play the trumpet/ drums/ guitar/ didjeroodoo like that if I tried a bit. That sure sign of great music played by a great musician. Makes it look easy.
Almost the converse at a Glass concert, the first I’m sure for many in this menagerie of elderly cardigan-wearers, stern t-shirted students of notation and the lip-ringed turtle-necked in Vis Arts. There’s a young and paunchy stage hand with a big forehead in the corner nodding his head in trance. Well, there’s a spectacled fourth-year English Prof-looking guy doing the same thing. The music is pretty simple. There’s no real need to watch the performer, and not just because he looks like your grandpa.
Despite its simplicity, a P. Glass tune kinda effaces your physicality towards music, the performer, the surroundings. It really is cinematic music, i.e. inextricably linked with an image (regardless whether that association with P. Glass is because his music is in so many films or cinematic as a musical genre outside film really exists). And in concert with glass without celluloid or DVD, the image is in your head.
Point being that when you watch a film scored with this stuff, it really enhances the visual experience while masking its own existence, i.e. you think (voice rising on
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