What Philip Glass and J. S. Bach have in common (2018)
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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.
Glass's score makes this a very powerful scene, IMO.
Open to suggestions here! I don't have a formal music theory education but I've been playing violin (classical training) since my childhood.
Bach... Okay Bach actually has a lot of incredible pieces. But also a ton of on-hold music.
I love disagreeing so strongly about this because it tells me there's at least one entire parallel universe to how I experience music. So there's so much more to experience.
What is most sad to me is, nowadays music mostly taught as a means of practice. People go through entire schools of music without composing their own pieces. As a total nooby, composing music is one of the most fun I have interacting with music, it allows me to explore what these composers thought about writing their music. Like, pick up a guitar and try to improvise a jazz piece, or pick a classical composer (Bach/Mozart/Glass/etc...) and try to write variations based on their theme or re-harmonize the piece. It shows you what each composer valued the most, and why certain trade-offs made sense.
For example, Bach was absolutely obsessed with polyphonal/contrapuntal music, maybe to an insane, unhealthy degree. He was so obsessed with this idea, that he went ahead and wrote entire fugues for solo violin, and entire suites for solo cello that have nothing but arpeggiated chords. Once you realize what was the "musical project" (so to say) of each composer was (not just classical but also any genre of music including mainstream pop), your music enjoyment increases an order of magnitude. Like, when Bach was alive the art form of "fugue" was considered outdated and old, but he loved it so much that he simply dedicated his life to exploring contrapuntal music.
Whereas with Bach, I am always returning to him. I go and listen to Mozart...and halfway through the piece I stop and switch it to Bach. Go and listen to a favorite movement of Beethoven, and then I’m back into endless Bach. Spend a few hours enjoying Metallica or Megadeth, and then I round out my day with Bach.
Bach unifies the emotional and intellectual life unlike any other art I’ve encountered. His music is almost unbelievably deep. I’ve listened to some movements an absurd number of times, yet there is always something new to notice.
What am I missing? And I mean that as in, what can I listen to, that will help me see what others see?
Anyway, what I really like about Bach is how much many of his compositions just swing. He was a big fan of the canon, where a melody is played simultaneously by several voices/instruments, but with an offset and counterpoints. He uses this to create what to me are beautiful textures and great rhythm.
Not sure classical music generally is much slower or faster than "modern" music (there is of course a wide variety in both), but I would say, also generally, that a classical piece is harder to learn to play because it tends to have a more complex structure and is less repetitive than most contemporary pieces.
(This is not a slight against modern music; personally, I enjoy listening to both classical and modern.)
I remember as a teenager listening to Mozart and thinking "this is slow and boring", while Metallica is "super fast and cool", when in actuality the Mozart piece has a faster tempo and many, many more notes produced per minute.
Not a dig on Metallica, I still enjoy their music, just that my horizons have broadened.
What might be a better place to start would be the cello suites. The first is so well known that it's hard to come to it with an open mind. But my favorite is the second in d minor. Here is a performance by Mischa Maisky: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ki9ySiWQNu8 Much more lyrical and passionate than we often associate with Baroque music.
Bach is, of course, very well known for his counterpoint, which probably is why a lot of technical people like his music so much. I personally like these pieces best on organ. The fugues in particular are always a great deal of fun as each line comes in and the piece gets richer and richer. Here is a performance of the Great Fugue in G major: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6clTa8_QYQE I think there's really no substitute for listening to these pieces live, though. With a good organ you just get enveloped in the sound. The next best thing to do is wear good headphones and really crank up the volume, but headphones just can't match the bass of 64 foot pipes.
I'd also be remiss if I didn't mention the Chaconne from his partita for violin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEbi-7tPaqo
Here is some slow, boring but not religious stuff, no hapsi and no singing:
js bach, the art of the fugue
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5BC3686A00C91558
it was a demo of the gist of his composition, his music making: he introduces a melody, the motif, and then overlays it with itself and variants of itself and I admit the details completely escape me.
yet the music captures me and allows me to think.
I guess his slow chorales are played the most in churches and ads. but he composed so much more. Some of my favorites are The Well-Tempered Clavier, Goldberg Variations, and English/Italian Suites.
Bach: Harpsichord Concerto No.1 in D Minor BWV 1052 (Jean Rondeau)* I'm sure some people will hate on this unorthodox interpretation, but to me this is sublime.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcsfDxojdV8
Johann Sebastian Bach - Chaconne, Partita No. 2 BWV 1004 | Hilary Hahn * The solo violin bible
Cello suites. See No. 6:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbH3JYfRjOQ
Violin concertos; e.g., D minor:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZFOhkGGr8A
Brandenburgs:
I found it surprising nobody yet mentioned the “Gödel, Escher, Bach” book by Douglas Hofstadter. Not sure how popular the work is today, but some years ago it was really famous.
I read the book years ago, and loved it. Learning about Gödel's incompleteness theorems had already my blown my mind; Escher already was, and still is, my favorite visual artist. I remember well, at a general level, the book's explanations of counterpoint, constraints, and logic in Bach's compositions. In stark contrast to the rest of the book's content, that was all somewhat academic since the book didn't play any music.
Ever since reading the book, it has greatly saddened me to think about how much enjoyment I get from the work of Gödel and Escher, and that I'm missing out on the third component of Hofstadter's holy trinity of self-reference.
https://www.chenalexander.com/Bach
It's not for everyone and that's fine. I have some suggestions to try though.
BWV 999
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0g4FrGcRAIs
Goldberg Variations #13
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5-7QENoXoA
Erbarme dich, mein Gott
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zry9dpM1_n4
Cello Suite #6 Sarabande
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzb8aEW_Rdc
I'm going to go a little rogue with the Chaconne and suggest an arrangement ...
I've been dealt a very different view, perhaps because I'm tainted by the analytical snobbery of a formal musical education, one that included studying, arranging, and performing the works of both. The pioneers of minimalism - Terry Riley, Philip Glass, Steve Reich et al - redefined my expectations and comprehension of music, and I perceive their ideas bright and clear in every genre today from pop to EDM to incidental.
I too have seen and heard Mr Glass play live, in two very different settings. Once in a very small chamber close enough to hear the piano stool creak in Metamorphosis, and once as part of the 2013 staging of Einstein on the Beach. Both were mind-blowing, and the only topic of conversation afterwards was the music.
For my generation of music students, both Glass and J.S.Bach remain towering geniuses whose influence will ripple for centuries, whose ideas are clearly still identifiable, and thereby form an indelible contribution to the arts.
Spotify won't give you the whole of Mishima, in the same way it will never collect together the three essential recitals of the Op.92 II. Allegretto, nor will it knowingly preface The Orb's Adventure's Beyond The Ultraworld with Steve Reich's Electric Counterpoint, nor Hendrix with Handel, and in general is not a conscientious guide to anyone's oeuvre or the relationships across music forms.
Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic (1963) for grave and majestic, Gardiner and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique (1994) for bright and invigorating - but what's the third?
Nevertheless, for my personally selected essential version, I'll always nominate Erich Kleiber (1950, Decca) with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. Once heard, never forgotten, it is spine chilling.
His son Carlos's is better known, but I think it's a goofy misreading.
Bonus: the Liszt transcription for piano reveals fascinating details that otherwise tend to submerge in the symphonic effusion. There's a pleasing version on Youtube purporting to be from Glenn Gould, but note that the provenance is disputed.
Unspeakably irreverent but great fun (though you've probably already encountered it) is Joachim Horsley's Beethoven in Havana: https://youtu.be/mZRb0FyAa9s
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".
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'.
Or as if they were on the same tracks but on... different trains?
Glass generates a rhythmic tension that is similar to Reich's loops moving in and out of phase by changing the time signature feel (eg duplets vs. triplets). These are not the same mechanisms but for me both generate a curious shifting feeling where suddenly I'm listening to the "wrong" line. With Glass, I'm now also feeling the "wrong" beat! The effect from Reich's loop asynchrony is more gradual, transformational, just as surprising (perhaps even more so) but they are definitely different animals.
I hadn't thought of that, but now that you mention it, there is definitely some truth there ;-)
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.
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.)