Track Listing

1. Music In 12 Parts

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #91763 in Music
• Released on: 1996-10-14
• Number of discs: 3

Album Description
Orange Mountain Music is proud to present the premiere recording of the unabridged 'Music in Twelve Parts' performed by the Philip Glass Ensemble with the composer on keyboards. This 4-disc set contains a new recording of the entire work.

Glass' 'Music in Twelve Parts' may be the most seminal work of the minimalist movement. The entire four-hour piece has come to be viewed as a summation of all of Glass' achievements of the period and came to inform many of the composer's later works. A massive piece written for his own group of musicians, the Philip Glass Ensemble, Music in 12 Parts was recorded by the group in Rovereto Italy in 2006, more than 30 years after most of the same musicians premiered it at New York City's Town Hall.

Tim Page describes the work: "Music in Twelve Parts, written between 1971 and 1974, is a deliberate, encyclopaedic compendium of some techniques of repetition the composer had been evolving since the mid 1960s. It holds an important place in Glass's repertory - not only from a historical vantage point (as the longest and most ambitious concert piece for the Philip Glass Ensemble) but from a purely aesthetic standard as well, because Music in Twelve Parts is both a massive theoretical exercise and a deeply engrossing work of art."

Philip Glass: "It was a breakthrough for me and contains many of the structural and harmonic ideas that would be fleshed out in my later works. It is a modular work, one of the first such compositions, with twelve distinct parts which can be performed separately, in one long sequence, or in any combination or variation."

Personnel:
Philip Glass Ensemble: Lisa Bielawa - (vocals), Jon Gibson - (soprano saxophone, flute), Dan Dryden - (live sound mix), Philip Glass - (keyboards), Richard Peck - (alto & tenor saxophones), Andrew Sterman - (flute, soprano saxophone, piccolo), Mick Rossi - (keyboards), Michael Riesman - (keyboards and musical direction)

Customer Reviews

Possibly the finest version yet...
Music in Twelve Parts was Glass's summation of, and farewell to, the 'minimalism' that saw the first flowerings of his genius. It is both minimalism in extremis and a decisive move away from it's limitations. It is very long, very rhythmic and very beautiful.
This latest recording comes from a live performance in Italy in 2006. It runs to 204 minutes. The sound quality is a wonder, just a hint of reverb and a beautiful clarity.
The performance is a revelation, fitting as four of the seven performers have been playing this sequence for thirty years now. They've got good at it, very good, with none of the staleness that can mar the performance of over familiar works. Twin threads of energy and calm weave into each other, neither canceling the other out. If I had to single out a performer, it would be soprano Lisa Bielawa, who maintains a warm purity throughout.
This is music for meditation, music for driving with, music for creating art to, music for love and music for pumping iron to, music to walk through fields with and music for reading to. Oh, and you can dance to it.
What more, in all honesty, could you want?
Of three PGE recordings of this work, I would rate this one best, but only just.
If there is a fault, it is the decision to spread the work over four CDs, thus introducing an unnecessary break in the work, when it would comfortably fit on three CDs.
The packaging is minimal, with no booklet but some useful notes on the digi-pack inside.
If you want one version of the work, I'd go for this one, the next best (IMHO) being the original Sony followed by the Nonesuch recording. All three, however, are excellent and I own all of them and am happy to be able to do so.

Quite unlike anything else
Glass's recent works, which I think are good, are squarely located within the classical/romantic tradition, although they represent a somewhat new take on it. "Music In Twelve
Parts" is not. It is quite unlike anything you've ever heard. Not many pieces can justify 3.5-4 hours - Wagner, for instance, doesn't do it for me - but this does. A strange, unique, masterpiece. Not to be missed.

No middle ground here, love it or hate it.
This piece of music is about four hours long, carried on three CDs. It closes Glass's early phase, characterised by intertwining, repetitions for keyboards, woodwind and voice. The first piece is very beautiful, very gentle and slow and creates an almost ambient texture similar to Eno. However, over the course of the four hours, the music varies a great deal - tuneful, tuneless, harsh, gentle, energetic, somnambulent, pretty, dissonant, sad and happy. Personally, I love this music, but I did get into Glass on the basis of North Star which is similar in style, although much shorter! However, I have friends who love Glass's later orchestral works but who cannot engage with this music at all. It's a nice package, with appropriately minimalist cover, and excellent sound quality.