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Philip Glass in London

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January was one hell of a month for live gigs in London, with Spring Heel Jack on tour more than living up to expectations, Han Bennink & Steve Beresford magnificent while launching a new club space on a boat moored on the Thames, Joe McPhee (in London for the first time in 20 years) starting his tour with Paul Hession, and also Wolfgang Muthspiel, Marc Johnson & Brian Blade calling in for a one-off date at the Vortex on a whistle stop tour of Europe. Not to mention Arthur Lee playing Forever Changes live with full orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall, but that is another story...

However, one event dwarfed all of these, when for five nights Philip Glass and his ensemble took over the Barbican to bring us Philip on Film , a celebration of Glass's soundtrack work. In addition to two talks from Glass, we were given the movies Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi, Beauty & the Beast, and Dracula , plus a full programme of shorts, all with live soundtrack provided by the ensemble. Over the years, we have seen some wonderful examples of this combination of film and live music - Bill Frisell's soundtracks for Buster Keaton shorts, and Ornette Coleman and Howard Shore's soundtrack for Naked Lunch are particularly memorable - but this season topped them all in its range, emotion and vitality.

The opening night featured short films by five directors, and was an excellent hors d'oeuvre for the rest of the week. The directors were chosen by Glass; he had an original list of ten, but the first five he approached all agreed to work with him. For me, the outstanding short film was Passage by the Iranian artist Shirin Neshat. Her work has striking images, resonant with cultural and religious overtones. Here, these included a funeral procession of black clad figures along a beach, and a group of women — again black clad — digging with their bare hands in coarse rocky desert soil. Glass's music, as throughout the season, complemented and intensified the images, becoming an essential part of the narrative. Typically, Glass's music is very rhythmic, not just through its use of percussion but also through the repetitive structures upon which it is founded. It also includes many elements of world musics that are integrated into it.

Two of the short films were by Godfrey Reggio - Evidence and Anima Mundi. Evidence features music that was written for but not used in Koyaanisqatsi , and strikingly shows the effect of TV on young children. Reggio does not tell a story, but presents us with poignant and powerful images that are open to many interpretations.

Glass first had the idea that he and his ensemble could play soundtracks live when he saw the pioneering live orchestral performance of the soundtrack with Abel Gance's classic silent Napoleon at Radio City in New York City in 1981. In fact, the Napoleon accompaniment was the orchestra playing a selection of fairly conventional soundtrack pieces. Glass had something far more potent at his disposal. The music that he wrote for Koyaanisqatsi went way beyond any conventional notions of "soundtrack". Directed by Reggio, Koyaanisqatsi was itself revolutionary, in the tradition of 60s experimental film. It had no narrative structure, although its juxtaposing of images of the natural world and "civilization" expressed its meaning loud and clear.

Glass and Reggio integrated the music and images in a way that was unheard of in a narrative film, where the music would invariably be secondary to the images (even in films scored by such soundtrack geniuses such as Bernard Hermann, Ennio Morricone, John Barry, John Williams, Ry Cooder...). Rather than Glass writing music to accompany a final, edited version of the film, he and Reggio collaborated throughout. For instance, the breathtakingly powerful rhythmic music that opens Powaqqatsi (the pair's masterpiece, to my mind) was written before filming. The film's amazing opening sequence — of thousands of ant-like workers in an open cast goldmine — was shot to the music, with some of those workers even hearing the music on a Walkman. A far cry from traditional notions of how soundtracks work. Listening to Glass's music without the images is a very satisfying experience, but nowhere near as rich as listening while watching the film. Without the music, the film is just a series of images; the music integrates them and gives them resonance. Or as Reggio himself says, rather more eloquently, "When a film is made, I look at it from the point of view of a triangular relationship, as the image, the music and the viewer." In stark contrast to the Glass/Reggio films, for Dracula and Beauty and the Beast Glass was adding music to existing films (and classics to boot). If Dracula is relatively conventional, then Beauty and the Beast is totally radical and extraordinary. Glass completely reinvents Cocteau's film as an opera, with the original dialogue all being sung in French. The overall effect is to heighten the magic and mythology of a film, which already had oodles of both.

OK, let's talk about some products you can buy! The five CD box set Philip on Film: Filmworks by Philip Glass (Nonesuch) is a reasonably priced and easy way to sample the core of Glass's film work. It features the soundtracks to Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi, Dracula and Beauty & the Beast in full, plus a fifth CD that has the music from the shorts Anima Mundi, The Man in the Bath, Diaspora and Evidence plus selections from Kundun, Mishima, The Secret Agent and The Thin Blue Line. A good selection to begin with. Inevitably, there are moans about what has been put in or left out. A common one concerns the 1997 re-recorded version of the Koyaanisqatsi music included here, which lacks the power of the original soundtrack recording. My own moan is that the soundtracks to the shorts Notes and Passage , shown at the Barbican, are omitted. But did you ever know of a compilation that someone didn't complain about! Suffice to say this box guarantees many hours of pleasure.

The first two parts of the trilogy, Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi have just been released on DVD. There have been serious gripes about the ratio of this version, which is geared to wide screen TVs (1.85:1 ratio) and hence loses a considerable amount of the original cinema information from the image (which was in 4:3 ratio). Nonetheless, if you don't have an original videodisc version in the proper ratio (and let's face it, few of us do!) then this DVD package will suffice until they get it right next time. Putting all that to one side, it is a delight to be able to enjoy these two magnificent films at home. As they are non-narrative, one can enjoy them many times over without reaching saturation, each viewing revealing fresh nuances and subtleties, particularly of the interplay between sound and vision. As has been observed, the "meaning" of these films is subjective and liable to change as one's own experience of the world changes. This is most graphically demonstrated by recent reactions to Koyaanisqatsi. Released in 1983, many of its images and techniques have been used in advertisements and pop videos — for instance, its ubiquitous high speed, long exposure images of traffic at night are nowadays almost a cliche. They have become part of our visual language to the extent that they are no longer as striking as they were twenty years ago. However, the film's juxtaposing of images of high rise cityscapes, buildings collapsing and a lone fire-fighter has taken on new meanings in the post-September 11th world, to the extent that the film now moves many people to tears. Recommended (with the reservations expressed above).

As we await the cinema release of the third part of the Glass/Reggio "Qatsi" trilogy, Naqoyqatsi , later this year, we already have the CD release of its soundtrack, on Sony Classics. With Yo-Yo Ma featured on cello, one might expect a radical departure from the music of the first two films. However, just as the electronic sounds of Koyaanisqatsi were supplemented by world music elements in Powaqqatsi , so this soundtrack continues the evolution by adding more acoustic elements. But much of the underlying structure remains unchanged, so that the three soundtracks are clearly members of the same family but also have very distinct differences. I cannot wait to see the film, to fully appreciate this music in context.

Another recent Glass soundtrack, and one of his most popular to date, earning him a Golden Globe (and Oscar?) nomination, is The Hours. This album functions far more like a conventional soundtrack recording. Full of beautiful, sweeping melodies, it nonetheless comes from a recognisable tradition in which the visual narrative has primacy over the music. Nevertheless, music to wallow in!

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