For the 2022 installment of popular Cork-based music festival Quiet Lights, programmer Jonathan Pearson pays tribute to a true giant of classical music - a living legend by the name of Philip Glass. He takes a deeper dive below...
"Philip Glass Is Too Busy For Legacy" is the title of a widely read piece on the composer known as the godfather of American minimalism in the New York Times written a few years ago. In the piece, he discusses that he's very busy writing music and that he won’t be around for legacy and so he doesn’t concern himself with it.
And yet with that reluctance, Glass has become one of the most widely known composers in classical music history. When you ask someone not traditionally into 'classical music’ and its modern iterations on what they listen to, you’ll probably hear Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, perhaps Chopin & maybe also Philip Glass.
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Watch: NSO play music by Philip Glass from the music of David Bowie & Brian Eno
The fact that Philip Glass is still alive and well and is regularly mentioned with such esteemed company is little surprise. His compositions are both rich and dark whilst being (and I hate using this term) accessible to the average listener. Overall, there’s just something very special about the music Philip Glass creates.
Indeed many from my generation know him as much for his film compositions than his concert music. Most notably for me is the haunting Truman Sleeps from The Truman Show. He perfectly captured the absurdity and loneliness of that film with his simple melody over his signature arpeggiated accompaniment. It’s one of my favourite pieces of music.
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I have long been an admirer of the American composer’s ability to come up with a melody that hooks the listener in immediately, and then stretches and scrunches it up in various ways that makes it almost unrecognizable by the time you come out the other end, when you are left wondering what exactly changed, as the basic premise of the piece remains, even though the tone and mood of the piece has totally shifted without you realizing.
Many contemporary composers who have found fame in recent years have used this compositional technique to great effect, arguably most notably Nils Frahm and the en-vogue piece structure of quiet-loud-quiet that has taken the discerning hipster audience by storm for the last decade or so. But nobody does it like Philip Glass, arguably the OG hipster when it comes to presenting what seems like simple material and jankying it up a lot.
The music company I run, Islander, produce a festival in Cork called Quiet Lights, that is primarily billed as a folk festival. It happens every November. We host Ireland’s most innovative and forward thinking folk and trad artists, and with the members of the company working as managers of artists such as Anna Mieke, Niamh Regan and Ye Vagabonds means that Islander are probably uniquely suited to programming such a festival.
I’m very proud of Quiet Lights, because it pairs folk & traditional music with some other more obscure stuff - we have long had a contemporary music strand throughout the festival, and we don’t shy from more experimental music. More and more I find that those genres blend into each other in Ireland. It’s a small enough place that experimental musicians are going to meet traditional musicians and hang out, and maybe even make work together. It’s a point of pride of the festival that we nurture that spirit of collaboration and spontaneity.
This year, one of my favourite Irish musicians, Máire Carroll, is coming to Cork to perform a suite of Philip Glass’ Etudes on the Triskel's famed Steinway piano. It’s a mirror program of what she has just completed at the National Concert Hall this month, except she performed two concerts there, whereas she is performing a bespoke one off programme for us in Cork.
I have long been an admirer of Máire’s playing and her approach to new music, ever since I first met her when I managed to convince her to play keyboards with Crash Ensemble in a field in Cahirsiveen (long story). It is a real honour to host her in more salubrious surroundings this time in the Triskel Arts Centre. It will be a very special way to open the festival and I hope that some of you can join us for it.
I have collated a selection of some of my favourite music by Glass as a Spotify playlist - some of them are Etudes, and some of them are not, but I hope that you enjoy it if you are unfamiliar with the genius of one of the main composers of the American new school.
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Quiet Lights takes place at various venues from the 24th - 27th November 2022, with performances from Martin Hayes, John Francis Flynn, Eoghan Ó Ceannabháin, Aoife Nessa Frances, The Bonk, Rachael Lavelle and many others - find out more here.
