On this nearly cloudless day in Seattle, why not spend a little time with Philip Glass and Terry Teachout’s illuminating new essay on the 78-year-old composer—one of the few known beyond classical circles besides Aaron Copland—in Commentary magazine.
Even if you think you know what you think about Glass—many love him, probably just as many loathe him—I’m guessing Teachout has something to tell you. His essay, Philip Glass Half-Full (hardy har), is just what I always want criticism to be: sensitive to its subject matter, able to see behind the work it’s discussing and into its cultural context, but still uncompromising.
Teachout’s essay, which dives into how thoroughly Glass was trained in classical music, how deeply he understood “the dogmatic modernism of the ’50s and ’60s” and broke with the 12-tone hegemony because of Samuel Beckett (!), ends with this rigorous, sunny-day thought:
The problem is that Glass’s music fails to do what I believe all great music does, which is to structure time in a profoundly meaningful way. We look at a painting, even a complex and crowded canvas like Jackson Pollock’s “Lavender Mist,” and then move on. Not so a piece of music, with which we must spend a period of time fixed in advance by the composer. If it is not sufficiently eventful to hold our attention throughout that time, then it is not successful—and that is where Philip Glass falls short. To borrow Tim Page’s meteorological metaphor, Glass’s non-narrative music is like a cloudless day: One can only contemplate it for so long without wanting to go inside and read a book.
