Glassy Eyed

Clouds moved in, then moved out. No rain.

Here where I live, there's this festival every year that draws the art crowd big time. It's called Spoleto, after a town in Italy where founder Gian Carlo Menotti started the thing. A few years after the festival came here (as best I recall -- this was all many years before I moved here), the city started a parallel festival for the rest of us, called Piccolo Spoleto. Anyhow, it's coming up, and downtown stores put up window displays every year in a contest about the festival's (the big one's) theme. The year's theme is illustrated every year by the official poster, and the 2007 poster/theme gave the window-dressers a challenge. It's a portrait (taken from a well-known Avedon photo, I think) of New York composer Phillip Glass. The portrait does not use brush or pen. Instead, it uses the artist's thumbprint -- hundreds of them -- to make up something that actually looks like the sleepy-eyed Glass in his salad days. Some windows just punted, and did something else. At least one got the point. I'll tell you what I think the point is, after this review/reminiscence (did I spell that right?) about one of Glass's recordings that a rock, folk, blues and jazz listener might actually like.
I'd heard a lot about Glass, but his records were utterly unobtainable in the vinyl days, outside of college towns, in my part of the world. And I never dared spend on records at college, unless they were two-dollars-ninety-nine, or something like that. Glass got articles, even in Rolling Stone, as I recall -- but mainly he was for the New York art crowd. A record he put out on CBS (that's right, the Eye had a record label, way back) changed all that. It's called "Songs from Liquid Days." The thing about this record is that, yeah, the songs are Glass's music. But people like Paul Simon, Suzanne Vega and David Byrne are writing the lyrics. No trap sets or electric guitars, but still, stuff you could listen to, if not actually jam to. It honestly sounds like a poetry "open mic" night set to this strange, repetitive music. I'm listening to it now, because the vinyl (which had, as I recall, a great sound) is long gone. I scored the CD (though I really can't afford to, but ...) for a ten, because the copy was old (circa 1990) and the store wanted to get rid of it. (There's a tweak to getting good sound out of old CDs I'll get to in a minute.) Anyway, when I bought the record, my 'cool' cred was shot to hell. I'd let myself go during the newspaper career (cough, cough) because I thought I needed to be that way. I think buying a Bob Seger record was about as far out as I got back then. After that, I got an education later in more edgy material while selling records, but I really didn't dig the stuff the other employees liked that much. They thought I was a hick. (Charlie Haden notwithstanding -- I lied about doing that, anyway. [See much earlier post for evidence of my sin.]) I'm not sure they were wrong. I'm not sure they still aren't. (I can't figure out the double negative I just wrote.) Anyway, I got my groove thang back with the purchase of "Songs from ... ." Too bad nobody but me cared. (They don't care now either!)

Don't my neuroses and insecurity stop you from giving "Songs from ..." a spin. It carries the minimalist thing into the mainstream, as far as that can go, anyway.

Glass is not usually atonal: his thing is to take little elements of music and repeat them in different registers, keys, instruments, etc. And then start another one and roll in and out of the first one. They keep repeating until you get a sense of layers of sound. The best example of this that I can think of that you might have already heard is Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells." This record was a stoner favorite my freshman year in college. (The narrow hallways in that dorm gave "just breathe" new meaning!) I pretty much had the record memorized at one point. You don't have to be "on" anything to like "Tubular Bells." Or "Songs from ... ," either, though lyrics like "We gradually became aware/Of a hum in the room ... /It went ooooommmmm" might make you wonder ... . (I actually think the lyric in "Changing Opinion" refers to early efforts at home recording and the problems you get into.)

BTW: The tweak on pre-1995 CDs is to clean the edges with a bit of water and really mild cleanser (no alcohol or ammonia!), then take a water-based, green magic marker and rim the edge with several coats of the green ink. Get it really dark by letting each coat dry a minute first. This emulates the edge coating on mirror glass. Most CDs from early days (1985-95) need it, because of less accurate mastering or manufacturing at the time. I would imagine doing that before ripping would help, as well. It's a waste of time on modern CDs -- the industry fixed the problem long ago. Oh, yeah, if you've got room on your Windows computer, I think ripping into WMA Lossless is worth it for sound quality. But if you want to transfer WMA Lossless music to a portable, you'll probably need a Zune.
Glass came from a school of composing philosophy that used small pieces of music, not even complete melodies or themes, as elements, and by the composer repeating them in different ways, but changing them slowly, you kind of get sucked into the sound. I recall attending a concert featuring a Steve Reich piece for violins I think was called "Tape Loops." When the music finally resolved into a peaceful chord, you thought you'd hit nirvana (the place, not the band, although ...).

So, this one window display downtown had thumbprints all over the window itself and sheets of music meant for children learning piano that repeat little themes (think "Chopsticks" but better). I think it hit the idea of the poster, which (again, to me) is to translate the aesthetic of Glass and Reich into visual art, and probably add homage to Glass's early big works that were said to be musical portraits of illustrious people ("Einstein on the Beach" etc.).

Glass has written lots of music for movies ("The Truman Show" is one), so maybe that's another way to get into his sound. He's premiering something for Spoleto, so that's the link there.


LJ orig.: 05/05/07