Philip Glass Ensemble

From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist

The Philip Glass Ensemble is an American group, founded in 1968 by the composer Philip Glass as a vehicle for performing his experimental, minimalist music. The ensemble still exists and is under the musical direction of the keyboard player Michael Riesman. The line-up became a hallmark of Glass's early style: amplified woodwinds, usually saxophones, flutes and bass clarinet, electronic keyboards and a solo soprano singing solfège, that is, the syllables of the note names instead of a text.

Music and breakthrough

In 1976 Glass wrote his first opera, Einstein on the Beach, for the ensemble. After that he wrote more often for other line-ups, but the core remained. In 2011 the ensemble played a series of concerts in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, at the Temple of Dendur. Between 2012 and 2015 it performed Einstein on the Beach again, starting in Montpellier. In 2013 it began again with La Belle et la Bête, an opera to accompany the 1946 film by Jean Cocteau. In 2014 Glass appeared on stage with Steve Reich for the first time in more than thirty years, at the Next Wave Festival in Brooklyn. In 2018 the ensemble played Music With Changing Parts at Carnegie Hall, a work said to have changed the music of the 1970s, with the San Francisco Girls Chorus.

Influence

The importance of the group is that Glass could determine and perform his own instrumental sound. The repeating patterns and the unceasing rhythm brought minimal music to a wide audience, far beyond the classical concert hall.

Listening

Discography

Studio albums

• 1979Einstein on the Beach
• 1993Einstein on the Beach
• 2008Music in Twelve Parts
• 2010A Retrospective

In School of Rock

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• The Dream Factory: Film Reel 5^NL Reader