Word: glassed
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Glass's musical background is strictly classical. When he was eight, he began flute lessons at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, his home town. At 14, he passed an early entrance exam for the University of Chicago and subsequently enrolled. After Chicago came five years at Juilliard as a composition student. Glass copied the cutting-edge modernists and won some prizes. But he wasn't satisfied. "To me, all of modern music sounded terrible," recalls Glass."It was purely theoretical, and I saw music as more accessible, as a sense of community...
Looking for some "alternative avenue," he won a Fulbright scholarship to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger, one of the most famous of modern composition teachers. On a vacation in North Africa, he first heard Eastern music. Says Glass: "I saw the repetitive element of non-Western music as another way of organizing music." He worked with Ravi Shankar on a film score, traveled through India and returned to New York in 1967, determined to create a new Western music built not upon melody but structure...
...Glass is now at work on an opera, "a continuation of Einstein's dense harmonies." Titled Satyagraha, it is based on the life of Mahatma Gandhi and has been commissioned by the city of Rotterdam for a Netherlands Opera performance in 1980. But Glass also wants to pursue the quiet vein of Part 4: "I don't have to break the sound barrier every time...
...soon to tell whether Glass's music is the sound of the future or merely a lush amalgam of classical and rock traditions. Still, he is undeniably one of the more innovative composers today. In a time of cold experimental music, his sound is both pleasing and powerful. "Something about my repetition and harmony seems to hit people right away," he says. Whatever that something is, it works...
...STAINED GLASS by William F. Buckley...