Word: glassing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Twenty years or so after the rise of minimalism, and almost a decade after Composer Philip Glass and Theater Artist Robert Wilson detonated Einstein on the Beach at the Metropolitan Opera House, the answers are appearing. Last week in Cambridge, Mass., the American Repertory Theater (ART) offered the world premiere of The Juniper Tree, a collaborative opera by Glass and Composer Robert Moran, in a staging by Director Andrei Serban. The event demonstrated how pervasive minimalism's influence has become, and what promise it still holds...
...Glass and Wilson began as cultural rebels, "downtown" artists in New York City's bohemian SoHo district who shared a radical aesthetic. Linked not only by ideals but by the cultural establishment's chilly rejection of their efforts, they and several like-minded colleagues forged a style that prized content over form, emotion over intellectuality; gradually, they won over wider audiences with the uncompromising excellence of their visions. Today Glass's relentless, repetitious music has become gentler, smoother, subtler and more flexible. Wilson's stream-of-consciousness stage pictures, which are intended to evoke emotional states rather than further conventional...
...Wisely, Glass and Moran have chosen to emphasize the tale's elements of love and redemption, instead of its gruesome aspects. Glass's familiar style is aptly suited to express transfigured states like the fatal ecstasy of the first wife, who dies giving birth to her beloved son, while Moran's more muscular music communicates the horror of the murder without wallowing in it, the way the detached, matterof-fact language of a fable does...
...dividing the opera's six scenes roughly equally between them, the composers have maintained stylistic integrity even while sharing melodic motifs and a unified dramatic plan. The interplay between them is slickly accomplished, especially in the final scene, when Moran picks up Glass's folk- style setting of the bird's lament and brings the opera to a peaceful close. Musical collaborations historically have not been very successful, but Glass's hypnotic arpeggios and Moran's dry Stravinskian syncopations are harmoniously soldered in a chamber opera that should prove practical and durable. The Juniper Tree represents the triumph of experience...
...absorption of Wilson and Glass into the cultural mainstream is not surprising. In the evolution of art, the substantial contributions of the avant-garde become part of the culture. In addition to The Juniper Tree, the current ART season also features Wilson's adaptation of Euripides' Alcestis, with music by Performance Artist Laurie Anderson. And the recently concluded Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music had as a highlight Wilson's theater piece The Golden Windows, an elusive love story with a Beckett-like nonsense text and some startling stage pictures, including an earthquake that sunders the stage...