Word: glassing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...there a busier contemporary composer than Philip Glass? The prolific minimalist seems to be everywhere these days, churning out operas, film scores and instrumental music with the tireless industry of an 18th century Kapellmeister. Unlike Haydn, though, Glass has no Prince Esterhazy to keep him in livery, only his appetite for work. In May his The Fall of the House of Usher, based on Poe's grisly tale, opened in Cambridge, Mass. Seven weeks later, the Houston Grand Opera premiered his operatic setting of Doris Lessing's novel The Making of the Representative for Planet 8. Now, and most spectacularly...
...Glass has always been an enthusiastic collaborator, working with Theater Artist Robert Wilson in Einstein on the Beach, fellow Composer Robert Moran in The Juniper Tree and Choreographer Twyla Tharp in In the Upper Room. But 1000 Airplanes may be his most daring ensemble effort yet, involving Chinese- American Playwright David Henry Hwang and Scenic Designer Jerome Sirlin. The trio has produced a science-fiction music drama that is part Freud, part Kafka and part Steven Spielberg...
...Glass's music adds the final layer to this psychodrama, and he responds with one of his most daring scores. From the arresting opening chords that symbolize the lurking spacemen -- an alien harmonic system that makes sense to them but not us -- to the striking stretch of C-major that underpins poor M.'s longings for a girlfriend, this primal scream of angst surges and soars on an electric current of inspiration...
...trying to invent a way for English to be used as a viable music- theater language," says the composer. "Usher was all sung, The Representative used a mixture of speech and song, and 1000 Airplanes is spoken. But I'm still finding my way." As directed by Glass, the piece emerges as a strong statement in which the whole is, for once, equal to the sum of its formidable parts. And for those who care about contemporary music theater, that is good news...
...single-engine Mooney-252 touched down smoothly at Le Bourget airport, and the smiling pilot hopped off the two pillows that had elevated him high enough to peer out the plane's window. He turned down a glass of champagne and took a Coke instead. Landing at the same field where Charles Lindbergh ended his solo flight in 1927, U.S. Aviator Christopher Lee Marshall, all of eleven years old, had just become the youngest pilot to fly across the Atlantic...