The Philip Glass Ensemble at Town Hall, performing Music in Twelve Parts. From left to right, Michael Riesman, music director, and conductor; Andrew Sterman, flute, piccolo, saxophone; Sam Sadigursky, flute, soprano sax; Peter Hess, saxophones; Mick Rossi, keyboard and Lisa Bielawa, voice, keyboards.

New York City. Philip Glass premiered “Music in Twelve Parts” at Town Hall in New York City in 1974. It was not just at a different cultural time but in a different country. If it’s hard to imagine what that audience must have made of a four-hour avant-garde piece with no story built on repeated patterns and subtly shifting rhythmic figures, consider The Philip Glass Ensemble’s 50^th-anniversary performance at Town Hall on Saturday. The patterns of minimalism might be part of our musical vocabulary now, but the challenges “Music in Twelve Parts” poses to our ways of listening might have become tougher — and perhaps more necessary.   

I had been listening to the recording of a live performance by the Ensemble in Rovereto, Italy, in 2006, which featured several of the players in the current group and the composer on keyboards, and then I had the fortune to interview multi-instrumentalist, educator, and Ensemble’s manager Andrew Sterman for my program notes (below). It seemed like a fair preparation.

As it turned out, it was like trying to learn how to swim from a book.

Once in my seat, I knew I had to let go of my music-listening routines and my habits as a composer and critic. Still, I counted beats, analyzed patterns, looked for connections, and listened for development and form until it all faded away without realizing it.

I was listening wrong. Give in, open up, and pay attention.

We put our connection with and enjoyment of music through so many filters and judgments that sometimes we forget how much physicality there is in music-making and listening.

By the end of the evening, I was convinced that Mr. Glass wanted actual human musicians to play those insistent patterns and shifting accents so there would be “mistakes” in the performance. That made the music, too. By 1974, when he completed the piece, there were enough technological advances to have machines play exactly what he wrote. Press a button and go. But he didn’t. What would’ve been the point?

The Ensemble is an extraordinary collective but still made of humans who inevitably, for all their supreme talent and skills, in a marathonic four-hour performance will flub a scale, miss an accent, or come in a quarter of a breath late or early. Just as the voice in the ensemble humanizes the mechanical patterns, so does the tension of playing a particular passage and the slip-ups. And then there’s us, the listeners. Once the standard musical game of setting expectations and fulfilling or denying them is off the table, we are left to deal with sound and the vagaries of time (how long have I been listening to this movement?). There are no stories to follow or extra-musical meanings to fill in, just textures, rhythms, and melodic fragments organized in lattice patterns, both a music treatise and a game of sound. The opening and endings of the sections often sounded deliberately brusque, a door opening and closing on some continuous stream of sound. After a particular section abruptly ended, I imagined the music still playing somewhere, just out of our reach.

“Music in Twelve Parts” is a monumental piece, a compendium of musical techniques and strategies disguised as a sensual, immersive experience, Glass’s “Art of the Fugue.”

Andrew Sterman speaks eloquently about it.

I brought home a lesson about the art of listening.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Program Notes

“‘Music in Twelve Parts’ is Philip’s first grand masterpiece,” says multi-instrumentalist Andrew Sterman, a performing member of the six-piece Philip Glass Ensemble since 1992 and the group’s manager for the past two years. “It sums up his creative work up to that time, from 1971 to 1974. He was developing his new language and began writing a piece in a 12-line counterpoint. That was the original ‘Music in Twelve Parts,’ and it lasted about 20 minutes.”

Then, out of a misunderstanding, the piece evolved.

Glass has recounted how he played it for a friend, and “when it was through, she said, ‘That’s very beautiful; what are the other eleven parts going to be like?’ And I thought that was an interesting misunderstanding and decided to take it as a challenge and go ahead and compose eleven more parts.”

That original piece is now Part One.

“This is part of Philip’s brilliance. Rather than correct her and say, ‘Oh, no, my friend, this is the piece. There are 12 contrapuntal parts,’ he ran with it, saying ‘Yes, I’m working on it,'” explains Sterman. “Now multiply those 20-25 minutes by 12, and it makes for quite a long piece. And frankly, he didn’t know where he was going when he began. He was well trained in what was available for composers then, but it’s as if he said: there’s nothing here I want to use going forward. Nothing. So now you’ve got a blank canvas. What do you do? In “Music in Twelve Parts,’ he’s building the language for his art.”

“The piece is gentle and ferocious, methodical and playful. There’s a sense of humor in it and so much energy,” offers Sterman. “What we say in the Ensemble is that it’s like a Table of Contents of Philip’s signature style. You have a counterpoint, repeating and shifting patterns, scales, a unique Ensemble sound, and an evolution in tempo, meters, and certain harmonies, and then it’s as if he’s done with minimalism. The table of contents is complete, and after about Part 8, he’s free.”

Philip Glass has long secured his place in music history since, but in 1974, premiering a new work at Town Hall was a daring move. 

“Someplace in the archives […] we have the receipts from the original ticket sales in Philip’s handwriting. That’s what it took then,” says Sterman. “He’s so famous now and has had such a huge career that people forget what a creative act it was to build that career. That music was not popular outside of the art scene. It was a downtown phenomenon. The general, concert-going institutions did not accept it at first.”

In his book “Minimalists, ” author K. Robert Schwarz underscored the significance of that evening at Town Hall.

 “The event was a remarkable success: 1,200 of the 1,400 seats were filled, the audience gave Glass a standing ovation, and the more open-minded critics began to grant him a certain grudging acceptance.”

For Town Hall’s Artistic Director Melay Araya: “It is an honor to present the 50th anniversary of the Philip Glass Ensemble’s debut at The Town Hall. The work is as fresh as ever and continues to bring out the curious, diverse, and ever-expanding audience of Philip Glass and the Ensemble. With plans to finish the Qatsi series next season, the Philip Glass Ensemble and The Town Hall have entered our next fifty years together with more plans than we’ve ever had and with a deeper commitment to bringing exciting explorations of Philip Glass’s work to the public.”

Extremely demanding on the players, “Music in Twelve Parts” is an atypical listening experience for the audience.

“If you sit there and try to listen with the ears and mind you may use for other music — say pop, jazz, Beethoven, Stravinsky, or twelve-tone music — it’s going to drive you crazy,” Sterman says. “Here, the music is telling you how to listen. “Music in Twelve Parts” needs to be listened to immersively; it needs to be experienced. Let it happen around you, like the world itself.”

By the end of the performance, “we feel that we’ve gone on this tremendous adventure,” Sterman says. “This piece is difficult to play. It takes every bit of concentration, physical muscle, and technique, and the audience is right there with us, staying with it. The audience becomes part of the Ensemble. It’s such a special feeling, and the word I have for it, frankly, is ecstatic. “