Philip Glass' founding work of minimalism performed by Dedalus Ensemble.
A foundational work in the history of minimalism,
Music with Changing Parts marked a crucial turning point in Philip Glass's early compositional development. Composed in 1970 and based on a series of shifting melodic fragments, the piece invites performers to freely choose between eight staves, resulting in a constantly evolving texture of rhythm and tone. This new interpretation by the Dedalus Ensemble (
Sakina Abdou: saxophone; Pierre-Stéphane Meugé: saxophone; Didier Aschour: guitar, direction; Amélie Berson: flute;
Denis Chouillet: keyboards; Barbara Dang: keyboards;
Stéphane Garin: vibraphone;
Alexandra Grimal: voice) embraces the work's utopian openness. Using a layered recording process—first capturing the eighth-note sequences, then the long-tone resonances—this version highlights the psychoacoustic phenomenon at the heart of the score: how identical notes played across instruments can create shimmering harmonic overtones. The result is a sonic paradox—music that evolves without moving, and transforms without ever breaking its own rules.
This edition not only reveals the structural brilliance of the work but also its unexpected sensuality: a hypnotic interplay of pulse, resonance, and color that laid the groundwork for Glass's later masterpieces like
Music in Twelve Parts and
Einstein on the Beach. A masterful realization of a timeless piece.
"Music with Changing Parts is a piece with free instrumentation. The musicians choose which part to play among the 8 staves of the score. At each indicated cue, the musicians can change part, which produces an abrupt change of instrumentation. While the music is based on a melodic material limited to a few notes that are repeated in patterns that expand or contract, the changes in orchestration refresh the listening experience by producing sonic contrasts. These techniques at work in Music with Changing Parts, written in 1970, will lead Philip Glass to renew his language and move from the monochromatic works that precede it to more dramatic works such as music in 12 parts and especially the opera Einstein on the Beach.
When Philip Glass began rehearsing the piece, he was surprised to hear long notes when everything was written in eighth notes. After making sure that none of the musicians were playing held notes, he realized that the fact that the same notes were played by all the instruments in the ensemble produced, through a psycho-acoustic effect, a harmonic substrate of resonant frequencies. He then decided to add to the score the possibility of playing long notes to reinforce this effect.
For this recording, we chose to record first the eighth notes, then the long notes in re-recording. This utopian version, with each musician playing short and long notes at the same time (!), illustrates the minimalist aesthetic that plays with our perception and allows us to reconcile opposites and cultivate the apparent paradox of a music that moves forward without Moving and changes constantly while remaining the same."
DA, July 2024.
Philip Glass is considered one of the most influential composers of the late 20th century. Along with
La Monte Young,
Terry Riley and Steve Reich, he is one of the pioneers and leading exponents of minimalist music, particularly the repetitive school.
Through his operas, his symphonies, his compositions for his own ensemble, and his wide-ranging collaborations, Philip Glass has had an extraordinary and unprecedented impact upon the musical and intellectual life of his times.
The operas—"Einstein on the Beach," "Satyagraha," "Akhnaten," and "The Voyage," among many others—play throughout the world's leading houses, and rarely to an empty seat. Glass has written music for experimental theater and for Academy Award-winning motion pictures such as "The Hours" and Martin Scorsese's "Kundun," while "Koyaanisqatsi," his initial filmic landscape with Godfrey Reggio and the Philip Glass Ensemble, may be the most radical and influential mating of sound and vision since "Fantasia." His associations, personal and professional, with leading rock, pop and world music artists date back to the 1960s, including the beginning of his collaborative relationship with artist Robert Wilson. Indeed, Glass is the first composer to win a wide, multi-generational audience in the opera house, the concert hall, the dance world, in film and in popular music—simultaneously.
He was born in 1937 and grew up in Baltimore. He studied at the University of Chicago, the Juilliard School and in Aspen with Darius Milhaud. Finding himself dissatisfied with much of what then passed for modern music, he moved to Europe, where he studied with the legendary pedagogue Nadia Boulanger (who also taught Aaron Copland , Virgil Thomson and Quincy Jones) and worked closely with the sitar virtuoso and composer Ravi Shankar. He returned to New York in 1967 and formed the Philip Glass Ensemble—seven musicians playing keyboards and a variety of woodwinds, amplified and fed through a mixer.
The new musical style that Glass was evolving was eventually dubbed "minimalism." Glass himself never liked the term and preferred to speak of himself as a composer of "music with repetitive structures." Much of his early work was based on the extended reiteration of brief, elegant melodic fragments that wove in and out of an aural tapestry. Or, to put it another way, it immersed a listener in a sort of sonic weather that twists, turns, surrounds, develops.
There has been nothing "minimalist" about his output. Glass has composed more than thirty operas, large and small; fourteen symphonies, thirteen concertos; soundtracks to films ranging from new scores for the stylized classics of Jean Cocteau to Errol Morris's documentary about former defense secretary Robert McNamara; nine string quartets; a growing body of work for solo piano and organ. He has collaborated with Allen Ginsberg, David Bowie, Paul Simon, Linda Ronstadt, Yo-Yo Ma, Leonard Cohen, and Doris Lessing, among many others.
Founded in 1996 by Didier Aschour, Dedalus (Didier Aschour, guitar; Amélie Berson, flute; Vincent Bouchot, voice;
Cyprien Busolini, viola; Eric Chalan, double bass;
Denis Chouillet, piano;
Stéphane Garin, percussion;
Thierry Madiot, trombone; Pierre-Stéphane Meugé, saxophone; Christian Pruvost, trumpet; Silvia Tarozzi, violin; Fabrice Villard, clarinet; Deborah Walker, cello) is a contemporary music ensemble based in Toulouse and associated with the
GMEA - Centre National de Création Musicale of Albi-Tarn. Dedalus is a champion of free instrumentation scores from the experimental contemporary music scene, and is organized as a collective in which arrangements, orchestrations and performances are developed in common. Its repertoire includes works by classics of minimalism (
Christian Wolff,
Phill Niblock,
Frederic Rzewski, Tom Johnson,
Moondog or
Philip Glass), composers of the Wandelweiser movement (Michael Pisaro, Antoine Beuger or Jürg Frey), independent composers (Pascale Criton, Peter Ablinger, Jo Kondo,
Luc Ferrari), and commissions to a new generation of composers (Catherine Lamb,
Jean-Luc Guionnet,
Sébastien Roux).
