In Ross’s book, by far the liveliest and smartest popular introduction yet written to a century of diverse music, history winds through the pages like those highway signs and mountains. They evoke the experience of driving in a car across empty desert, the layered repetitions in the music mirroring the changes that the eye perceives-road signs flashing by, a mountain range shifting on the horizon, a pedal point of asphalt underneath. “Minimalist vistas,” he writes,Īre filtered through new ways of seeing and hearing that relate to the technology of speed. In The Rest Is Noise, his first book, reaching for the apt metaphor to describe Glass and several other similar composers, Ross adopts this very notion of moving through space. In Paris, Glass was, if not note- perfect, engaged, and the music dovetailed with Serra’s remarkable sculpture, which, around the corner of a distant slab, suddenly revealed some fresh, surprising aspect-the presence of another slab, which had previously been blocked from view, or the triangular space formed by the angles of two further slabs coinciding in space-and in the context of such a spare but monumental art, these small incidents, like Glass’s key and tempo shifts, acquired gravity. But marvellous things can happen when the composer’s attention is fully engaged. At times, it seems as though he had launched Microsoft Arpeggio on a computer and gone off to have tea with, say, Richard Gere. More often than not, you start with a disappointed sense of déjà vu: a rapid onset of churning arpeggios and chugging minor-key progressions dashes any hope that the composer may have struck off in a startling new direction. Writing in The New Yorker last year, the music critic Alex Ross described “a familiar sequence of emotions” that one may experience while listening to Glass: The mostly young audience responded at the end as if Glass were a pop star. Glass’s music spilled out, in the usual waves of clattering or murmuring arpeggios that, after lengthy, lulling periods, abruptly shifted, by changing key or tempo, alerting listeners, whose concentration might have drifted, to refocus. So the Paris event was a throwback and reunion. It was common then that Glass would have an opportunity to perform his own music (this was before concert promoters saw fit to engage him, long before he became, as he is now, a classical music celebrity): he would play in the galleries and museums where Serra had shows. Some forty or so years ago, Glass earned money working as Serra’s assistant and along with Steve Reich and Chuck Close helped Serra prop up so-called Prop pieces, those lead houses of cards that are antecedents to Serra’s current art. Hundreds of Parisians lined up on the street outside beforehand, then filed in and sat cross-legged on the concrete floor. One evening a piano was brought into the exhibition so that Philip Glass could present a recital. For Serra, art that occupies large spaces enlists temporal effects, nudging sculpture a little bit toward film or music. The subtle ways each slab played off against the others, the shifting effects of sunlight through the great, paned ceiling, shadows moving about-all this unfolded during the process of walking around, over time. Large cranes were required to install it, and viewers were expected to traverse the expanse, a length of more than a football field. For several weeks this spring, a sculptural installation by Richard Serra-five slender, soaring steel monoliths, fifty-six feet high and seventy-five tons each, spaced evenly apart and differently tilted just so-occupied the emptied nave of the Grand Palais in Paris.
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