Philip Glass – Part 10 of Music in Twelve Parts: Pattern Etude

 Part 10 of Philip Glass’s “Music in Twelve Parts” is composed of several organ and synthesizer motifs repeated over and over again. During the piece, slight variations occur – these variations are minimal and one at a time. Thus, I suppose the name of the genre: minimal music. As my mind subconsciously longs for some more variation to occur, for the tension to subside at least a little bit, Glass’s music doesn’t deliver on that. Instead, he makes it go on and on, even adding more uncomfortable tension to the piece, which, from about minute 3:20 on, acquires the aesthetic appeal of the sound a crashing Windows computer makes just before diving into a bluescreen. High and low frequencies are artistically layered on top of one another, and just as one is getting somewhat comfortable with the harmonies, somewhere in the middle a single eighth is included and makes the rhythm just a bit askew.

The thing is that I know that everything here is intentional and well-crafted to do what it does. It is just that I just can’t be at ease with this kind of music. Minimal music is not about beauty or sublimeness, I know, but some of the pieces from the last weeks certainly did have some kind of beauty in them. It’s hard for me to recognize anything else than patterns and (minimal yet accumulating) variations in the piece, uncovering more and more different phrases unheard so far. However, everything is interwoven in such a complicated way that it’s everything but easy for me to pinpoint what exactly is going on.

This leaves me wondering about the intention behind this piece. I’m aware that a narrative is probably the last thing Glass intended to provide when writing this piece. Still, I can’t get my mind about anything that’s going on in “Part 10,” even after listening to half of it. Perhaps one needs to be in a certain relaxed (or otherwise prepared) state to see anything in this music at all, or to have some kind of disposition for this. All I know is that I don’t seem to have this aptitude, no matter how hard I try and how many parts of “Music in Twelve Parts” I have a listen to on YouTube.

I appreciate how difficult and intricate it must be to coordinate melodies and performers alike to reveal all these notes and sounds out of what is essentially always the same few melodies. Unfortunately, for me it remains but a sonic, intellectual exercise of layering and shifting patterns without any enjoyable qualities beyond that. In this way, it’s much like the Burgmüller and/or Czerny etudes almost every learner of piano is forced through towards the beginning. But for all who can enjoy this kind of music, I’m of course still glad it exists. It’s the good thing about modern society and a market-oriented economic system that there is pretty much something for everybody, no matter how simple, common, uncommon, or weird the styles are one longs for. Maybe that would be a good, conciliatory bottom line to my attempts to understand what intentions, emotions, and thoughts in general really are behind this piece by Glass.