Philip Glass Etudes

Swedish Patrik Komorowski, who lives in Åland, is not one of the best-known pianists in the Nordic countries, but Glass's etudes do not require star-class technology, as the young Glass composed them for himself. The album’s etudes and other individual tracks are actually a version of Bach’s prelude in C major: the pattern repeats, the chord changes. The changes are square and the processes are jerky or obvious, but at times some natural aroma of music moves even my minimalist soul. The violent swirling of the third etude and the sincere simplicity of the eighth etude are like cubist graphic versions of romantic oil paintings, and as such are refreshing.

This elegantly packaged 10 disc retrospective surveys four decades of work by Philip Glass, from his earliest solo pieces to his world-renowned operas to his Oscar-nominated film scores. In music, words and pictures, it traces the evolution, as critic Tim Page puts it in his liner notes essay, of '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.' The long-awaited release of this set follows this past spring's triumphal new staging of Glass's 1980 Satyagraha at the Metropolitan Opera House.

An album the majority of whose contents consists of harp arrangements of music by Philip Glass might seem a bit arcane for a major label, but it seems that Sony knows what it is doing here. The Glass Effect double album is one of those releases that succeed on two different levels, an explicit one and one that, although not mentioned, is perhaps even more important. The former level here is the one denoted by the title, as Meijer picks up the rather neglected theme of Philip Glass' influence by offering, on disc two, a group of works by younger composers who follow Glass in varying degrees but who, it's safe to say, wouldn't have the styles they do without Glass having gone before. Much of the album consists of arrangements by Meijer herself, and these include, at the end, a remix of music from Koyaanisqatsi that's delightful and would be spoiled by description. But there's also solo harp music: sample the Suite for Harp by progressive rock musician Bryce Dessner, who certainly seems to have absorbed Glass' style far enough to make it his own.

This very appealing disc of post-minimal solo piano music, played by Bruce Brubaker, includes two multi-movements works by William Duckworth and Philip Glass. Composer and music critic Kyle Gann describes Duckworth's The Time Curve Preludes (1977-1978), which use repetitive structures, an essentially tonal harmonic language, and a limited amount of musical material, as the first examples of post-minimal music, because of their brevity, which runs counter to the element of minimalism in which musical changes unfold very slowly over a long time span. The preludes are in two books of 12 movements each, and Brubaker plays the first book. Although they rarely involve exact repetition, each prelude takes a musical idea and examines it from a variety of subtly shifting perspectives. The preludes generally have limited harmonic movement and are frequently built on drones, so they tend to create a sense of stasis and equilibrium, sometimes quietly meditative and sometimes busy. Duckworth's quirky hallmark mixture of major and minor modes is evident in many of the preludes. The harmonic movement and gestures of Glass' Six Etudes for Piano, from 1994, make the pieces immediately recognizable as his work.