Concerts: The Photographer

Philip Glass (b. 1937)

A composer-in-residence at the 1990 Cabrillo Music Festival, Philip Glass is credited as one of the originators of minimalism, the musical movement developed during the early 1960s in reaction to what was perceived as the increasing intellectualization and emotional distance of existing contemporary music. Along with fellow composers Steve Reich and Terry Riley, Glass favored a return to the most fundamental, or "minimal" elements of music: basic triadic harmonies, slow, simple modulations and repetitious ostinato rhythmic patterns, giving their music a meditative, almost hypnotic quality.

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Glass pursued a conventional musical career: studies at the University of Chicago, the Juilliard School and with Nadia Boulanger and Pierre Boulez in France, until he met Indian sitar-player Ravi Shankar in 1965. The encounter provoked a radical rethinking of his own approach; after two years of travel to Africa and Asia, Glass returned to the United States where he organized the Philip Glass Ensemble to play his new works.

Glass' first pieces were theater works: incidental music to plays and dance pieces, culminating in his opera Einstein on the Beach, the first of a series of "portrait" operas. Others include Satyagraha, Akhnaten and The Voyage, the latter commissioned in 1992 by the Metropolitan Opera to celebrate the voyage of Christopher Columbus. He has recently written new scores for the Jean Cocteau film Beauty and the Beast and the original Dracula with Bela Lugosi. Other works include a violin concerto (performed at the Cabrillo Music Festival in 1996), five string quartets, five symphonies (the latest composed in 1999) and a number of large-scale orchestral works.

The subject of The Photographer is Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904), one of history's more interesting characters. Born Edward James Muggeridge in Kingston-on-Thames in Britain, he came to the United States in 1851 and took up photography, then still in its infancy. Over the next 15 years he became one of the great photographers of the American West, obtaining images of remarkable clarity by exposing them on large 20- x 24-inch glass plates. In 1872, he was approached by former California governor Leland Stanford, one of the "Big Four" of the Central Pacific Railroad, to help settle a bet over whether all four of a horse's legs leave the ground while galloping. Muybridge rigged a series of cameras along a racetrack, tripped by threads as the horse passed, and was able to prove Stanford correct. His success ensured Stanford's patronage for several years, enabling Muybridge to produce his most important work, a series of photographic studies in human and animal motion, using techniques that foreshadowed stop-motion photography and movies.

Muybridge's life, however, was overshadowed by a scandal, which is also the focus of The Photographer. After the birth of Muybridge's son in 1874, he began to suspect that the child resulted from an affair between his wife and a British soldier, Major Larkyns. Late on October 17, when the Major answered Muybridge's knock on his door, Muybridge announced, "Good evening, Major, my name is Muybridge and here is the answer to the letter my wife sent you," and shot him. Muybridge was tried but acquitted on the grounds of "justifiable homicide."

The Photographer was commissioned in 1982 by the Holland Festival and introduced that May at the Royal Palace in Amsterdam, conducted by Michael Riesman, with the Act I play written by co-author Rob Malasch. The Photographer has been called an "opera" and a "music drama." Glass himself describes The Photographer as a work that "falls into that strange area of music-theater pieces, what we used to call Ômixed-media.' It's in three distinct parts: Act I is a play, Act II is a concert and Act III is a dance . . . Rob saw the piece as beginning with the literal events of Muybridge's life and ending up with a very abstract presentation, with slides of Muybridge's work appearing throughout. So we developed the basic structure as three parts: play, concert, dance. From literal words to metaphorical dance."

The 20-minute Act I play, with incidental music by Glass, covers the circumstances leading to Muybridge's shooting of Major Larkyns, his subsequent trial and acquittal. It is divided into three scenes, "Philosophical Toys," "In the Following Summer," and "A Man in a Strange Land Who Must Then Also Have Felt a Stranger to Himself." The concert that forms Act II is essentially a violin concerto, accompanied by a slide-show of Muybridge's photographs. Marin Alsop participated in the first American performances at Brooklyn's Next Wave Festival in 1983, which included playing the second act solo violin part. The most abstract section, the Act III dance, involves all the characters.

Suggested recording: Paul Zukovsky, violin, Philip Glass Ensemble Sony Classical SNYC 37849