Since their first encounter in May 2011, Lavinia Meijer has worked with some frequency with Philip Glass, even though he has never written solo works specifically for the harp. However, many of his piano works and piano transcriptions, after minor adjustments, prove to be well suited to the modern pedal harp. Initially, Lavinia Meijer added Glass’s five-movement Metamorphosis to her repertoire, on the instigation of the undersigned, the Amsterdam gallery owner Robert Malasch and the American composer himself. After a first and successful performance (in the composer’s presence) in the Amsterdam ‘pop temple’ The Melkweg, a first official recording was made for Channel Classics in June 2011 in the Dutch town of Schiedam. Since this recording was exclusively intended for a brief national marketing campaign, it has now been followed up by this complete Glass CD for international distribution.
In addition to a new recording of the five-movement Metamorphosis, the present issue features Opening Piece (from Glassworks) and a selection of film music from The Hours. The pieces were recorded in May 2012 in the Mennonite church in Deventer, where Lavinia Meijer’s earlier recordings for Channel Classics were also made. When she first met and rehearsed with Glass in The Melkweg in May 2011, the composer said of the star Dutch harpist “that sounds beautiful!”. He later described her to a reviewer of the Dutch national daily NRC Handelsblad as “a wonderful musician”, going on to add “an arrangement like this for a different instrument really teaches me something new about my own piece. The harp emphasises different things in the music, in a timbre that was absent before”. My conclusion that this was something new – a ‘world premiere’ of his music on the harp – proved to be incorrect, for a number of harpists had already explored the oeuvre of the American minimalist. As ever in this branch of music, harpists are constantly on the look-out for new repertoire.
The now extensive oeuvre of Philip Glass offers plenty of opportunities. This is partly because in his own performances as a pianist he likes to draw on music of his own, written first in a different form. In this sense Glass’s attitude as a pianist (and keyboard player) does not differ from that of other composers who are out to have their most popular numbers played as often as possible in all sorts of arrangements. It may seem slightly far-fetched in this context to refer to masters of the past, but Bach and Han- del too had a habit of restyling earlier compositions. Less far removed from today is Stravinsky’s frequent use of works from earlier periods, in revisions and new instrumentations of his own orchestral works and ballets. Scholars refer to this process in Bach and Handel as musical parody, but nowadays we simply call it ‘recycling’.
Whatever the case may be, composers have always ‘stolen’ from their own work, and often with great (commercial) success. Some- times because they wanted to re-use brilliant ideas or appealing tunes. Or because they ran out of time or were harassed by clients; or, not unusually, just for financial gain. Bach and Handel could quite easily disguise the fact that they simply put a completely different text – whether sacred or secular – to existing music. In Stravinsky, who early on had much of his music recorded (on 78s), the matter is more transparent. Eric Walter White, one of his first biographers, gives detailed information on each work in his standard study ‘Stravinsky: The Composer and his Works’ (Faber).
More complex in this respect are the works of Philip Glass, in view of the fact that many pieces seem to employ (ad nauseam according to his critics) the same melodic texture, formu- las, chords and rhythmic patterns. On closer examination, however, his compositions prove to be richer in variation and contrast than would appear on first acquaintance. It is conspicuous and indeed sympathetic that Glass does not beat about the bush concerning the roots of his pieces. The piano score of Metamorphosis (published by Chester Music) explicitly states: “Philip Glass’s Metamorphoses One to Five are collected together, having originally been part of two separate projects: some written for Eroll Morris film A Thin Blue Line, the others for a staging of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. The pieces were written in 1988”.
The same applies to the music that Glass composed in 2002 for the film The Hours. The title page of the published selection of eleven piano pieces from the film score is no less revealing in its subtitle: “Music from the motion picture – arranged for piano solo – composed by Philip Glass” (Wise Publications, 2003). What is more, above each piece we read “arranged by Michael Riesman and Nico Mühly” (Riesman has been Glass’s musical partner from the very beginning and is leader of the Philip Glass Ensemble). The British- American film The Hours was directed by Stephen Daldry and is based on the novel Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, whose suicide also features in the film. The main roles in this drama are played by Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore. Although the film was nominated nine times for an Academy Award, only Nicole Kidman received the best actress prize. It was the British BAFTA, the counterpart of the Academy, which awarded Glass for his score.
Hans Heg