Insistence on Truth
It has often been said that among composers born in the first half of the last century, Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring served as a defining, life-changing work, and that for composers born later it was Terry Riley’s In C. Both of these works left an instant impression on me the first time I heard them—in both cases, on recordings. But I heard In C much later than I heard Rite of Spring. Stravinsky’s ballet score was the only work composed in the 20th century on a Reader’s Digest collection called something like “Masterpieces of Classical Music” which I acquired for a pittance in a Salvation Army store in high school, perhaps a year before I actually started collecting recordings in earnest. As a result it was the recording from that set that I listened to the most, almost daily in fact. I spotted the Columbia Masterworks Music of Our Time In C LP in a bin that mostly had classic rock albums at a now defunct Greenwich Village record shop a couple of years later. I instantly identified with it, but by that point I had already heard the music of both Philip Glass (as the result of a PBS TV documentary about him) and Steve Reich (from a WNYC concert broadcast), so the relentless ecstatic repetition of early minimalism was not really surprising to me by that point—in fact, it had already completely insinuated itself into the music I was writing at the time.
Yet, if I were to point to a work that was a defining, life-changing work for me, it would probably be neither Rite of Spring or In C, much as I love them both and still frequently return to them. My big minimalist epiphany was admittedly with the music of Philip Glass I had heard in that TV documentary—snippets from North Star (his soundtrack for the film Mark Di Suvero: Sculptor), Einstein on the Beach, and—I think—Dance 1-5. I tracked down as much of his music as I could almost immediately—it’s what turned me into a record collector—and I managed to find even the now super-rare first pressings of his early pieces on his own label Chatham Square. But while I loved the energy of this music and wanted to find a way to incorporate that euphoria into the music I was writing, I felt that it wasn’t quite my own personal sound world. Then, during my freshman year at Columbia, I attended the American premiere of Satyagraha at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in what was the very first season of BAM’s Next Wave Festival. That was the life-changer. This music had the propulsive excitement of Glass’s earlier music, but it also had something else—a deeply reflective, otherworldly, magical quality that made it seem fragile and monumental at the same time. It was the first time that Glass had composed for an orchestra in his mature style; indeed the first time he had written for people other than his own ensemble, which—since he was not involved in the actual performance—also made it appear more objective somehow, like a third-person novel rather than a first-person memoir. All of the earlier music by Glass that I had heard before Satyagraha had been extremely loud, as assaultive as most heavy metal bands. (I still remember hearing his Ensemble rehearse before one gig I attended halfway down the block from the venue.) Satyagraha, on the other hand, is often quiet and almost always somewhat gentle, even when it builds to forceful climaxes. That such a work could have been created from the compositional language of minimalism proved conclusively to me that this style was capable of expressing anything. And the fact that it was an opera about fighting injustice through pacifism also really said something to me in the year following the United States’ re-instating the military draft—when I attended Satyagraha I was 17 and totally feared registering once I turned 18.
So attending the Metropolitan Opera’s revival of Satyagraha on Friday night was a chance for me to relive an extremely important moment in my musical life. (I was unfortunately out of town when the Met revived it in 2008.) I have listened to the recording of Satyagraha countless times since I bought it the day it was released in 1985. (I had to wait four years to hear it again after the BAM premiere even though passages of it—like the final scene’s 30 sung ascending Phrygian scales accompanied by progressively layered counterpoint sequences—never left my consciousness.) But hearing it live is a different experience entirely, especially since it is a work of music theatre. Funnily, there are even a few strictly musical details that had eluded me after all those repeated listenings over the years that came into focus during this second-ever live performance I attended. For example, I was always struck by how the opera has no overture and doesn’t really seem to wrap up at the end, but I realized on Friday that the opera actually begins and ends with the lead role (Gandhi, expertly sung at the Met by tenor Richard Croft) completely unaccompanied. It is subtle (it lasts only about a second at either end), but it is a remarkably poignant musical metaphor for how alone Gandhi was, and how alone anyone with a revolutionary idea ultimately is.