ArtBistro

This thread sees 'modern music' as music from the period 1750 to 2000. The two posts I have placed here occupy positions at each end of this time continuum.-Ron Price, Australia

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GLASS



After watching the very stimulating TV program “Glass: A Portrait of Philip Glass in 12 Parts,” ABC1:8:30-9:30 p.m. 26 January 2009 I was moved to write this prose-poem. This film portrait of a composer, one of the greatest and most controversial musical artists of our time, took two years to make and was put together to celebrate Glass’s 70th birthday. Glass is 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. Glass spoke of himself as a composer of “music with repetitive structures.”  That is certainly true of my prose-poetry and for this, among other reasons, I was attracted to Glass and his work—and to watching this program.  His work aims to immerse listeners in a sort of sonic weather that twists, turns, surrounds, develops.  My prose-poetry also aims to immerse readers in a sort of sonic atmosphere that twists various themes and tries to turn them into some surrounding and developing whole consisting of my life, my society and my value and belief system.



There has been nothing “minimalist” about Glass’s output, although his new musical style was eventually dubbed “minimalism.”  In the past 25 years(1984-2009), Glass has composed more than twenty operas, large and small; eight symphonies (with others already on the way); two piano concertos and concertos for violin, piano, timpani, and saxophone quartet and orchestra; soundtracks to films ranging from new scores for the stylized classics of Jean Cocteau to Errol Morris’s documentary about former defence secretary Robert McNamara; string quartets; a growing body of work for solo piano and organ. He has collaborated with Paul Simon, Linda Ronstadt, Yo-Yo Ma, and Doris Lessing, among many others. He presents lectures, workshops, and solo keyboard performances around the world, and continues to appear regularly with the Philip Glass Ensemble.



My work involves no collaboration with others except insofar as I beg, borrow and steal ideas from wherever I can get them and blend, fold and synthesize them into the tapestry of my own writing much like a swallow and a snail.1 –Ron Price with thanks to 1Andre Aciman, “Proust’s Way?” The New York Review of Books, Vol.52, No. 19, 1 December, 2005.



The swallow’s quick, agile, speedy

travel across long, tireless stretches

of the world, taking it in the ways

whales take in water and plankton,

with mistakes easily corrected, bad

times put to good use,  judgements

which are unwise just tweaked here

and there in some implacable line

of words where the only pieces that

are thrown away are those which had

problems with the printer or were lost

in cyberspace because I pressed those

wrong keys---and then---the snail’s

slow, deliberate, fussy, cramped and

burrowing into itself, ingesting choice

bits down some multichambered spiral

and with an appetite for a whorled vision.1



In the past 25 years there has been nothing “minimalist” about my output, although I did subscribe to a minimalist philosophy as outlined by William Hatcher in his book Minimalism: A Bridge between Classical Philosophy and the Baha'i Revelation.  In this book(2003) Hatcher sought to provide a much-needed bridge between the so-called scientific materialists and the post-modern relativists. And I try to do this in my prose-poetry, although with none of the logic, pattern and tightly reasoned argument of Hatcher.



Generally, the goal or aim in my work in these same years(1984-2009) and the way my narrative imagination is engaged in what I see as an epic literary opus is to attempt to connect the long and complex history of humanity, my society, my value and belief system, my own life and the lives of my contemporaries, as far as possible. I have sought and found a narrative voice and a noetic integrator, that contains uncertainty, ambiguity and incompleteness among shifting fields of reference mixed with certainties of heart and spirit.  Since my prose and poetry is inspired by so much that is, and has been, part of the human condition, this epic oeuvre it could be said has at its centre Life Itself and the most natural and universal of human activities, the act of creating narratives. When we die all that remains is our story. 



I have called this prose-poetic work of mine an epic because it deals with events, as all epics do, that are or will be—such is my belief anyway--significant to the entire society. It contains what Charles Handy, philosopher, business man and writer, calls the golden seed: a belief that what I am doing is important, probably unique, to the history and development of a new System. This poetry, this epic, has to do with heroism and deeds in battle of contemporary and historical significance and manifestation.   My work and my life, the belief System I have been associated with for over half a century, involves a great journey, not only my own across two continents, but that of a precious Cause1 as it has expanded across the planet. To outline, however briefly, my output in this quarter-century, an output of many millions of words, would lead to prolixity.--1 The Baha’i Faith



Glass wrote about his opera

Waiting for the Barbarians

saying that he saw it as an

occasion for dialogue about

political crisis.  He also sees

his work as an illustration of

the power of art to turn people’s

attention toward history’s human

dimension. This TV program, this

visual-aural-literary portrait, closes

with a brief comment by Glass about

one of his friends who is a writer. 



Glass muses as to whether his friend’s

writing and his own musical work are

but efforts to bring order, beauty and

meaning into our chaotic world.1 This

is true of my work, although I would

twist and turn the idea to say that there

is a beauty, a new flower, which has

begun to bloom in our Rose Garden of

changeless splendor.  Compared to this

flower every other flower is but a thorn,

and before the brightness of Whose glory

the very essence of beauty pales, withers.2



1“Glass: A Portrait of Philip Glass in 12 Parts,” ABC1-8:30-9:30 p.m., 26 January 2009.

2  Baha’u’llah, Gleanings, US Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1990, p.319.



Ron Price

27 January 2009