Some of the very finest bands in extreme metal succeed through a strategy of sheer overwhelming force. Volume, speed, weight; louder than loud, faster than hell, heavier than death. The question for any such band, though: what do you do with the listener once you’ve got them quivering in the palm of your iron fist? Bend their ear to the wisdom of your (anti)god, bang their head and spill their beer in the service of Joy, cut them low and make them weep a dirge for all lost creation? An option too rarely explored within the halls of metal comes from the unlikely figure of the avant-garde minimalist composer Philip Glass, and his landmark 1982 album Glassworks: maybe you let them sit in the unresolved silence that follows.
Unlike many of the earlier works for which he had won acclaim, notoriety, and significant critical disdain (including the opera Einstein on the Beach and the three-hour, twelve-part work Music in Twelve Parts), Glassworks is relatively short, compact, and occasionally almost pop-like in its construction. The hallmarks of Glass’s minimalism are still there, however; moreover, the suite’s compact duration has the effect of forcing the listener to understand the minimalist approach much more quickly than a several hour experience would otherwise allow. But before we get carried away: am I really calling something that sounds like this ‘minimal’?
[SONG1]The open question – the half-formed puzzle – in today’s Reverse Polarity: how can an album so superficially busy personify minimalism?
The answer: unlike other forms of complex, multi-part music (a Romantic string quartet, say, or a hard bop jazz combo), in which part of the pleasure is following along with a particular melodic or rhythmic line in order to understand how it relates to the rest of the composition, Glass’s minimalism produces busy washes of complex, interlocking sound that remain in a constant state of suspension, never quite resolving into the rhythmic unity or harmonic completion that our ears have been trained to listen for. The result is that these pieces become trance-like, and even though the individual pieces are always moving, the listener eventually tunes out that complexity and instead experiences change only when the entire group moves as one through chord changes. Thus, the principal movement registered by the ear is these slowly shifting blocks of sound, not their constituent pieces.
The structure of Glassworks is very balanced – an opening solo piano piece doubled by a closing piece in which the ensemble reprises the piano’s theme; two extremely busy, reed-heavy mind-benders; and two longer pieces introduced by hushed strings before featuring delicate reed interplay. The first piece, the solo piano “Opening,” while dissimilar from most of the rest of Glassworks, is absolutely essential, because it teaches the listener how to hear the remainder of the work. The hands play in cross-rhythm, with the left hand playing eighth notes in 4 and the right playing faster triplets. Although in practice this is a very difficult thing to do, its effect on the listener bears all the hallmarks of minimalism.
[SONG2]Thus, when the full ensemble pulses into whirling, fluttering life in “Floe,” your ear has already been primed to listen not for individual components, but for flights of divergence, and brief moments of unexpected convergence. The French horns eventually mark the simple drone of the chord changes with legato phrasing against the sharp staccato of the rest of the ensemble. Of course this music won’t speak to everyone, but for those of you to whom it does speak, isn’t that speaking voice a magical affirmation?
[SONG3]The potential appeal of Glassworks to metalheads, as I see it, is twofold. First, the suite offers an excellent example of instrumental virtuosity used in the service of something bigger. Though the individual lines may not sound outrageously difficult, their repetition and often cross-meter rhythmic component makes them quite challenging. Nevertheless, Glassworks doesn’t sound like six musicians playing a guitar solo. This is a collective born out of sweat and toil, with the unity of the group’s delivery possible only through the elision of strident difference. Communitarian, though, not fascist. Imagine Satriani, Vai, Malmsteen, Petrucci, Loomis, and whomever else together on stage, but their guitars are threads in the same fabric, their bleeding fingers bleeding in service of the same sadness or hope; shredding for selflessness.
The second way in which Glassworks might appeal to metalheads follows directly from the first: namely, that these compositions, with their meditative restraint, make such graceful little out of lots. That is, much of doom metal’s appeal comes from wrenching maximum impact out of minimal gestures; plenty of other varieties of extreme metal prosper by making much noise out of many noises; but relatively little extreme metal functions on the model of Glassworks. Atmospheric black metal often tends in this direction (see Darkspace, for example), but one of the first (somewhat) similar examples that came to mind was the closing song from Gojira’s monumental From Mars to Sirius, “Global Warming”:
The effect of this song’s endless procession of triplets is much the same as the busier sections of Glassworks. Of course, for Gojira’s music to really fit Glass’s mold, one would need to subtract the vocals, bass, and chugging midsection from the song, because they impose upon the piece too forceful a narrative structure. Nevertheless, the point stands. And so, anytime you find yourself zoning out when listening to a composition of great complexity, your first thought might be to assume that you are bored. But hold fast; perhaps you are in the presence of that which cannot answer the questions you ask of it, which may be an answer of its own.
In either case, try gluing your ears to these six suspensions and embracing their open-endedness. Imagine things differently, and then live in that space that makes imagination possible. That’s the real opening.
