nice & blue

mad rush

April 09, 2012

In the late 1870′s before Emerson began to seriously lose his memory he said that he felt as though music was the one thing that lifted him out of the actual. He said it whispered to him the dim secrets of his startled wonder, made him long for something he didn’t and probably would never have. Music, he said, was what really made him think about who he was and for what. Where he had come from and to where it was he was going.

I’ve always loved music. I’ve enjoyed it immensely. Once upon a time I even tried to play it. I think I failed miserably but it has nevertheless ceased to move me. Crush or melt me if you will. But the lifting out of the actual, the whispering of dim secrets – I’ve never really and fully understood what Emerson was trying to say. Where were the dim secrets of my startled wonder? Was I being lifted? I’ve thought about who I am and for what, but it was poetry and not music that did that for me.

That is, for the most part, until I saw Philip Glass at the Villa Montalvo Saturday night. It was a very real and small intimate setting. A little over a hundred of us and we were all dressed up and sitting closely together in the back room of this historic mansion. And it was there under the lamplight and in front of the stage that I think I heard what Emerson must have heard.

It was silence demanding a voice with no vocabulary. The melody but also something deeper. Something so original and yet so ordinary. So ordinarily unique that I asked myself – how had I not felt or heard this before?

I still can’t quite pinpoint it. But you know when something slams you to the floor and you ask yourself – what the hell just happened? I think it was there on the floor that I started to hear the whisper. And the getting back up was the music lifting.

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Here is a clip from 1986 of Philip Glass playing a very truncated version of his piece called Mad Rush. He wrote it in 1979 for the Dalai Lama’s visit to North America.

The piece is often criticized for its lack of development but I think if you consider for whom Glass wrote the piece, the culture and philosophy of the Dalai Lama and the fact that Glass is often flirting with minimalist philosophy in his work – you can understand that it isn’t necessarily a lack of development so much as it is non-standard development.

The song is about the now , the quasi-eternal present, which one tries to prolong for as long as possible. Its something fragile. Something that shifts ever so slowly and sporadically. It might come across as repetitive but Glass does a great job of accenting the now concept by adding the regular and accessible harmonic progressions that he does. It’s really a beautiful piece and he plays it better now than ever.