World Premiere: September 1, 1995

Most Recent HSO Performance: 

This is the HSO's first performance of this work.

Instrumentation: 2 flutes with second flute doubling on piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, bass drum, suspended cymbal, hi-hat, snare drum, tenor drum, glockenspiel, triangle, tambourine, cymbals, maracas, woodblock, templeblocks cowbell, celeste and strings: violin I, violin II, viola, cello, and bass

Duration: 23'

Concerto Saxophone Quartet and Orchestra (1995)

Philip Glass

(Born January 31, 1937 in Baltimore)

“You know there is a maverick tradition in American music that is very strong. It’s in Ives, Ruggles, Cage, Partch, Moondog, all of these weird guys. That’s my tradition.” Thus Philip Glass traced his artistic lineage in an interview with the composer Robert Ashley. Glass, born in Baltimore on January 31, 1937, began his musical career in a conventional enough manner: study at the University of Chicago and Juilliard; a summer at the Aspen Music Festival with Milhaud; lessons with Nadia Boulanger in France on a Fulbright scholarship; many compositions, several of them published, in a neoclassical style indebted to Copland and Hindemith. In 1965, however, Glass worked with the Indian sitarist Ravi Shankar in Paris on the score for a film titled Chappaqua, and that exposure to non-Western music was the turning-point in forming his mature style.

In 1965-1966, Glass spent six months traveling in India, North Africa and Central Asia, and he returned to New York in the spring of 1966 with a new musical vision (and a new religion — he has been a Tibetan Buddhist for years). Glass rejected his earlier works, formed an ensemble of amplified flutes and saxophones, electric organs and synthesizers, and began writing what is commonly known as “Minimalist” music (though Glass loathes the term; Debussy likewise insisted that he was not an “Impressionist.”) “Minimalist” music is based upon the repetition of slowly changing common chords in steady rhythms, often overlaid with a lyrical melody in long, arching phrases. The style is viewed by its adherents as hypnotic and trance-like, lifting the spirit out of the mundane and freeing the mind; its detractors call it dull, simple-minded and boring. Glass’ works (and those of his sometime fellow Minimalist travelers, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, John Adams and several other of America’s most important composers), stand in stark contrast to the fragmented, ametric, harshly dissonant post-Schoenberg music that had been the dominant style for the 25 years after the Second World War. Minimalist music is meant, quite simply, to sound beautiful and to be immediately accessible to all listeners. Indeed, Glass represents the epitome of the modern “cross-over” artist, whose music appeals equally to classical, rock and jazz audiences.

Such an extraordinary, new style was not quickly accepted, but Glass was determined to continue on the path he had set for himself. He kept composing and honing the skills and performances of his ensemble, but supported himself for some time as a taxi driver and plumber. His first wide recognition came with the four-and-a-half-hour opera Einstein on the Beach, produced at the Metropolitan Opera House on November 21, 1976 in collaboration with multi-media artist Robert Wilson. Glass has since become one of America’s most successful and widely known composers with the creation of more than twenty operas (including Satyagraha, based on Gandhi’s years in South Africa; Akhnaten, concerning an Egyptian pharaoh martyred for his monotheism; Galileo Galilei; and Appomattox), compositions for dance companies, film scores (perhaps most memorably those for The Thin Blue Line, Koyaanisqatsi, an extraordinary movie comprising exclusively images and music without a single spoken word, and the Oscar-nominated The Hours), works for his own ensemble (their 1981 recording, Glassworks, was a best-seller), nine symphonies, two dozen concertos, works for chorus and for solo piano, and several unclassifiable theater pieces (The Photographer, 1000 Airplanes on the Roof, The Mysteries and What’s So Funny?). He has also collaborated with Paul Simon, Linda Ronstadt, Yo-Yo Ma, Woody Allen, Leonard Cohen and Doris Lessing, among many others. Glass was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2003, won the 2010 Opera Honors Award from the NEA, was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama in 2015, and been nominated for an Oscar three times: Notes on a Scandal (2006), The Hours (2003) and Kundun (1998).

Glass composed his Concerto for Saxophones in 1995 for the Raschèr Saxophone Quartet, founded in 1969 by Sigurd Raschèr (1907-2001), a pioneer in establishing the saxophone as a concert instrument and expanding its repertory with missionary zeal. Glass’ publisher, Music Sales Classical, supplied the following description of the Concerto, written by Nick Breckenfield:

“The overall tenor of the Concerto is one of relaxed lyricism, with the gentle first and third movements contrasting with the jazzier second and fourth. The first movement is in a flowing tempo, with the lower orchestral instruments introducing the three rhythmic and melodic cells from which the music is developed. The four saxophones (soprano and tenor in B-flat; alto and baritone in E-flat) enter with the same material and later introduce rocking triplet figurations. A quiet, extended, off-beat syncopation is taken up by the quartet joined by high winds and violins. These elements alternate until the rather sparse ending, where the music ebbs quietly away. 

“The frenetic, scherzo-style second movement allows the baritone sax to introduce a syncopated jazz figure at the outset. There are few places in the movement where the saxophones play all together rather than two at a time. The syncopated rhythms die away for a quiet close. 

“The slow third movement, which a reviewer of the American premiere wrote is ‘as restful as a lullaby,’ never gets loud. The tenor sax has an extended, laid-back solo that is slowly developed. Soprano and alto soloists take over, and eventually the baritone enters, building to an insistent climax after which the soloists and orchestra alternate gently with each other to the end.

“Multiple meters proliferate in the final movement, which has a jaunty, syncopated, insistent, rising theme. The music dances on amidst swirling accompaniment. A descending passage for the four soloists marks the half-way point, but the pace never slackens, as orchestra and soloist rush headlong to the sudden final flourish.”

©2022 Dr. Richard E. Rodda