This week at NYCB, the dancers had the honor of performing Jerome Robbins' Glass Pieces for the composer himself! He sat discreetly in the back of the audience (near the usher's seat, which is how I was able to take this photos of Glass' head silhouetted against the stage.)
Philip Glass (center) watches Glass Pieces at NYCB. May 14, 2024. Photo by Lauryn Johnson.
Philip Glass and Jerome Robbins take a curtain call after the premiere of Glass Pieces in 1983. Photo by Martha Swope.
More on Philip Glass
In college, Philip Glass double majored in mathematics and philosophy. Music composition began as a hobby during college but became his career: 18 operas, 10 symphonies, 11 concertos, and 37 film scores. His mathematical studies in college, however, appear to influence his music by way of patterns, sequences, and formulas. Rather than building a composition around a musical structure whose inner workings are only understood by the musically-initiated, Glass’ music reveals the structure of the music like an exoskeleton. Rather than building the frame of a house and then covering it with brick and vinyl siding, he leaves the beams exposed and shows us the beauty of the structure itself—the series of supports, the regularity of the trusses, the angles of the joints.
In Robbins’ Glass Pieces (whether an intentional reference to math or not) the backdrop is an illuminated grid resembling a student’s geometry notebook, draft paper for an architectural drawing, or the comforting repetition of NYC’s streets.
The video I’ve included here is titled “Geometry of Circles” which comes from a series of animation pieces created for Sesame Street in 1979. Animator Cathryn Aison created a storyboard of the animation and then commissioned Glass to write the music based on that. In this example, Glass was quite literally composing what math “sounds” like.
Comments