Sunday Night Special 5… ‘Low’ Symphony by Philip Glass

Hello Everyone, my name is Peter Cudlipp.

Welcome to another in the occasional series of extra episodes of the Classical For Everyone podcast. Episodes which I am calling Sunday Night Specials.

The name comes from the night of the week when for some of us, the demon of insomnia hits the hardest… and for me, and I hope for you, getting lost in some music is a much better thing to do than stare at the ceiling or a phone screen.

Now I’m not choosing the music with the hope that it will send you to sleep, though it’s fine if it does… this is music to keep you company.  And course this series is for everyone… but it is perhaps intended a little more for those of you whose sleep has been troubled.

The idea of the special is to play you just one piece, uninterrupted and in its entirety… with a few minutes of background explained at the end of the episode… if you’re interested. But the main thing is to get straight into the music.

And tonight it is a symphony from 1992 by the American composer Philip Glass. He gave it the name the ‘Low Symphony’. It is about 43 minutes long, is in three parts and starts pretty quietly.

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I hope you enjoyed that performance of the ‘Low Symphony’ by Philip Glass. It was performed by the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Dennis Russell Davies.

Here are a couple of minutes of background for you.

In 1992 Philip Glass was 55 years of age and had completed what is now called his ‘Portrait Trilogy’… the three full-length operas… Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha and Aknaten… As well as roughly a dozen other what can collectively be called music theatre works. He was probably, and with good cause, regarded as the best living opera composer of the time.

The conductor Dennis Russell Davies had been working with Glass since the late 1970s including conducting his operas and he realised that Glass had a real gift for pure orchestral writing that emerged from time to time in the operas. So, in his role as Principal Conductor of the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra, he commissioned Glass to write a symphony, which would be his first, famously saying to Glass… "I'm not going to let you be one of those opera composers who never writes a symphony."

Glass found his inspiration in a perhaps surprising place… and gave credit to it in the title he gave the symphony… David Bowie and Brian Eno's 1977 album ‘Low’. Glass had admired the album since its release, recognizing that Bowie and Eno were using experimental techniques similar to those employed by composers in the ‘new music’ circles he was a part of. He selected themes from three instrumental tracks on the record… and at the time he wrote…

My approach was to treat the themes very much as if they were my own and allow their transformations to follow my own compositional bent when possible. In practice, however, Bowie and Eno's music certainly influenced how I worked, leading me to sometimes surprising musical conclusions. In the end I think I arrived at something of a real collaboration between my music and theirs.

The Low Symphony premiered in 1992 in Munich… and was recorded in 1993 by the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra under Dennis Russell Davies. The reception was positive, with some critics hearing echoes of Copland, Ives, and Bernstein in Glass's orchestral writing. The work surprised many listeners who associated Glass primarily with minimalism, revealing a composer expanding into new orchestral territory.

And once Glass started writing symphonies, he couldn't and hasn’t stopped—he's now written 15 of them including two more using themes from the other albums Bowie and Eno made in Berlin, ‘Heroes’ and ‘Lodger’. 

Thanks for listening and in a few days there will be another episode of Classical For Everyone out in the world.

To finish I want to let you know I chose tonight’s music especially with a couple of friends in mind… one who thinks classical music stopped in 1827 and one who is a recent convert to the music of Philip Glass.

Sleep well everyone.