Ravi Shankar and Philip Glass - Passages
“This historic collaboration brings full circle a process which began when promising young American musician Philip Glass met Indian master Ravi Shankar in Paris in 1965. That week Glass, studying with the great Nadia Boulanger, was earning pocket money doing notation and conducting a recording session for the soundtrack of Conrad Rook’s film “Chappacqua.” The score’s composer, Ravi Shankar, was directing his ensemble from the sitar.
What the young Glass heard which lay beyond his conservatory hermeticity was RHYTHM, long out of fashion in the world of American academic post-Webernism, with its almost exclusive concern for harmonic organization. Indian music is based on melody, which would get you laughed at Princeton or Columbia, and rhythm, which despite Stravinsky’s efforts in works like “Le Sacre du Printemps” or “ Les Noces,” was considered “incidental” to constructing 12-tone rows and other serious contrapuntal matters.
So for someone to play for the budding composer an expressive, vital, respect-worthy music must have been mildly astonishing at the very least. He realized that one could construct music on a rhythmic, as opposed to a harmonic, base.
Also, unlike most of the composers Glass had met up till that time, Ravi Shankar was a player, a composer/performer, whose authority arose from intimate hands-on contact with the music itself, and the other musicians, with whom he regularly shared a vibrating column of air.
Unlike previous Shankar “collaborations” (actually elaborate sessions with masters of other musical traditions joining Ravi to “jam” on his own music) the Glass encounter was a rare instance of classical music reciprocity, each composer presenting thematic material to the other as raw material from which these finished pieces were fashioned. “Passages” contains four such co-ventures: two Glass compositions on themes by Shankar (Shankar/Glass); two Shankar compositions on themes by Glass (Glass/Shankar) as well as one piece from each composer completely of his own devising.” -Martin Perlich
The pieces nicely blend and combine almost seamlessly; the intensity, sometimes quiet and sometimes driving and exciting, characterizes the entire CD.
Mere words are not enough to describe the entire emotional charge and powerfulness of this album, so you’ll have to listen to it in order to experience and feel it completely.
Only two words are left to be said: Brilliant and exquisite.
Tracklist:
1. Offering
2. Sadhanipa
3. Channels and Winds
4. Ragas In Minor Scale
5. Meetings Along The Edge
6. Prashanti
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