Title : Philip Glass: Glassworks
Author : Glass, Philip
Release Date : 19901025
Binding : Audio CD
Regular Price : $9.98
Amazon.com Price : $8.67
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Editorial Reviews : Glassworks remains Philip Glass's bestseller from the middle period of his career, the recording by means of which many listeners familiarized themselves with his music. Conceived as a thematically whole instrumental studio album taking advantage of the promotional and marketing capabilities of what was then Glass's new major label (CBS, now Sony Classical) and targeted at consumers intrigued with his newfound notoriety, Glassworks features six parts (three per side on the original LP and cassette), alternately meditative and frenetic, that have since broken free and developed lives of their own. The most frequently rearranged and recorded part, 'Facades,' is an outtake from the score to Godfrey Reggio's film Koyaanisqatsi, which before editing had spent more time panning across the flat modernist surfaces of New York City skyscrapers, imparting a sense of alienation and despondency. Glass frequently performs the first part, 'Opening,' in solo piano recitals. When his ensemble performs the second part, 'Floe,' in concert, he adds a female voice where, in the recording, the horns perform the Sibelian accompaniment of stately rising and falling crotchets. Throughout, Glass popularizes his earlier idiom of relative rhythmic and harmonic stasis by enriching the instrumentation as well as modulating quickly and even--as in the case of 'Rubric'--at a vertiginous pace.
This album was one of the first by a contemporary composer to be recorded digitally, and it has held up remarkably well since 1982 despite the slight harshness and hiss. (CBS remixed the cassette version to satisfy users of portable stereos--back then a fairly new technology.) Fans of Glass will have added this title to their collections long ago, but if you're new to the composer's tonal, reiterative music, Glassworks is still as good a place to start as any. --Robert Burns Neveldine
Buyer Reviews : Collecting six bite-sized shards of Glass, this album is, along with 'Koyaanisqatsi', one of the two essential single Philip Glass albums. 'Facades' is the track most people will recognise, if they recognise a track, although the almost Enya-esque 'Closing' is a close second. Released at a time when the British navy was busily taking back the Falklands, Coke came in glass bottles, ring-pulls actually pulled all the way off, and Atari were seemingly unassailable giants of video game technology, this album hasn't dated even remotely, except by association with a decade that used minimalism when it wasn't being excessively maximalist - bare apartments, uncarpeted floors, nouvelle cuisine and so forth (it's no accident that John Cale's music for 'American Psycho' so resembles Philip Glass).
