Somebody had to write Music in 12 Parts. In 1975, when minimalism was barely a twinkling triangle nagging at John Adams’s eardrum, Philip Glass got together an ensemble to perform a piece that emerged as a kind of primer for the rules of the genre – a musical experiment in which a large-scale work was built up of tiny figures endlessly repeated, stretched, added to and manipulated.
But does the piece have the same impact when it is no longer experimental? On one hand, it’s hard to reproduce a state in which 1970s synthesiser settings – harpsichord, strings, doorbell – don’t sound quaint, or when this music wasn’t the soundtrack to every TV advert. On the other, any performance has a novelty. This one – with James McVinnie leading nine other players from the keyboard, and lasting five and a half hours with intervals – was the first by a group other than the Philip Glass Ensemble.
Alongside the classic Glass ingredients of synthesisers, tuned percussion and wordless soprano, the lineup offered some potentially interesting instruments – viola da gamba, cor anglais, electric harp, bass flute. Their sonorities generally got sucked into the amplified melee. But the playing was admirable, for its RSI-inducing dexterity, sheer stamina and sometimes – as in part nine, when scales rose gently in parallel before cascading down – for its musicality. Music in 12 Parts has moments of arrival, jubilation and even euphoria, and they were all there in this performance, even if Glass spreads them very thinly.
