Music in Twelve Parts is one of the pillars of minimal music and of all contemporary music. The culmination of a long and complex creative process, this composition is the sum of the concepts called additive process and cyclical structure, explored by Glass starting from the mid-sixties and brought to full completion with Music in Twelve Parts. There are two discographic documentations of this monumental musical page, always with the Philip Glass Ensemble: the first was made between 1975 and 1987, while the second was recorded between March and June 1993, at the composer's studios.
“Since 1965, my obsession has been to create rhythmic structures from which the general form of the work would arise spontaneously. It all began with Samuel Beckett's Play, but my interest in this technique had been stimulated even earlier by my encounter with Ravi Shankar and Alla Rakha, and the music of my group reflected until the end of the 1960s my concern with developing techniques that expanded a rhythmic motif into the general structure. In 1970 I was finally ready to incorporate my reflections of the previous five years into a major work. Music in Twelve Parts was to become a kind of catalogue of ideas about rhythmic structure. Each part embodied a series of these techniques (the cyclical, additive, repetitive structure), so that by the time Part 10 was completed, the work of cataloguing was practically finished. Part 11 then focused on the connecting elements between the various parts, which appeared to the listener as modulations. The theme of Part 12 was finally the cadence, that is, the normal closing phrase we are used to in Western music: a fitting finale for a piece of such a large scope (each part lasted about twenty minutes, so that the whole composition, including intervals, was five and a half hours).
Modulation and cadence, combined with the previous techniques of rhythmic structure, formed the basis of my next composition for the Ensemble – Another Look at Harmony, Parts 1 and 2 – which then became the beginning of Einstein On The Beach”. Philip Glass (from My Music, Edizioni Socrates)
