Philip Glass – Music With Changing Parts
Philip Glass’s Music With Changing Parts (1970) marks a pivotal turning point in the composer’s career — a bridge between the austere rhythmic minimalism of his early works and the richer, more fluid harmonic language that would later define his operas and symphonies. It stands as both culmination and experiment: a piece that consolidates his early process-driven techniques while opening the door to greater freedom, warmth, and spontaneity.
Written for an open ensemble, the score unfolds as a continuous stream of repeating figures that gradually shift in rhythm, pitch, and harmonic weight. The work’s title is almost a description of its method: rather than strict additive patterns or fixed rhythmic modules, Music With Changing Parts invites performers to linger on fragments, overlap phases, and introduce sustained tones that blur the edges of the musical fabric. The result is a texture that feels at once rigorous and alive — a shimmering organism of sound that breathes, grows, and transforms.
Where Glass’s earlier pieces explored the precision of structure, Music With Changing Parts begins to explore the precision of perception. The shifts are often microscopic, yet their cumulative effect is vast. Listeners find themselves drawn into a hypnotic continuum in which small changes in timbre or interval radiate with surprising intensity. Each performer becomes both an individual voice and a component of a larger system — listening, adjusting, and aligning in real time.
For us, this piece is a natural meeting point between compositional process and collective listening. Our instrumentation — tuned percussion, violin, cello, bass clarinet, flute, and two keyboards — brings a renewed palette of colour and resonance to the work. The tuned percussion adds a crystalline rhythmic brightness, allowing patterns to sparkle and interlock with heightened clarity; the strings and winds introduce a sense of breath, a human suppleness that animates the repeated figures; and the two keyboards provide a warm harmonic foundation, expanding the music’s resonance beyond the more familiar organ and woodwind timbres of earlier performances.
This reimagined instrumentation opens up new relationships between texture and space. Overtones ripple outward, rhythms overlap like shifting currents, and subtle variations in tone colour reshape the perception of pulse. Each performance becomes a dialogue between sound and environment — the acoustics of the space, the energy of the audience, and the collective awareness of the players all influencing the flow of the music.
We feel Music With Changing Parts not as a historical minimalist artefact but a living system: a structure designed to evolve through performance. The score provides a framework, but its real substance lies in listening — in how each musician’s choices ripple through the ensemble, shaping patterns that can never repeat in exactly the same way.
This openness mirrors the ensemble’s broader philosophy. Our work seeks to connect the radical experimentation of the 1960s and ’70s with the present moment, creating performances that exist as much in space and time as in notation. By approaching Glass’s music with an ear for resonance, colour, and social experience, we aim to reveal its continuing vitality — music that, even half a century later, remains fresh, direct, and alive.
In Music With Changing Parts, repetition is never static. It is a form of transformation — a reminder that within even the most limited material lies infinite possibility, provided we continue to listen.
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