Philip Glass is an American contemporary music composer. Well known for his minimal style music, Glass has composed numerous multimedia works such as opera, film music, theater music, and dance music. He has a strong interest in multimedia music, whic...
Philip Glass is an American contemporary music composer. Well known for his minimal style music, Glass has composed numerous multimedia works such as opera, film music, theater music, and dance music. He has a strong interest in multimedia music, which leads us to the new methodology to analyze his music. Therefore, this paper explores musical aspects of Glass in multimedia through Koyaanisqatsi(1982), an experimental film, made by Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass. The followings are the musical features of Glass studied in this paper.
Firstly, the repetition of musical figures in his works makes a synchronization of the visual and auditory senses. It is because of the picture-like characteristics of the repeating musical patterns can be easily juxtaposed with the repetitive patterns of images in the film.
Secondly, the repetitions of chordal progress or musical division are employed as musical ostinato in the film. In this case, the moving image of film can be perceived as a musical melody line. Furthermore, this way of combination can be extended as an integrated tension made by visual and acoustic senses, because the audiences are able to recognize musical elements being put into visual elements or vice versa.
Thirdly, non-polyphonic structures or the texture of multi-layered arpeggios can smoothly combine themselves with the visual medium which has only one screen such as film. This is because musical structures of his works make steady rhythms of pulses. For these reasons, music of Glass and moving image create a relationship like that of dance music and dancer.
After researching these aspects, I analyze one sequence named ‘Grid’ from the film in a context of the three features mentioned above. In detailed, I study the organic relationships between musical elements presented in the sequence, such as harmonies, rhythms, and repetitions, and visual elements such as cuts, some of mise-en-scène, and camera movements.
This study is not a study of film music, which deals with music as a subelement of a film. Instead, this focused on a sort of example of the way music exists in new circumstances. Also, this result shows us that music can create a new meaning in a multimedia environment. In addition, through an observation of this interaction, various musical features of Philip Glass, for instance his extreme simplicity, can be newly understood as his own charms, cannot be interpreted in the formalism context.