Hello humans, I am Tyler Suarez. I will be popping on here occasionally to provide some insight and examination into songs or musical works that I find blissful, brilliant or beautiful in the series "Tyler Talks Music."
To start, music is my life. I have been playing guitar since the age of 4 and have been professionally studying music for almost 4 years at the University of Bridgeport. I could sit down and type out a crazy long music blog about the cadential 6/4 and how it changes the entire tone of a Bach piece, but I'm not going to do that- that's what I have to do in class.
I don't want people to stray away from reading these blogs because of big musical terminology that makes no sense to normal people. I want people to read these to start to see music in a different way, and realize that you don't need to know the technical aspects to transform your perspective. "bloom" is the perfect place to do this because that's exactly what Jenn is trying to do with every other aspect of art, health and life.
With all that being said... grab a coffee, open up your preferred music streaming service, and let's dive into the 3.5 hour mystical world created by my favorite composer, Philip Glass, in his 1974 seminal work "Music in 12 Parts."
As we press play on Part 1, we immediately start to float. Reeds, flutes, keyboards and a wordless singer gracefully prepare our ears (and mind) for the next 11 parts Glass will unleash on us. As you will discover, this is the only slow part. It is like Glass gives us a break with the first 18 minutes, before he rams it into overdrive.
This piece emerged as a kind of primer for the rules of this style/genre – a musical experiment in which a large-scale work was built up of tiny figures endlessly repeated, stretched, added to and manipulated. So if it sounds foreign at first, that's okay!
Personally, most of the time that I'm not listening to a piece by Glass, I'm listening to him talk. Upon all the Glass interviews I watch in my spare time, I discovered that he originally wrote this piece with inspiration from Indian ragas in mind (look it up! super interesting). That inspiration can be felt throughout this whole piece.
There is something extremely meditative about it. With a combination of fast high notes and slow, sustained tones I keep being drawn back to Newton's law of inertia. When you hear a note repeated enough times, you begin to think it will never change. Waves of high-speed back and forths between notes become your brain’s new normal. But when the pattern changes abruptly (from one part to another), readjusting momentarily feels like you’re cheating on the previous sound and you can't find the footing that you cemented halfway through the previous part.
The entire peice is like a flight on one of those zero gravity planes. You start off slow and you're comfortable in your seat and then before you know it- you lose your footing and you're in the air, and this plane ride lasts hours. Constantly losing your footing as soon as you gain it.
The beautiful thing about this piece is that it is calmingly invigorating. Just like life, this piece pushes your confirmative tendencies and refreshes your mindset towards life.
Keep listening,