Philip Glass - Three Songs / Songs from Liquid days / Vessels

Unless you raid the operas, there is very little music by Philip Glass for chorus which can be performed in concert. I was musing on this one Friday evening — during a rehearsal of the Three songs for Crouch End Festival Chorus's 1997 performance at Snape Maltings — when a little phrase suddenly reminded me of the song Liquid Days. And from that association grew the idea of making a version of Songs from liquid days for chorus and orchestra.

Right from the beginning, I was determined to make an arrangement that the casual listener would be surprised to learn hadn't been made by Mr Glass himself and I strove to keep the arrangement as idiomatic as possible.

I was also very concerned to produce a version that stood a chance of performance. This means, as much as anything, that it should not be gratuitously expensive to mount. So, I reasoned, if I gave the choir a lot of the music previously performed by instruments — brass, synthesisers and so on — the orchestra could be reduced to flutes, strings, piano and organ (plus lots of percussion for Lightning), retaining the essential components of the original soundworld of the album.

Discussing this arrangement with Philip Glass was immensely helpful, and encouraging, and resulted in a number of the features of the final version. The retention of both piano and organ in Open the Kingdom was at his request; on the other hand, he readily agreed to my idea of 'fading out' the piano in Changing Opinion. Glass also sanctioned the small cuts in the first song, made solely to tighten up a structure which otherwise tends to be a bit too much of a good thing. Apart from these particular cuts, all the songs on this album follow the first recorded version bar by bar (plus a few extra repeats in Open the Kingdom and Forgetting where the sonority and power of the choir justified them.)

This version differs fundamentally from a mere transcription in that the cycle of choral songs has been thoroughly thought through as a dramatic work in its own right and the listener familiar with the original album will detect very many small points of departure from that version (starting at the very beginning). Also the order of the songs has been changed for this arrangement.

I was greatly aided by having access to the composer's original drafts of Lightning, In Liquid Days, Freezing and Forgetting, which themselves differ in many respects from how the songs appear on the first album. However, I have certainly not blindly reinstated original versions of passages which the composer changed later.

As usual with Glass, the six songs are all fashioned from a modest set of melodic and harmonic material and the composer's ability to create completely different atmospheres from not only simple material, but the same simple material, is a tour de force. And, although I believe each song could be performed in isolation, there is no doubt that together they form a total, greater than the sum of its parts.

For this album the orchestra and choir were recorded direct to stereo 2-track, being mixed simultaneously, in order to give the feel of a "live" performance as, after all, the music is arranged to be performed in concert without the benefit of studio technology. The solo vocals where then added later.

The Three Songs were commissioned for the 350th Anniversary of Quebec in 1984 and, like Songs from liquid days, the Three Songs set words from a wide variety of sources. Perhaps because they are sung a capella, they are tighter, more concise. And if anyone doubted Glass's ability to write powerful, melodic (non-minimalist) music they need look no further than the first of these songs, There are some men.

Vessels comes from one of Glass's finest scores, the soundtrack to the film Koyaanisqatsi. As with Songs from Liquid Days, this performance goes back to Philip Glass's manuscript, which explains why the instrumentation of the current performance— flute, soprano and tenor saxophones — differs from that of the other recorded versions.

— Jeremy Marchant, July 2000


THREE SONGS - For Choir a Capella
1. There Are Some Men 2:54
2. Quand les Hommes Vivront d'Amour 3:00
3. Pierre de Soleil 4:02

VESSELS from KOYAANISQATSI - For Choir, Saxophones and Flute
4. Vessels (from Koyaanisqatsi) 7:55

SONGS FROM LIQUID DAYS - For Choir, Soloists and Orchestra
5. Changing Opinion 8:59
6. Lightning 6:47
7. In Liquid Days 5:09
8. Open The Kingdom 8:31
9. Freezing 3:28
10. Forgetting 9:07