In which Philip Glass meets the vernacular and finds salvation. Or almost. But first, a few necessary points of clarification. The work on this disc is called the Low Symphony because the three movements it is made up of are developed from material 'borrowed' from a rock album made in 1975 by David Bowie and his then-collaborator, Brian Eno. The album was called ''Low'' and, even though there was no piece of music of that name included on it, Glass's re-working of three tracks from that name has been given that title, apparently with Bowie's blessing.
I would unhesitatingly say that this is the most musical composition from Glass in many years. Depending on your Weltanschauung, that may mean a lot or mean nothing. In this work, the actual sound of the piece, and a firm grip on where it goes in the end, seems to be of more interest to the composer than the theory of how the notes got there in the first place. But then he is working with an original which delivers unusual material for a minimalist to work with: melody; direct emotion; a varied structure; a sense of drama.
What is of overriding interest, however, is the use to which Glass puts these raw materials. For one, he has dispensed with the vocal renditions which were the core moments of two of the original pieces—Subterraneans and Warszawa; this music is purely orchestral. (One point worth at least noting is that Bowie is as big a magpie as Glass, having borrowed the main theme of Warszawa, completely intact, from Polish folk-music.) The other central point is that when Glass comes to develop the raw material he has inherited from Eno and Bowie, he immediately abandons the musical language of the original and dons the static rhythmic and harmonic patterns of the minimalist language he helped define. In that sense, the music shows its joins.
The final point of main comment concerns Glass's actual arrangements. In each of the three movements, he provides the listener with an initial statement which is a close copy of the source material he is working from. However, it is never more than an approximation, and while this can be a positive thing, allowing the creative artist the aesthetic room from which to strike out into their own unique idiom, with Glass in this piece, there is an inevitable reduction in resonance from the original. I will give just a single example. The Low Symphony opens with a straightforward re-creation of the opening few minutes from Subterraneans, the last piece of music from Bowie's ''Low''.
Yet it's not so straightforward. On the original, created entirely on synthesizers, the first theme is accompanied, and commented upon, by a distended, elliptical and entirely captivating series of descant melodic slivers (most of them emerging backwards), closer to Indian and Islamic music than anything else. Glass has not ignored these filigrees. On the contrary. But the solution to the problem of representing these within the context of an orchestra made up of conventional acoustic instruments is a rather lame major third tremolo sustained by the strings right the way through the initial exposition. The enigmatic quality of the original slips away.
Other listeners could argue with conviction that Glass manages to create something new and musically valid from the materials he has picked. In a way, that is quite true: any artefact has finally to stand or fall on its own merits, or lack of them. And this work shows a stronger sense of traditional concerns such as form, harmonic movement and emotional impact than any other Glass I care to recall, so it certainly stakes a claim to be considered on its own. But then we come back to the name: Low Symphony. Glass wants us, the audience, to know where this music came from. He invites comparison. To which I can only answer that this is an encouraging—perhaps even courageous—work from a composer not usually given to the romance of music. But is it not ''Low''.'