Double LP
Philip Glass, the great American composer, was already in his mid-30s before his first album appeared, and then only because he produced the double LP himself. Music With Changing Parts was the inaugural release on his own Chatham Square imprint in 1971.
At this point, Einstein on the Beach, Glass’ first opera, was still five years away. Yet in Changing Parts, one can already hear much of his vocabulary in full bloom: the buoyant arpeggios, the melding of electronic and acoustic instruments, the elongated drones of human voice, the primary emphasis on pulse (an interest he shared with fellow composer Steve Reich) and the ecstatic potential inherent in repetition.
The album features the original Philip Glass Ensemble—the composer himself, along with Jon Gibson, Dickie Landry, Art Murphy, Steve Chambers and Robert Prado—playing Farfisa organs and woodwinds as well as Barbara Benary on electric violin.
As Glass describes in his memoir Words Without Music, he secured a $500 interest-free loan for the recordings’ initial release from the Hebrew Free Loan Society—an organization intended to help immigrants from the Old World upon arrival in the US. Though Glass was merely the grandson of immigrants, the venture wasn’t far off the society’s charter as Changing Parts helped usher in a new world of sound that would become known as Minimalism.
Chatham Square went on to release albums by other composers in Glass’ circle, including Gibson and Landry. The label was named after the Manhattan intersection where Landry had a studio and the ensemble rehearsed.
Born in Baltimore in 1937, Glass first moved to New York to attend Juilliard at just nineteen, having already graduated from the University of Chicago. A staple of the Downtown scene, he can perhaps be appreciated as akin to the likes of sculptor Richard Serra or filmmaker Jim Jarmusch: mavericks who became major cultural figures entirely on their own terms.
