Music With Changing Parts 61’04”

Amstel Quartet with
Laura Sandee & Pascal Meyer voice and keyboards

With Music with Changing Parts (1970), a monumental work from Philip Glass’s early period, Amstel Quartet returns to the meditative and grooving world of hard-core minimalism. This work, consisting of repeated melodic figures which gradually expand and contract, shares some of the rhythmic, trance-inducing aspects of the earlier Music in Similar Motion. However, through the addition of subtle vocal parts and long tones improvised at different moments in the piece by the musicians, the music acquires a different dimension and anticipates Glass’s opera work of the later 1970s, such as Einstein on the Beach.