UCSB Arts & Lectures will present Philip Glass and The Poets, 7 p.m. Sunday, May 17 at UCSB Campbell Hall.
Approaching Glass’ 90th birthday, Arts & Lectures celebrates his longstanding collaborations with poets.
The event features Glass interpreter and composer Timo Andres; and theater artist and MacArthur fellow Taylor Mac.
Throughout his career, Glass has drawn inspiration from poets’ words and lives, Arts & Lectures said.
In particular, his friendship with American beat poet Allen Ginsberg spawned multiple collaborations; and the upcoming event will include previously unreleased recordings of Ginsberg reading his poetry set to some of Glass’ most intimate chamber music.
Members of the San Francisco Girls’ Chorus will sing songs by Ginsberg and Leonard Cohen, and choreographer and performer Lucinda Childs performs poetry from Glass’ 1976 opera “Einstein on the Beach.” Co-commissioned by Pomegranate Arts. (Philip Glass will not be performing.)
“Through his operas, his symphonies, his compositions for his own ensemble, and his wide-ranging collaborations, Philip Glass has had an extraordinary and unprecedented impact upon the musical and intellectual life of his times,” Arts & Lectures said.
Glass has written music for experimental theater and for Academy Award-winning motion pictures such as “The Hours” and Martin Scorsese’s “Kundun,” while “Koyaanisqatsi,” his initial filmic landscape with Godfrey Reggio and the Philip Glass Ensemble, may be the most radical and influential mating of sound and vision since “Fantasia,” according to Arts & Lectures.
His associations, personal and professional, with leading rock, pop and world music artists date back to the 1960s, including the beginning of his collaborative relationship with artist Robert Wilson. Glass is the first composer to win a wide, multi-generational audience in the opera house, the concert hall, the dance world, in film and in popular music – simultaneously.
He was born in 1937 and grew up in Baltimore, Maryland. He studied at the University of Chicago, the Juilliard School and in Aspen with Darius Milhaud.
Finding himself dissatisfied with much of what then passed for modern music, Glass moved to Europe, where he studied with the legendary pedagogue Nadia Boulanger (who also taught Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson and Quincy Jones) and worked closely with the sitar virtuoso and composer Ravi Shankar.
He returned to New York in 1967 and formed the Philip Glass Ensemble – seven musicians playing keyboards and a variety of woodwinds, amplified and fed through a mixer.
The new musical style that Glass was evolving was eventually dubbed “minimalism.” Glass himself never liked the term and preferred to speak of himself as a composer of “music with repetitive structures.”
There has been nothing minimalist about his output. Glass has composed more than 30 operas; 14 symphonies, 13 concertos; soundtracks to films; nine string quartets; a growing body of work for solo piano and organ.
Timo Andres is a composer and pianist whose season is threaded through by an ongoing collaboration with pianist Aaron Diehl. The duo performed a two-piano recital at Carnegie Hall and Howland Chamber Music in January.
In recent seasons, Andres made his sold-out solo recital debut at Carnegie Hall; received a Tony nomination for his work orchestrations and arrangements of Sufjan Stevens’s “Illinoise” for the acclaimed theatrical production by Justin Peck and Jackie Sibblies Drury.
Notable works include “Everything Happens So Much” for the Boston Symphony; “Strong Language” for the Takács Quartet; and “The Blind Banister,” a concerto for Jonathan Biss, which was a 2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist.
As a pianist, Andres has appeared with the LA Phil, North Carolina Symphony, the Albany Symphony, the New World Symphony and the Metropolis Ensemble, among others.
St. Taylor Mac is a theater artist who prefers to write a bio in the first person.
“Hello. I’m also a theater artist who longs to be rid of the usual bios, which are lists of achievements. Here’s something different.
“In case you don’t know, my pronoun is judy (only capitalized when at the start of a sentence, like a normal pronoun).
“A few people have claimed I use it as a joke. They are uninformed. It’s not a joke, which doesn’t mean it isn’t funny. It’s a personalized pronoun for someone whose gender (professionally and personally) is constantly changing.
“My gender isn’t male or female or non-binary (which oddly creates a binary between people who are non-binary and people who are binary). My gender is ‘performer’ (one day I’ll get it on the passport) and continually changing. It’s also an art piece and as annoying to navigate as it is delicious. You too may change yourself.
Films include: “Whitman in the Woods” (directed by Noah Greenberg) and “Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music” (a concert doc directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman).
“Occasionally Mac acts in plays by others.” Most notable: the title role in Sarah Ruhl’s “Orlando” (Signature Theatre, directed by Will Davis); the title role in The Foundry Theatre’s “Good Person of Szechwan” (La Mama and The Public Theatre, directed by Lear DeBessonet); and Puck/Egeus in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (Classic Stage Company, directed by Tony Speciale).
Childs holds the rank of commandeur in France’s Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
In 2017 she received the Golden Lion award from the Venice Biennale and the Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival award for lifetime achievement.
She has been inducted into the Hall of Fame of the National Museum of Dance in Saratoga Springs, New York, and received an honorary doctorate from the Université Côte d’Azur in 2021.
Since its founding in 1978, the San Francisco Girls’ Chorus (SFGC) has redefined what a youth chorus can be: a powerhouse of artistry, education and innovation that amplifies the unique and compelling sound of young voices.
Guided by a mission to create transformative performances while shaping the future of the art form, SFGC has become an international leader in treble choral music and a vital cultural force in the Bay Area and beyond.
“Under the leadership of artistic director Valérie Sainte-Agathe, the chorus has cultivated an incomparable sound – crystal-clear, dramatic and deeply expressive,” according to arts & Lectures. “This vibrant artistry brings to life more than a millennium of music, from ancient plainchant to adventurous contemporary works written specifically for the ensemble.
Every year, hundreds of singers aged four to 18 from across 45 Bay Area cities take part in SFGC’s programs. SFGC has produced award-winning concerts, recordings and tours.