The Paris Junior College Choir, led by PJC Music Director Dr. Michael Holderer, will present a lecture recital on the music of composer Philip Glass on Monday, March 24 at 6 p.m. The free concert will take place in the Shaw Recital Hall in the Music Building.
“Join PJC piano students, choir, and the PJC cheer squad in a presentation about and musical performances from one of the most significant still-living composers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries,” said Holderer. “His tonal-minimalistic style of composition has been heard in and influenced everything from popular music to Hollywood cinema. Prepare to be immersed in what will surely be a unique musical experience.”
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.
The operas – “Einstein on the Beach,” “Satyagraha,” “Akhnaten,” and “The Voyage,” among many others – play throughout the world’s leading houses, and rarely to an empty seat. 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.”
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. Indeed, 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.
Glass has composed more than thirty operas; fourteen symphonies, thirteen concertos; soundtracks to films ranging from new scores for the stylized classics of Jean Cocteau to Errol Morris’s documentary about former defense secretary Robert McNamara; nine string quartets; and a growing body of work for solo piano and organ. He has collaborated with Allen Ginsberg, David Bowie, Paul Simon, Linda Ronstadt, Yo-Yo Ma, Leonard Cohen, and Doris Lessing, among many others.
For more information about the concert or the music program at PJC, contact mholderer@parisjc.edu.
