Sold Date: January 19, 2018
Start Date: January 9, 2018
Final Price: $39.67 (USD)
Bid Count: 5
Seller Feedback: 54
Buyer Feedback: 105

This is an original 1st pressing of a Philip Glass masterpiece.
Privately issued on Chatham Square Records by the composer in the early 1971.
Now is your chance to complete your Philip Glass collection and own a piece of history!
Thank you for considering my auction offering!    Note: I am original owner of this LP.

Label/Catalog Number        Chatham Square Productions    1001/2

Condition
     Media:   NM  High gloss grooves and dead wax.  Labels in perfect shape. (see photos)     
     Sleeve:  VG+  A bit of shelf wear (see upper left corner_last photo), no seam splits, no stains.  (see photos)

     Matrix:    S1:   USR 4151-1 RE1 CHQ 1201      S2:   USR 4151-2  RE1 CHQ 1202   
                     S3:    USR 4151-3 RE1 CHQ 1203     S4:    USR 4151 RE1 s1064 CHQ 1204

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Tracklist
A    Music With Changing Parts (Part One)    
B     Music With Changing Parts (Part Two)    
C     Music With Changing Parts (Part Three)    
D     Music With Changing Parts (Part Four)

Companies, etc.
    Recorded At – Martinson Hall
    Mixed At – Butterfly Studio, New York City

Credits
    Original music composed by Philip Glass.
    Electric Piano – Arthur Murphy
    Engineer – Bob Fries
    Engineer, Electronics – Kurt Munkacsi
    Mixed By – Kurt Munkacsi, Philip Glass, Dickie Landry
    Organ [Electric] – Steve Chambers
    Organ [Electric], Flute [Alto] – Philip Glass
    Organ [Electric], Soprano Saxophone, Flute, Voice – Jon Gibson
    Photography By – C. Girouard
    Producer – Klaus Kertess, Philip Glass
    Soprano Saxophone, Tenor Saxophone, Piccolo Flute, Voice – Dickie Landry
    Trumpet, Flute, Voice – Robert Prado
    Violin [Electric], Voice – Barbara Benary

Notes
Recorded in the Martinson Hall of the Public Theater, Lafayette Street, New York City by Butterfly Productions, Inc. using a mobile studio equipped with a 16-track recorder with Bob Fries and Kurt Munkacsi engineers. Mixdown from 16-track to 2-track stereo by Kurt Munkacsi, Dickie Landry and Philip Glass at Butterfly Studio, New York City.
Issued in gatefold sleeve.
Note that side 1 and 4 are the first disc, while side 2 and 3 are the second disc.

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Album Review
In his book All American Music, John Rockwell writes lyrically of a 1973 Soho performance of Philip Glass's "Music With Changing Parts": "Glass's ensemble that night played with the spirit and precision that only years together can bring. The music danced and pulsed with a special life, its motoric rhythms, burbling, highly amplified figurations and mournful sustained notes booming out through the huge black windows and filling up the bleak industrial neighborhood. It was so loud that the dancers Douglas Dunn and Sara Rudner, who were strolling down Wooster Street, sat on a stoop and enjoyed the concert together from afar. A pack of teenagers kept up an ecstatic dance of their own. and across the street, silhouetted high up in a window, a lone saxophone player improvised in silent accompaniment like some faded postcard of fifties Greenwich Village Bohemia. It was a good night to be in New York City".

It is likely that many of Glass's admirers are unfamiliar with his work, one of the composer's most significant and attractive. "Music With Changing Parts" was issued only on LP (two discs, packaged in an inexpensively made, grainy black and white cover, produced by Glass's own semi-private Chatham Square label) and it has been out of print since the late 1970s. By the time Glass completed "Music With Changing Parts", in early 1970, he had been performing with an early — and still metamorphosing — version of the Philip Glass Ensemble for about two years. "Music With Changing Parts" is constructed with the techniques Glass had developed in earlier works such as "Music In Fifths", "Contrary Motion" and "Music In similar Motion". The score is broken into brief modules; Glass, from the keyboard, "conducted" the ensemble with nods of his lead indicating it was time to move from one module to the next. Like most of the early pieces for the Philip Glass Ensemble, "Music With Changing Parts" was written in open score, with no specific orchestration. Instead, what Glass calls "unassigned lines" of music were divided up in rehearsals. The listener will notice some unfamiliar timbres (unfamiliar, that is, for the Glass ensemble) in this recording: the late Robert Prado is heard on trumpet and the composer Barbara Benary plays violin. While Glass would later assign the violin an important part in both "Einstein on the Beach" and "The Photographer", it is used there in a soloistic manner quite different from the way it is blended among the winds and keyboards in "Music With Changing Parts". Besides Benary, several other players in the ensemble (notably Jon Gibson and Dickie Landry, both of whom would be associated with the group for many years) were composers and Glass remembers occasions when performances were joined by, among others, Anthony Braxton, James Tenney, Richard Teitelbaum and Frederic Rzewski. "Music With Changing Parts" is about as close as Glass would ever come to two very different styles of music: modern jazz and New Age. Glass carefully controlled the improvisation in "Changing Parts" (as he did in Part IV of "Music In Twelve Parts" and the Building scene in "Einstein on the Beach", the last of which remains far and away his jazziest piece) but it is there, nonetheless.

We find in "Music With Changing Parts" evolve from the same source as the improvisation: Glass's discovery, during a 1969  run through of "Music In Similar Motion", that sustained overtones and undertones were following the patterns played by the ensemble like an aural shadow. "In those days, we'd play in the center of a hall, with our speakers placed in the four corners of the room", Glass recalled in 1993. "And during one rehearsal we noticed sustained sounds emerging from the repeated beats of the music. I stopped and asked who was singing. and nobody was singing; it was just a psycho-acoustical effect of the music". And so, in his next piece, "Music With Changing Parts", Glass decided to augment what was already occurring naturally. Toward the end of this new composition, he added in long tones, allotted to wind instruments and voices, held for the length of a breath, to support the notes that emerged from the keyboard patterns, with the rule that a player could reinforce any tone emerging from the whirl. However, the creation of actual melodies — of "solos" — was discouraged.

Glass and the ensemble took "Music With Changing Parts" on tour throughout the United States and Europe in the early '70s; one English audience included David Bowie and Brian Eno, who heard Glass's music for the first time that night (and would collaborate with him some two decades later on the Low Symphony). A use of drones and repetition similar to that found in "Music With Changing Parts" would manifest itself in Eno's work as early as 1973, with the release of the first Fripp/Eno album, "No Pussyfooting" and, thus reconstituted, would have a tremendous influence on much popular music of the '70s and '80s. Glass himself was never particularly interested in following the implications of "Music With Changing Parts". "It was a little too spacey for my tastes", he says now. "We don't play it much anymore. But it was very important to my development. I proved to myself that the music I was making could sustain attention over a prolonged period of time, an hour or more. And that led directly to "Music In Twelve Parts" and then on to the operas".
 
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