Philip Glass melds musical urgency to images in 'Qatsi' film triology

Philip Glass melds musical urgency to images in 'Qatsi' film triology: "Philip Glass melds musical urgency to images in 'Qatsi' film triology
Joshua Kosman, Chronicle Music Critic

Monday, February 20, 2006

Philip Glass is often knocked or mocked for writing the same music over and over. You only have to hear a few minutes of different pieces in juxtaposition to know how misguided a notion that can be.

The score that Glass wrote for Godfrey Reggio's 1983 film "Koyaanisqatsi" is a collection of the composer's trademark gestures in their purest form -- the familiar rippling arpeggios and portentous minor chords, repeated in square but shifting phrases.

But five years later, with "Powaqqatsi," he was grafting those moves onto an exuberant mishmash of world music, fusing a recognizable personal vocabulary with elements from elsewhere.

The two scores sat back-to-back in Davies Symphony Hall over the weekend, courtesy of San Francisco Performances, as members of the Philip Glass Ensemble provided live accompaniment for screenings of all three components of Reggio's cinematic "Qatsi" trilogy. (Sunday's performance wound up the run with "Naqoyqatsi" from 2002.)

Both the contrast and the similarities proved wonderfully telling. Glass' musical signature can be as much a shtick as a style, as some of his more throwaway creations demonstrate; faux Glass is not that hard to come up with if you try.

But when he's writing with real urgency and a sense of the occasion, as in the film scores for "Koyaanisqatsi" and "Powaqqatsi," Glass' standard elements combine to create a commanding dramatic landscape.

And hearing the music performed live, by a 10-member ensemble conducted by Music Director Michael Riesman, only added to the feeling of grandeur and scope. Kurt Munkacsi, Glass' longtime sound-design guru, helped sculpt what seemed at times like solid masses of musical material in the air of Davies Hall, and the shifting textures -- now thunderous, now translucent and spare -- made a kaleidoscopic effect.

In the music for "Koyaanisqatsi," the combination of this big, electronically modulated sound with Glass' stripped-down compositional aesthetic produced a piquant sense of contrast. The opening sequence, with a deep-voiced singer rumbling the title over and over in tones both deadpan and ominous, packs a punch that is all the greater for its restricted resources.

Glass casts his net wider for "Powaqqatsi," bringing Afro-pop, Middle Eastern chant and South American folk music into the mix, but interpreting it all through the lens of American minimalism. The most remarkable effect of all this new material is the way it enlivens Glass' rhythmic palette -- meters become punchy and complex, and even the simpler passages boast a vivacity that is not always part of his work.

I linger on Glass' music because Reggio's films, as far as I can ascertain, are pretty much irredeemable tripe. They comprise long, lushly beautiful montages of wordless images, all designed to explore the notion that Western technology is, y'know, like, a total bummer, and that before it hit them, the noble indigenous peoples of the Third World were living in serene harmony with the cosmos.

So on the one hand we have happy fishermen, folk dancers and agricultural workers, but on the other -- uh-oh! -- oil derricks, mushroom clouds and Vegas waitresses with really bad bouffant hairdos, who as we all know are the true purveyors of cultural evil.

"Koyaanisqatsi" (the title, like the others, derives from Hopi) does include one brief and beguiling memory trip for San Franciscans: sped-up footage of a drive along the late and not-very-lamented Embarcadero Freeway. That's something you don't see anymore.

E-mail Joshua Kosman at jkosman@sfchronicle.com."