Music in Twelve Parts

On the eve of Glass's 90th birthday, we become only the third ensemble in history to perform Music in Twelve Parts, the work Glass himself called 'the end of minimalism'. It began as a single piece. A friend's misunderstanding of the title convinced Glass to write eleven more parts over three years, and the five-hour result has been performed outside the Philip Glass Ensemble exactly once. Gentle and ferocious, methodical and playful, it is the sound of a composer using up a language in public. He builds the system, exhausts it, and ends audaciously with a 12-tone row, as though picking through the wreckage of one style for the beginnings of the next. A monument and a ruin in a single evening.