Philip Glass "Music With Changing Parts" 2xLP

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• The inaugural release on Glass's own Chatham Square imprint - a self-produced 1971 double LP that laid the foundation for Minimalism, featuring the original Philip Glass Ensemble.
• For fans of: Steve Reich, Terry Riley, La Monte Young, Brian Eno, Harold Budd

Philip Glass, the great American composer, was already in his mid-30s before his first album appeared, and then only because he produced the double LP himself. Music With Changing Parts was the inaugural release on his own Chatham Square imprint in 1971.

At this point, Einstein on the Beach, Glass' first opera, was still five years away. Yet in Changing Parts, one can already hear much of his vocabulary in full bloom: the buoyant arpeggios, the melding of electronic and acoustic instruments, the elongated drones of human voice, the primary emphasis on pulse (an interest he shared with fellow composer Steve Reich) and the ecstatic potential inherent in repetition.

The album features the original Philip Glass Ensemble - the composer himself, along with Jon Gibson, Dickie Landry, Art Murphy, Steve Chambers and Robert Prado - playing Farfisa organs and woodwinds as well as Barbara Benary on electric violin.

As Glass describes in his memoir Words Without Music, he secured a $500 interest-free loan for the recordings' initial release from the Hebrew Free Loan Society. Though Glass was merely the grandson of immigrants, the venture wasn't far off the society's charter as Changing Parts helped usher in a new world of sound that would become known as Minimalism.

Born in Baltimore in 1937, Glass first moved to New York to attend Juilliard at just nineteen, having already graduated from the University of Chicago. A staple of the Downtown scene, he can perhaps be appreciated as akin to the likes of sculptor Richard Serra or filmmaker Jim Jarmusch: mavericks who became major cultural figures entirely on their own terms.

This first-time vinyl reissue reproduces the original side-breaks and gatefold sleeve.