Philip Glass - The Photographer: Act III (1983)

This movement was my introduction to the music of Philip Glass. I first heard it on an all night University of Buffalo FM radio show in late 1985 that was mostly dedicated to classical music. The disk jockey often worked in "related" music by Pink Floyd and other artists under the cover of "music from films." For example Zabriskie Point would give him license to play tracks from the film recorded by The Grateful Dead, John Fahey, The Youngbloods, Pink Floyd, and others, which in turn would allow him to play a few other selections from the group or artist. He could also spotlight avant-garde and modernist classical composers such as John Cage, Arnold Schoenberg, Charles Ives, and composers who were typed at that time as being part of the minimalism wave, or else as avant-garde, art, and experimental, which included the works of Robert Fripp, Laurie Anderson, Brian Eno, David Byrne, and of course Philip Glass ... regarded since as being among the late 20th Century's and early 21st Century's most influential classical music composers. I would become more acquainted with his work and others watching the PBS TV series Alive From Off Center during the 80's and early 90's.

The night I first heard The Photographer, I had tuned in too late to catch Acts I and II, but heard the entire Act III. That was enough to prompt me to go out and buy the album in January 1986. Thus, Act III will always loom as large in my imagination as it did when I first listened to it. As a recorded composition one will experience it differently than the original opera of the work performed in 1982. Or, as Wikipedia would have it: "The recording was conceived with the idea that most listeners would not have experienced the stage work. Several pieces were shortened or left off the album entirely, and the order of the music is changed. Only two of the original three incidental pieces contained in Act I are included."

In other words stare at one of the famous Muybridge horse studies on the cover of the 1983 album and listen to the music without any frame of reference regarding the details of the opera that preceded the recording other than a meager knowledge of Muybridge's contributions to the development of motion picture. Your imagination will definitely run wild.

Thus for the music listener, this becomes a composition more thematically related to the work of 19th Century photographer and motion picture pioneer Eadweard Muybridge and the Victorian era itself, whereas the opera more specifically deals with the homicide trial of Muybridge who "murdered Major Harry Larkyns ... whom he suspected of being his wife's lover, and was acquitted by a jury against the instructions of the judge on the ground of justifiable homicide." The recording seems more of an homage to Muybridge as well as the era he lived in, and a foreshadowing of the outcome of his experiments in motion picture as it would play out in the 20th Century and our current century.