Solo: piano - Prelude to Liquid Days

Ensemble: solo piano

Duration: 7 minutes

Commissioned by: Washington Performing Arts

Published by: Yes Daedalus Music

Note:

Some of my earliest musical memories are listening to Philip Glass’s Songs from Liquid Days with my Dad in his studio. The first time I heard “Open the Kingdom,” I just couldn’t believe music could sound like that– towering stacks of chords, voices roaring with holy fire. I sensed a larger, more complex structure at work in the music than I had encountered before, and I was surprised and excited when my father told me the lyrics were by songwriters I knew and loved: Paul Simon, David Byrne, Suzanne Vega. I felt like I had discovered a trapdoor into an entirely new musical world, guided by trusted friends.

Many years later, I was approached to arrange the very same record for pianists Simone Dinnerstein and Lara Downes and the vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth. I was delighted and also a bit daunted. How do you bring any kind of objectivity, or sense of newness, to music that you grew up with? 

As part of the project, I was simultaneously commissioned to write two solo piano works for Simone and Lara, which would be paired with Songs from Liquid Days in concert and on a future recording. It felt a bit like being commissioned to paint the spaces between arches in some great cathedral. Philip’s music looms large in every composer’s mind, both in its ubiquity and its immediate recognizability. How do you bring your own voice into a world where the rules are already so clear, and so well-known by the audience?

I decided that rather than reacting directly to Philip’s music, I would instead let his words guide my writing. Perhaps thinking of my experience as a kid, I was especially interested in the text: how did he approach working with pop songwriters, whose relationships to lyrics were wholly different than, say, a librettist’s or a poet’s?

It turns out he had a lot to say on the matter; in fact, this relationship was why he set out to write the album in the first place.

“The people I asked (to write lyrics) — Paul Simon, Suzanne Vega, David Byrne and Laurie Anderson— are, I feel, not only outstanding songwriters on their own but also lyricists whose poetry reflects individual styles and approaches to songwriting.”

This new work for piano, Prelude to Liquid Days, written for Simone Dinnerstein, is structured in two parts, echoing the historical format of a prelude and fugue. The first section responds to a quote from Philip regarding what music is able to do that words are not:

“What music can do in a general way is to heighten our emotional sensitivity and awareness. And when applied to a particular subject, it can bring that heightened perception to the subject itself.”

It struck me that the prelude is perhaps the musical genre most aligned with this goal: a kind of musical warm-up for player and audience alike, bringing them together to a place of heightened emotional sensitivity. The first section of this prelude is quiet and ruminative, with a simple song-like AABA structure welcoming the listener into the space. With each repeat in the structure, the music accumulates additional voices, which saturate the harmony and affect modulations as the piece unfolds.

The second part responds to another Glass quote, this time about words– specifically the lyrics on Liquid Days:

“They’re mysterious, and they seemed meaningful but I didn’t know what they meant. I knew they meant something, and they meant something to other people… It sounded like church music.”

Later in the same interview, he mentions he has never been able to write lyrics himself. So I gave myself the challenge of “setting” his spoken lines on the piano, finding the melody and rhythm in his words that he never allowed himself to do. I contrasted this “sung” line against a contrapuntal invention that, like its homophonic predecessor in Part I, adds voices as it goes. As this accumulation reaches a breaking point, the piece ends on a big dominant chord, inviting Songs for Liquid Days, and the singers of Roomful of Teeth, to begin.

Inevitably Philip’s music, as well as his words, filtered into mine, and I tried to impart a harmonic and structural clarity that nods to his influence. But mostly, I was thinking about that secret door, the one I found in my Dad’s studio many years ago. I remembered sifting through the lyrics in the CD booklet, grasping for meanings that danced frustratingly out of reach; the hypnotic sound of the Roches singing in close harmony; Linda Ronstadt’s floating descant in “Freezing.” There is a sensitivity to wonder in this music, a desire to find the transcendent in the domestic and mundane; to pull God out of little details, that has stuck with me for decades and has doubtless shaped my own work in uncountable ways. 

Although as a kid, I didn't have the words for that; I only knew I wanted to keep opening that door.