Glass listeners are well acquainted with this music as Metamorphosis No.2 has been part of Glass’s piano repertoire since the 1980s. That same year Glass took some of his score to this documentary, arranged it for piano, and used it for a stage production of Franz Kafka’s “ Metamorphosis,” also from 1988. My take away from this has always been a reflection on the absolute value of music: does music ever belong to anything but itself? (Verdi’s Requiem and a Rossini overture were used to sell products in the commercials of yesterday’s Super Bowl.)įor example, let’s take the music from Glass’s score to the Errol Morris film “ The Thin Blue Line” from 1988. Just as the ear catches the music of others such as the quotation from Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony in Floe from Glassworks, we also can frequently find bits of music or whole sections in different works and different contexts. In my first big plunge into the music of Philip Glass I found his many instances of re-using music just another fun aspect in the activity of the constant listener. What you see here is a sense of compositional propriety which I highly revere ( “I wrote it, it’s mine, I can use it as I wish“) and free usage of material in different contexts. Going the other way, Herrmann’s own favorite score was his music for The Ghost and Mrs.Muir (1947), from which he took the extraordinary love theme and put it in his opera at the end of the Prologue.
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In this NPR interview the conductor of the opera the conductor Michael Christie, at the 8-16 minute mark you hear that Christie is taken aback by the fact that Herrmann appropriated the opening music from his opera and re-purposed it for Taxi Driver (1976).
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I see the world through music – I even choose my movies and TV shows based on who the composer is – so in thinking about Taxi Driver I recall a 2011 NPR interview about a very rare performance of Herrmann’s one and only opera based on Wuthering Heights (1951). A friend of mine contacted me telling me that he was listening to Bernard Herrmann’s soundtrack to Taxi Drivertoday on the film’s 40th anniversary. I thought about this on this snowy day in the Northeast. One aspect of this is the practice of repurposing music. Since I started following Philip Glass, about 17 years ago, I have noticed that an ancillary benefit for me in listening to his music has been how my own concepts about art and its role in the world have been challenged and formed by Glass’s positions and activity.