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Philip Glass Ensemble KOYAANISQATSI

Philip Glass Ensemble
KOYAANISQATSI LIVE! – Life out of Balance

Presented in partnership with KLRU-TV

This performance supported in part by a contribution to the Performance Development fund by the Applied Materials Foundation.

Considered to be one of the most influential composers ever to work in film, Philip Glass has reinvented the relationship between music and the moving image. Glass turned 80 in 2017, and to celebrate Texas Performing Arts presents a unique musical and cinematic experience!

The Philip Glass Ensemble, conducted by long time music director Michael Riesman, will deliver a live performance to accompany a screening of Godfrey Reggio’s 1982 “environmental masterpiece,” KOYAANISQATSI. An apocalyptic vision of the collision of urban life, technology, and the environment, KOYAANISQATSI LIVE! - Life out of Balance is an intense performance experience where Glass brings new life to this cinematic classic.

KOYAANISQATSI, A Conversation with Director Godfrey Reggio
The evening's program begins with a conversation on stage with the film's director, Godfrey Reggio, and Dr. Paul Stekler, UT Department of Radio-Television-Film. The screening and live film score will follow.

The audience sat silently through the film, and then erupted into an uninhibited cheering that was almost frightening in its intensity...the score for KOYAANISQATSI is invigorating, often tremulously beautiful, and almost extraordinarily in synergy with the visions projected upon the screen...Reggio's images haunt the viewer, accompanied by one of the most startling and original soundtracks ever written.

The New York Times

Philip Glass - KOYAANISQATSI Pruitt Igoe Live in Rehearsals from OrangeMountainMusic Label on YouTube.

Fun Facts:

  • Glass’ evolving new musical style was eventually dubbed “minimalism.” Glass disliked the term and prefers “music with repetitive structures.”
  • In the past 25 years, Glass has composed more than twenty operas, ten symphonies, two piano concertos and concertos for violin, piano, timpani, and saxophone quartet and orchestra, film scores and other projects.
  • Glass was nominated for Best Score at the Academy Awards three times for Kundun, The Hours, and Notes on a Scandal.
  • Glass has a brief cameo in The Truman Show, which he scored, where he can be seen playing piano.