Music in Twelve Parts

"…Music in Twelve Parts is a soulful score, packed with dramatic contrast and virtuoso ensemble writing. When the Glass Ensemble recorded the work in 1993 for Nonesuch they set such a high benchmark that any new recording inevitably comes with a weight of expectation. This latest version matches the boundless energy and honed precision of the earlier performance, while also adding an attractive "lived in" seasoning to the ensemble sound."
Gramophone Magazine, November 2008

Orange Mountain Music is proud to present the premiere recording of the unabridged Music in Twelve Parts performed by the Philip Glass Ensemble with the composer on keyboards. This 4-disc set contains a new recording of the entire work. Glass' Music in Twelve Parts may be the most seminal work of the minimalist movement. The entire four-hour piece has come to be viewed as a summation of all of Glass' achievements of the period and came to inform many of the composer's later works. A massive piece written for his own group of musicians, the Philip Glass Ensemble, Music in 12 Parts was recorded by the group in Rovereto Italy in 2006, more than 30 years after most of the same musicians premiered it at New York City's Town Hall.

Tim Page describes the work: "Music in Twelve Parts, written between 1971 and 1974, is a deliberate, encyclopaedic compendium of some techniques of repetition the composer had been evolving since the mid 1960s. It holds an important place in Glass's repertory - not only from a historical vantage point (as the longest and most ambitious concert piece for the Philip Glass Ensemble) but from a purely aesthetic standard as well, because Music in Twelve Parts is both a massive theoretical exercise and a deeply engrossing work of art."

Philip Glass: "It was a breakthrough for me and contains many of the structural and harmonic ideas that would be fleshed out in my later works. It is a modular work, one of the first such compositions, with twelve distinct parts which can be performed separately, in one long sequence, or in any combination or variation."

First recording of the full unabridged four-hour version of Music in Twelve Parts.

Regarded as the most seminal work of the minimalist movement - and enjoys huge popularity.

Despite its length and repetition, the work exhibits enormous invention and beauty.

New live recording by the Philip Glass Ensemble - with the composer on keyboards - made in Italy in 2006.

4-disc digipack set at price of only 2 CDs.