An Introduction to America’s Music

CHAPTER 19 | CLASSICAL MUSIC IN THE 1970s 489

Listen & Refl ect

1. What features of this recording would support a description of the performers as “singing actors”
   rather than “acting singers”? What is gained in this style of performance, and what is lost?

PHILIP GLASS AND EINSTEIN ON THE BEACH

The new techniques and musical languages that proliferated in the twentieth

century presented diffi cult challenges for performance, and composers have

long complained that standard ensembles such as symphony orchestras are ill-

equipped to do justice to new music. At the end of the 1960s Steve Reich and

Philip Glass, along with several other musicians, took the unusual step of form-

ing an ensemble to perform their own works in a way that ensures both ade-

quate rehearsal and sympathetic interpreters ready to pour heart and soul into

the music and its performance.

K A scene from a 2012

performance of Philip

Glass’s 1976 opera Einstein

on the Beach.

Listening Guide 19.5

“You Must Meet My Wife,” from A Little Night Music

CD 4.4 STEPHEN SONDHEIM

timing section text comments

3:45 (Désirée)

I must meet your wife..

In a 9-bar extension, the tempo slows and the

dynamic drops to piano as Désirée’s anger

gives way to resignation.

note Original Broadway cast recording.

172028_19_468-494_r3_sd.indd 489 23/01/13 11:05 AM