Philip Glass Ensemble: A Moving Picture

The notion of music performed live to accompany a film is as old as the movie business, though a handful of cutting-edge ensembles like Boston's Alloy Orchestra dedicate themselves to keeping it fresh. But the prospect of hearing the Philip Glass Ensemble play its award-winning score for 1983's literally moving picture Koyaanisqatsi a week ago Friday at the Wang Center held special promise.

Director Godfrey Reggio's film is packed with energetic visuals -- whether they're grains of sand dancing like low-lying fog across a Mexican desert or commuters streaming across the marble floor of New York City's Grand Central Station like cockroaches caught in the glare of a switched-on light -- that somehow, wordlessly, become emotionally resonant. They progress from ancient pictographs on sandstone to graceful waters to swirling clouds to -- suddenly -- explosions and a steamshovel ripping up the earth at a mining operation. So the peaceful still-life of Monument Valley contrasts with pedestrian congestion in Times Square; bats in their nightly, air-ballet exodus from Carlsbad Caverns are stacked against cars frantically hurtling down a freeway at super-speed thanks to accelerated photography.

The concept, as the film title's translation from the Hopi language makes plain, is that contemporary life is "out of balance." Reggio is saying we've abandoned nature's ways to create a culture that's dehumanizing and out of control.

Of course, if life was out of balance in '83, it's flat on its ass now. But Glass's soundtrack still exhibits a kind of marvelous symmetry. And if you really want to understand what he's up to, it's best heard live.

At the Wang the low, droning chords of Glass's synthesizers groaned with reverberating power as the overture played against the film's opening scenes. It was actually refreshing to hear sounds sampled from the early days of electronic keyboard synthesis. They're tonally much richer than the mass-produced computer-driven keyboards that proliferated in the mid to late '80s and early '90s, before the musical instrument industry tilted back toward guitar sales.

As the music ebbed and flowed with the action on the Wang's very big screen, the overtones from the dense, repetitive melodies (a signature combination of his serialist-dropout instincts, passion for fractional changes in movements, and the hypnotic qualities of Indian music that pulled him as a young composer into the influence of Ravi Shankar) sometimes mixed in the Wang's hall to produce sounds out of thin air -- things not directly generated by the musicians' keyboards or reeds that nonetheless appeared when their overtones met and blended. This is the kind of stuff that's nearly impossible to capture on a recording and is obviously different everywhere the music is performed. It also made Glass's 11-piece group seem larger. If the sonics the Ensemble produced didn't make the case, then certainly teaming their live performance with visuals that essayed the music's pulsing energy and life offered proof that minimalism needn't be academic.

The event was also a reminder that Glass buffs have something to anticipate in his new recording of the Koyaanisqatsi soundtrack, which triggered this brief major-city tour. This time the entire work was recorded for CD, restoring 30 minutes that would not fit on its original LP-format issue.

- Ted Drozdowski