The piece is composed of two movements, a format that evolved via an e-mail accident. Glass was working on two versions of the commission and asked his assistant to send what he considered the better of them to Levingston. The assistant attached the wrong work. “I played it and thought, Fantastic piece,” remembers Levingston. “But when I called Phil and we started going through details, we realized we were talking about two different things.” When the mistake was corrected, says Levingston, he came to believe that “these two pieces actually belonged together, that there were little motifs in both works that related to one another and that, played together, they painted a better portrait in sound of Chuck.”
Even an untrained ear can pick up on the fact that the style of the music changes from one movement to the next: The first is quite minimalist, and the second, fuller and more complex. The significance of that shift, however, depends on whom you ask. According to Levingston, the two parts correspond to Close’s life before and after the 1988 spinal aneurysm that left him partially paralyzed. “What you get, I think, is a sense of transcendence,” he says of the second movement, “of triumph at regaining his life and his ability to express himself artistically.” Close, however, is more interested in how the piece reflects the evolution of both his and Glass’s work. “The first movement is more like what Phil did when I first painted him, much more severe, reductive,” he says. “And at that time I was making things that were full of self-imposed limitations—just diagonal lines in a grid—in the same way that Phil was limiting himself to seven notes played on a crummy electronic organ. The second movement is more in line with what Phil is doing now and is actually crazy as hell and really baroque. In many ways our careers developed on a parallel, in my case from a few dark diagonal lines in each square to eight or nine colors.”
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