The Town Hall has announced a live performance of Philip Glass’s score of Godfrey Reggio’s Naqoyqatsi performed by The Philip Glass Ensemble and conducted by Michael Riesman, accompanying screenings of the film on Saturday, April 19th at 8:00 pm.
The performance of Naqoyqatsi follows the performances of Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi and is the third and final installment of the Qatsi film trilogy. These live scores continue the long-standing relationship between Glass, The Ensemble, and The Town Hall, which began in 1974 when Glass performed one of his early works, Music in Twelve Parts, at The Town Hall.
Naqoyqatsi is a Hopi neologism that translates to “life as war,” “civilized violence,” or “a life of killing each other.” The film has no characters, narration, or dialogue and is built solely around images and sound. It features early digital animation and computer graphics, giving it a distinct and unique visual quality. Naqoyqatsi explores themes of our society transitioning from a natural environment to a technology-based environment and how technology has significantly changed our world, even in ways that we may not have noticed.
Naqoyqatsi is the darkest film in the Qatsi trilogy and also the least performed. The film has not been performed in New York City since 2005, making this the first performance in ten years. Released in October 2002, Naqoyqatsi represents some of the somber emotions being felt post-9/11. Glass’s score, featuring a cello as a recurrent leading voice, winds, keyboards, percussion, and voice of The Philip Glass Ensemble, is the more traditional and lyrical of the trilogy. Though the film has no script, it is structured in three movements like a symphony, with different themes: human relations mediated by technology, competition, fame, and money as prime values, and a post-language world descending into war and civilized violence. The film is a mixture of beautiful cello-centered music paired with violent music, which reflects the themes of change and violence that Naqoyqatsi is portraying.
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THE TOWN HALL: 123 West 43rd Street (between 6th Avenue and Broadway), New York, NY 10036
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