Down the Glass Hole

ISSUE #271

Philip Glass is one of those names—the name of perhaps the most famous living composer, of course—that you’ve either heard but never investigated or have read about so many times that your eyes are rolling already. His reputation lies halfway between never needing to be written about again and still needing everybody with a pen to do so—just so we cover all our bases, all of our new generations. “Have you heard this guy, my dude?” I call out to my nephew and his Nintendo Switch.

Once, some friends and I were out on a sweltering afternoon at a new beer brewery, and Jacob, our sober angel, was valiantly helping by giving us rides. But he had his own fun—he insisted on playing only Philip Glass. As the other passengers screamed, I tried to tell him that Glass rules (in truth, I barely knew him at the time, but I liked what I was hearing) but that this was a little like ordering pizzas for a party and getting pineapple on all of them—an act of undeniable generosity, but completely unmoored from popular taste.

But I was wrong, and he was right. Here’s the thing I didn’t know at the time: Philip Glass is actually insanely accessible. His influence touches many forms of music today, from film (the stabs of horns in the scores of Hans Zimmer) to art rock (Brian Eno and David Bowie were particularly struck by Glass—you can hear his influence most in Bowie’s “Heroes”, with its repeated bassline and the guitar that soars above it). His style is so unique that you can identify his work almost immediately, a rarity amongst classical composers.

Glass’s works are largely ostinato (repeated musical passages and phrases), sequences of arpeggiated beauty, a tidal rise and fall of fast-moving triplets played by saxophones, flutes, organ, and choir. Where other Western music relies on harmonic progression in relation to its melody (the dramatic plot and character of music, if you will), Glass’s takes a more circular approach, repeating phrases over and over until it accomplishes a meditative quality. Like a writer rejecting the typical hero’s journey, his pieces embrace the more cyclical, feminine, internal nature of the avant-garde.

“The result was I had the ability to write music that was so radical, I could be mistaken for an idiot,” he said when speaking about his musical evolution and substantial subset of people who despise his music. Old-guard critics have called his style everything from “vacuously formulaic” to “as rewarding as chewing gum that's lost its flavour.” In this, David Lynch could be called his cinematic parallel, and Hemingway his major literary precursor, who profoundly changed the English sentence by cutting Victorian excess down to its barest bone. Hemingway’s writing is sometimes misguidingly called “masculine” and “unfeeling,” but it is simply simplified—and as much as he would have bristled against the word “minimalism,” so too would Glass, eventually calling his “music of repetitive structure” instead.

But largely, I’m struck and in love with Glass’s music because of its repetition. People decry our dwindling attention spans, but I find myself paying true attention when noticing the subtle changes in Glass’s phrases—the harmonic significance of a hovering flute, the impact of a prolonged note above the arpeggios. There’s a reason it pairs well with the plotless Koyaanisqatsi, one of his greatest scores. His works reflect the repetition of 21st century life, the benumbing quality of late-capitalist hellscape, but also how these same cycles can gesture towards the divine, towards mother moon and the governing tides. It can ease the pain of living. Take a listen.

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