I admire Philip Glass, but sometimes I detest his music

Telegraph

14-02-2025

Philip Glass is one of a small handful of living composers who you would call a household name. He's so well-known that he can be satirised on The Simpsons and Family Guy. Glass has collaborated with everyone, from David Bowie to Ravi Shankar and Doris Lessing, he's composed well-known film scores, including The Hours and Notes on a Scandal, and his more than 30 operas have made him visible in a way that mere concert composers can never achieve.
Yet he is also hated – at least by hard-line classical music lovers. For them being an enthusiast for Glass isn't like preferring Hollywood rom-coms to Swedish profundity. It's not a lapse of taste; it's simply incomprehensible. Those interminable arpeggios and scales and limp melodies aren't just vacuous, they're strangely inept. They ape the gestures of well-known classical composers but without any understanding of the grammar that underlies them. In that sense, Glass is actually worse than Ludovico Einaudi, another composer many classical devotees love to hate. Einaudi's music is merely empty, whereas Glass's seems actually wrong. And what makes it worse is that that wrongness is everywhere. Glass's repetitions, ponderous and manically excited by turns, have become the lingua franca of film music and TV commercial sound-tracks.
Much of the time I agree with the Glass-haters. Sitting through his interminable 5 th Symphony was probably the worst concert experience of my life. The first time I heard the tremulous, orange-on-pink sound of Glass's own ensemble playing his Music in Twelve Parts I felt it would take the enamel off my teeth.
And yet the strange thing is that, at the very moment I was wincing at that sound, something else kept me listening. Yes, there were moments in the following three hours when I wanted to scream. But there was also an ecstatic, otherworldly, innocent quality which I have found nowhere else – except perhaps in the music of that other 'father of minimalism' Steve Reich.
I must admit to a personal bias here. I can't claim to know Glass, now 80, but have interviewed him several times and found him both likeable and admirable. There's none of that prickliness that often clings to creative people who had to endure ridicule and poverty for years, as Glass certainly did. He had to work more-or-less full time for 24 years at various 'blue-collar' jobs – steel-worker, plumber, taxi-driver – before he could live off his earnings as a musician.
But as Glass says in his memoirs, he was too curious about life to resent this as 'wasted time'. On the contrary, he seems to have relished working as a plumber, and devotes pages to explaining exactly how you make an S-bend. He just loves discovering how things work, and there's a similar wide-eyed curiosity – but in reverse – in his composing method, particularly in his early hard-line minimalist period of the late 1960s and 1970s. Often he seems to be asking himself: what will happen if I set up this pattern and change it in this particular way?
Pieces like Music with Changing Parts and that immense Music in Twelve Parts, and even Glass's first opera Einstein on the Beach are like burnished interlocking mechanisms, with all the parts fitting together perfectly and humming away in obedience to some arithmetical process of addition or subtraction. I don't think Glass would be offended if I describe them as a sort of musical plumbing.
Naïve openness and 'wonder at the world' are at the root of his creative persona, as they are for many contemporary composers who've reinvented the musical language. Another example is Harrison Birtwistle, who like Glass stripped music down to its essentials – a note, an interval, a rhythm – before subjecting them to an ordering logic. In both composers these simple things were completely stripped of music's history. But unlike Birtwistle, Glass deliberately re-engaged with history from the mid-1970s onwards. Despite his enthusiasm for post-bebop jazz and Indian music, what he really wants is a lived connection to classical music's past. As he put it in his memoirs, 'lineage is everything'. And so instead of abstract patterns varied by adding one beat here, or subtracting one there, we find in his later music patterns that now bear familiar names: arpeggio, scale, sequences, all joined together with familiar tonal harmonies. And yet – to repeat – these things are fashioned and joined together in ways that seem methodical yet perverse, as if a computer had been maliciously programmed to write tonal music using the wrong rules.
The miracle is that sometimes that apparently mechanical churning yields something that seems actually inspired. I have room to mention only a few examples. There's a mood of stately gravity Glass often strikes, which can be ponderous but in the first movement of the 3 rd Symphony is actually moving. There's a delightful rapturous innocence in the opening movement of Passages, the orchestral work he co-composed with the great sitarist who taught him so much, Ravi Shankar. There are entrancing things in the scores he composed for three films by Jean Cocteau. The La Belle et la Bête overture has a haunting anxiety, combined with disconcerting glittery harmonies. Often Glass's orchestral palette is dull but in Le Domaine de la Bête from the same film he summons extraordinary colours.
If I had to name just one piece of Glass to take to a desert island, it would be the Vow scene from the 1980 opera Satyagraha, inspired by the life of Mahatma Gandhi. The same irresistibly striding bass, festooned with those orange-and-pink arpeggios is repeated over and over, each time accreting more choral voices. One feels that familiar disbelief—surely he isn't going to repeat that pattern again?—but eventually a magnificence emerges.
So am I among the Glass-haters? I would say 'Yes, but'. I've learned that each new piece might just have something extraordinary, where the wonkiness becomes inspired and moving. And the best of the early pieces have a manic energy that can induce an ecstatic feeling of leaving one's body. Voltaire once described the good bits in Shakespeare as 'pearls hidden in a dung-heap'; much the same could be said of Philip Glass.