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Philip Glass on the Web

Philip Glass: His music

This text by Tim Page has been extracted from the P. Glass Satyagraha album without permission.

Although he loathes the term, Glass if often classified as a "minimalist" composer, along with such composers as Steve Reich, Terry Rilley and Jonh

Adams. His music is based on the extended repetition of a brief, elegant melodical fragments that weave in and out an aural tapestry. Listening to this music is something like watching a challenging painting that initially appeard ststaic, but seems so metamorphose slowly as one concentrates. Compositional material is usually limited to a few elements, which are the subjected to transformation processes. One shouldn't except Westernized musical events - sforzandos, sudden diminuendos - in this music; rather, the listener is immersed in a sonic weather thtat surrounds, twists, turns, develops.

Glass prefers to speak of his work as "music with repetitive structures". His busy, tonal, aggressively rhythmic compositions would seem to mark a spiritual break with the spare, atonal and largely arhythmic world of the 50s and 60s avant-guardists. One thing is certain: Philip Glass has brought a new and enthusiastic audience to contemporany music.

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