The Virtuoso of Repetition

Philip Glass assured his place in music history through a breathtakingly simple act of displacement: he took musical gestures that had served for centuries as secondary—busily windmilling arpeggios, stubborn ostinatos, the kind of figures that are more often played by a pianist’s left hand than their right—and treated them as his primary material. Because listeners have been conditioned to think of these as accompaniments, much of Glass’s music has a quality of incompleteness and longing: we cannot help but feel the phantom limb of the absent melody that these figures surely ought to be accompanying.For this reason, his music thrives in interdisciplinary works, when there actually is some other element in need of musical illumination: a stage picture, a dance, a cinematic scene, a spoken text. By many accounts, Glass is a friendly, obliging collaborator, and his music—fruitfully self-effacing, rarely complex enough to saturate or overwhelm the listener’s attention—behaves the same way. It might be this personality trait that has enabled him to achieve his paradoxical status as an icon of the avant-garde and also one of the most commercially successful of American composers. As he w...