Music to Not Listen to Music to

On March 10, 1969, Philip Glass was performing his piano piece “Two Pages” at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam when an audience member rushed onto the stage. “The next thing I knew,” Glass recounts in his memoir, “he was at the keyboard banging on the keys. Without thinking, acting on pure instinct, I belted him across the jaw and he staggered and fell off the stage.” 

Fifty-five years later, such an impassioned response to Glass’s music is hard to imagine. Now heralded as one of America’s greatest living composers, Glass’s signature minimalist sound has sold out concert halls around the world and accompanied dozens of films. On January 26, Glass released a new album titled “Philip Glass Solo,” featuring brand new recordings of the composer playing some of his most beloved works, including “Opening” from his best-selling album “Glassworks,” and “Truman Sleeps” for the “Truman Show” soundtrack. Based on his legacy and fame, you’d expect the new album to be an easy hit. But since its release, “Philip Glass Solo” has gotten few reviews and is streamed far less than other recordings of the same tracks. In other words, it hasn’t gotten much attention at all. 

One reason for this may be: In becoming such a fixture of contemporary life, Glass’s music just doesn’t stand out anymore. Like many other genres, after decades of play, the same music that drove some people to violence no longer elicits any emotional response. But this explanation is incomplete. The lack of response towards “Philip Glass Solo” represents a crisis for minimalism, one rooted in its very founding and fueled by the way we listen to music today. 

In the 1930s, prominent modernist composers like Arnold Schoenberg and Darius Milhaud escaped the war in Europe and took up academic positions in the U.S. With them came serialism and polytonality, which soon dominated the conservatory curriculum. Inevitably, the next generation of composers rejected these institutionalized forms, just a fiercely as the modernists did a generation earlier. Powered by new electronic instruments and influence from Eastern cultures, they made music that questioned all Western musical structures: composition, notation, tonality, texture, instrumentation and performance. One of the movements that emerged from this questioning was minimalism. In stark contrast to serialism’s cerebral structures and dense textures, minimalism was simple and familiar, or as one music history teacher once described it: a breath of fresh air in smoky room. 

In 1964, Terry Riley wrote “In C,” widely considered to be the first American minimalist piece. It consists of 53 short musical phrases labeled by a number. An ensemble of any size or instrumentation begins by playing the first phrase in unison, then every performer is free to repeat or move on to any other phrase. It was an elegant synthesis of modern jazz, classical Indian music, and tape loops, and the result conjured the rippling surface of a large body of water—a state of constant and stable change.

Several years later, composer Steve Reich defined the movement in an authoritative 1968 essay titled “Music as a Gradual Process.” (The term “minimalism” didn’t catch on until the ‘70s.) He argued that the point of the music he and his contemporaries were making wasn’t repetition or simplicity. “I am interested in perceptible processes,” he writes. “I want to be able to hear the process happening throughout the sounding music.” Whether melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, dynamic or textural changes, the goal was to convey musical evolution. Repetition and simplicity were tools to achieve that goal. “To facilitate closely detailed listening a musical process should happen extremely gradually,” Reich says. He compares it to “pulling back a swing, releasing it, and observing it gradually come to rest; turning over an hour glass and watching the sand slowly run through the bottom; placing your feet in the sand by the ocean’s edge and watching, feeling, and listening to the waves gradually bury them.” 

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Other avant-garde composers from this time played with process in their music, including John Cage in his 1951 “Music of Changes.” But that process was usually hidden from the listener and only revealed in the sheet music or the liner notes. By contrast, anyone can experience the changes in minimalist pieces. For instance, in Reich’s 1967 piece “Piano Phase,” two pianos start by playing the same short melody in perfect unison, before one of them slowly goes out of sync with the other. Within seconds, the listener knows what’s going on. 

This emphasis on experience rather than analysis is part of the reason why minimalist composers felt more of a kinship with contemporary visual artists than with other avant-garde composers. Many of the first minimalist concerts were held in art studios, primarily in downtown New York. The composer La Monte Young frequently collaborated with Yoko Ono, and his music—characterized by long drones—often had performance art elements. 

Minimalism blossomed in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. And while many composers were instrumental to its development, the movement’s main drivers—nicknamed the “Fab Four”—were Riley, Reich, Young, and Glass. 

In several ways, Glass’s trajectory ran parallel to that of his minimalist compatriots. He moved into a loft in downtown New York, held his first concerts in art studios while working as a studio assistant for sculptor Richard Serra, and learned Indian classical music from Ravi Shankar. But a few qualities distinguished him. 

First, starting in college, Glass composed for the theater. (He has said multiple times that he considers himself a theater composer rather than a minimalist one.) Second, although Glass’s music adopted many of the common elements of minimalist music—simplicity, repetition, gradual process—his music was always, as he put it, “strongly tonal.” Unlike Young or at times Reich, he stuck to familiar harmonies. These two traits allowed Glass’s music to break into the mainstream and stay there. 

For the first decade of its life, minimalism was an underground movement, largely confined to Soho’s art studios. When it did venture outside, the response was often negative. In 1973, Steve Reich attempted to perform “Four Organs” at Carnegie Hall and almost started a riot à la Stravinsky. But just a few years later everything changed. In 1976, Glass sold out the Metropolitan Opera with “Einstein On The Beach”; Reich sold out The Town Hall with “Music for 18 Musicians.” The fact that “Einstein On The Beach” was accompanied by a flashy stage production courtesy of Robert Wilson, and that “Music for 18 Musicians” was one of Reich’s most tonal works, is no coincidence. Minimalism had officially gone mainstream. And while Reich maintained a successful career afterwards, Glass would become a superstar by taking his theater music to Hollywood. 

He didn’t want to at first. When director Philip Reggio asked Glass to score his 1981 film “Koyaanisqatsi,” Glass refused, because he didn’t think music fit the medium. Reggio disagreed. To prove it, he showed Glass the opening sequence of the film—a series of long, aerial shots of the desert—with some of Glass’s music overlaid. Not even Glass could deny how well it worked; he signed on the project. Over the next 30 years, Glass would score dozens of films: “Mishima,” “The Truman Show,” “The Hours,” “Candyman.” He also continued to write concert music and operas, but his film music eclipsed all in popularity. Before long, his rolling arpeggios and haunting melodies became synonymous with big-budget, serious films. At the same time, Glass released instrumental albums like “Glassworks” in 1982 and “Solo Piano” in 1989. Both were hits by contemporary music standards, presumably because their music closely resembled his film work and therefore benefitted from the same audience.

Not everyone approved. In 1987, music critic Ian MacDonald wrote a searing essay titled “What Is the Use of Minimalism?” that accused composers like Glass of abandoning the movement’s founding principles for commercial success. He denounced modern minimalism as “pop music for intellectuals” who were more interested in adopting the music’s cachet of sophistication than in observing its musical processes. As a result, he argued that the movement had lost all of its avant-garde thrill and had become “as inert as the pre-planned corporate life-style for which it is the perfect accompaniment.” Although excessively harsh and overly selective in his survey of the movement, MacDonald is surprisingly prescient. Because, almost 40 years later, it does feel like minimalism has become, as he put it, “The passionless, sexless and emotionally blank soundtrack of the Machine Age.” 

If you go on Spotify, search “Philip Glass,” and scroll down on his artist page, you’ll find a section called “Discovered On,” which lists all the playlists in which his music is included. These change regularly, but as of this writing the top ones are: Calming Classical (821,555 likes), Classical Focus (317,454 likes), Dark Academia Classical (731,457), Classical In The Background (37,399), Chilled Classical (620,242) and Soundtracks for Studying (83,635). Notice a theme? Of the dozens of playlists listed, only a handful are not related to studying or relaxing. It’s safe to say then that hundreds of thousands of people are regularly listening to Glass in order to focus on something else. 

And if it’s not Philip Glass, it’s Hania Rani, Ólafur Arnalds, or Ludovico Einaudi. These post-minimalist use much of Glass’s vocabulary—soft arpeggios, bare melodies—yet aren’t nearly as daring. Their pieces are shorter, their textures more pleasing and more confined to the piano. They also embrace and even take advantage of minimalism’s new identity. Max Richter not only released an album entitled “Sleep” but also created an app of the same name that plays his music on a timer to help you doze off.

The ubiquitous association between Glass’s music and the act of studying or relaxing feels strange when you consider the intense—at times violent—reactions this music used to conjure. It also appears to fly right in the face of what Minimalist music was all about: experiencing the minute and gradual change in the music. That’s hard to do when you’re also writing a term paper.

Why is this? For one, not all Minimalist music is getting this treatment. Neither Reich nor Riley are on these kinds of playlists. And it’s often Glass’s film music—“The Hours” in particular—that gets the most play. So one explanation is that, in the same way Antônio Carlos Jobim’s music was redefined by its use in elevators and shopping aisles, Glass’s music was redefined by his soundtracks. In a time where every act can be accompanied by any soundtrack, his music thrives. 

Even away from Glass, I suspect that some minimalism would have inevitably become a tool for work. Reich ends his 1968 essay with: “While performing and listening to gradual musical processes one can participate in a particular liberating and impersonal kind of ritual. Focusing in on the musical process makes possible that shift of attention away from he and she and you and me outwards towards it.” Now, the “it” isn’t the music, but whatever other task you are trying to accomplish. While minimalism’s impersonality makes it less distracting and easily applicable to all sorts of work, its gradual development mirrors, even encourages, your own. This, of course, isn’t what Glass, Reich and rest of the Fab Four intended for their music. But they should know that intention shouldn’t matter to the listener. As Reggio proved to Glass all those years ago: if it works, it works.

Still, if you take the time to just listen to “Philip Glass Solo,” you’ll find that, despite being re-recordings of old material, it’s quite different from anything else he’s done. He made a point to mention that it was recorded at his home in New York, on his personal piano where much of his oeuvre was born. But that’s not what I hear most. I hear his hands. Slower and less precise from age, but also softer and more forgiving. These are the same hands that worked the steel plant, loaded trucks and gripped a checkered cab’s steering wheel. The same hands that touched Nadia Boulanger, Ravi Shankar, and Richard Serra. I’ve argued that minimalism can be impersonal, but this album is deeply intimate. 

In a brief description, Glass writes, “This record is both a time capsule of 2021, and a reflection on decades of composition and practice. In other words, a document on my current thinking about the music… To the degree possible, I made this record to invite the listener in.” If only the listener pays attention. ¶