Glassworks

Easily absorbed, approachable, without the long durations that can make his music daunting, Glassworks is the place to start for somebody taking on Philip Glass for the first time—and it was written, in 1982, for that very purpose, as something like a beginner’s guide to the composer’s sound world. At that point in his career, Glass had achieved recognition largely through monumental theatre scores like Einstein on the Beach and Satyagraha that required effort and commitment from their audience. Wanting to attract more casual listeners, he accepted a commission from CBS Records to write a relatively simple group of chamber pieces designed specifically for the recording studio and, ultimately, for the burgeoning Walkman cassette market. Glassworks was the result. It uses a small group of principally woodwind instruments (though also with keyboards, viola and cello) deployed in different combinations across six titled movements—each of them no more than six or seven minutes long. The first—prosaically called “Opening” and effectively a piano solo with a horn that enters at the very end—sums up the minimalist Glass style of the 1970s and '80s, with repeated oscillating chords, a slow insistent pulse and shifting rhythmic patterns that generate a trancelike state equivalent to stasis. The five other movements—“Floe”, “Island”, “Rubric”, “Façades”, “Closing"—do much the same, defying the traditional Western idea of music with the narrative of a beginning, middle and end.