Philip Glass’s first and most radical period lasted from about 1965 to 1974, corresponding to the first wave of minimalism.¹ Composers working in this stylistic trend at first took inspiration from the technique of additive rhythm taught by the Indian musicians Ravi Shankar and Alla Rakha. In Glass’s Play (1965), for example, each of the two saxophone lines emerges from a basic material of just two notes, deliberately kept as plain as possible. Such works inaugurate a radically repetitive and non-dissonant style, whose subversion lies in development rather than the quality of each moment taken on its own, in form rather than content. Encouraged from 1966 onward by the example of Steve Reich, who was close to minimalism at the time, Glass developed this technique in works such as 1 + 1 (1967), a piece without notes “for One Player and Amplified Table-Top”; Two Pages (1968), in strictly diatonic unison; Music in Fifths, which simply develops five parallel perfect fifths; and Music in Contrary Motion (1969), which takes to the level of caricature the principle of contrary motion between two voices (when one rises the other falls and vice versa). Having systematically tested out this basic language in what could almost be called a series of studies, Glass took it in a more vertical direction with Music with Changing Parts (1970): he moves his frenetic repetition beyond ordinary isometric rhythms and brings in long notes that give rise to simultaneities and clashes; the pentatonic scale E♭-F-G-B♭-C, used as a harmony, generates enough dissonance with its major seconds to make the work seem modern in vertical terms, above and beyond its horizontal qualities of stasis and relentless repetition. Yet Glass would come to find such music “too spacey” and went no further in this direction. In the nearly six-hour work Music in Twelve Parts (1971–1974), he drew up an inventory of his techniques. They amount to an “art of repetition,” to borrow Tim Page’s term with its allusion to Bach’s Art of Fugue. Like the last testament of the Cantor of Leipzig, this work sums up a period, in this case that of Glass’s minimalism, while sounding its death knell, bidding farewell to the much-repeated technique of repetition.

In the last part of Music in Twelve Parts, the novelty is Glass’s commitment to simplistic harmony, determinedly ingenuous and in that sense postmodern. This approach, continued in Another Look at Harmony (1975–1976), would lead directly to the slowed-down, simplified, transparent language of Einstein on the Beach (1976). The score for this first opera by Glass is one large chaconne on the figure A-G-C, with the ostinato bass line supporting the perfect cadence A minor–G major–C major. Though still economical to the point of caricature, such a procedure no longer produces minimalism as originally understood: gone is the strident, hurried welter of notes; the loops are longer, the tempo relaxed. Formerly prone to write presto, Glass now (and frequently hereafter) chooses a calm andante. And the music serves well the libretto by Robert Wilson, which, though not narrative, remains intelligible and would hardly tolerate text-repetitions following closely on each other. Einstein on the Beach is modern above all in its basic concept, that of a spectacle nearly six hours long but open: the public can come and go as it pleases. The experience is like that of an exposition — a beguiling trick that allows listeners to appreciate the novelty of the piece without having to commit to it for long, ultimately making it easier to accept.

In Einstein, Glass still treats the parameter of timbre in the economical fashion of minimalism. He is content with the forces of the Philip Glass Ensemble (flute, bass clarinet, saxophones, two amplified sopranos, two electronic organs), which he had used almost exclusively since 1968, plus a chamber choir, four narrators (not so many for a vocal work of operatic scale), and violin, the sole stringed instrument in the score. This hollow sound is perhaps the surest marker of modernity, insofar as it relies on amplified and electronic instruments.

Glass approached each of the operas that followed the instant success of Einstein on the Beach as opportunities to explore more and more of the orchestra: Satyagraha (1980) calls for a mellow (postmodern?) orchestra without brass or percussion, in which the winds merely reinforce the regular instruments of the Philip Glass Ensemble, while Akhnaten (1983), conceived on a bigger scale, calls for orchestra without violins; only in The Voyage (1992) do we finally get a full orchestra, plus an eighty-strong choir.

Each section of Satyagraha is again a chaconne, sometimes even repeating whole harmonic progressions. This is the basis of Glass’s later instrumental style, as still found in his music for the documentary Jane (2017) and even in Circus Days and Nights (2020): a series of chords, often mere triads, repeated as in a theme and variations; figures of two notes (often extracted from a chord); deliberately simplistic, often ternary arpeggios that rise and fall (along the lines of C-E-G-C-G-E…), sometimes in all the parts at once; and caricatural syncopations. Glass likes to use the minor mode and then borrow the relative major via its cadential six-four chord, only to revert to the minor through a chromatic ascent in the bass, just as in Schumann. Only in Evening Song No. 2 (2017) for piano does he finally, sometimes, relinquish such mannerisms, suddenly exploring a wider range of harmonies which generate more complex and less repetitious arpeggios.

Glass’s harmony is ingenuously naive, if not overtly clumsy. In his every work, always either conceived for the piano or an orchestral elaboration of his strangely arpeggiated, naively furious piano writing, it is as though a child has been allowed to improvise dreamily in the “universal language” of tonality (roughly that of the late seventeenth century), but with mistakes allowed, the idea being to get down to the primordial essence of tonal music and therefore of the sonic world around us. These touching mistakes, “honest” and, when it comes down to it, not very obtrusive (they sound not dissonant but at most a little rigid) include parallel fifths, six-four chords of a kind almost never found in Bach, false relations, and free use of chords from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, extracted from their original function. These often move by common tones (another economical gesture, though an old one); thus, in the number “Tearing Herself Away” from the film score The Hours (2002), Glass alternates between A-C-E-F and A♭-C-E♭-F, juxtaposing the two forms of his beloved added-sixth chord and in the process permitting the parallel fifths so as to hold the F common tone as a pedal, as if to say: “You can make music out of anything.” Glass indeed has a soft spot for pedals; in his first film score, Koyaaniskatsi (1982), he sets the five syllables of the titular word to a low pedal. Like some easy-listening composers, he often ends with a musical cliché: the tonic in a low register, left to resonate ominously (one can picture him trying it out at the piano).

When not left on their own, Glass’s arpeggios and simple chords accompany (especially in his operas) instrumental or vocal melodies, also kept as deliberately simplistic as textbook examples. They often use ascending scales, as in the “Evening Song” at the end of Satyagraha, the theme of Truman’s sleep in the cult film The Truman Show (1998), and the rising octaves in the piano in Tirol Concerto (2000). Helen’s theme in the music for the horror film Candyman (1992), based on the aimless back-and-forth of C-D-E♭-D-C…, is striking in its innocence, representing that of the heroine; its accompaniment leaves off arpeggios only to become an Alberti bass, a Mozartian archetype equally redolent of innocence. For Glass, Helen’s purity, sacrificed to the monstrous Candyman, perhaps stands for his own music, which opposes simplicity to the walking dead of modernism.

Starting with the late 1980s and the Violin Concerto (1987), a third, purely orchestral strain develops in Glass’s work. Yet several of his symphonies and concertos seem to confront a problem of scale: how to reconcile an innocent spareness or economy of means with hefty instrumentation, especially when no libretto or dramaturgy comes to the rescue? Moreover, how can a concerto, in essence an accompanied melody, be athematic? In the Violin Concerto Glass sidesteps this pitfall by putting his customary arpeggios in the solo part, where they sound pleasantly frisky and violinistic, almost as in Vivaldi.

After the mid-1970s, Glass enjoyed a reputation as not just a representative of musical postmodernism but its creator and sole exponent, more so than his compatriot and rival Reich, Arvo Pärt,² or the late-career Krzysztof Penderecki. His successes and failures came to seem those of postmodernism itself. Any definition of postmodernist music, therefore, has to give Glass’s work pride of place, including its aspiration to be an American national music and its mystical sources of inspiration.³

Glass has practiced yoga of the Tibetan Buddhist variety since his younger days. It is undoubtedly responsible for his fascination with repetition, seen in all his music but especially the early works. Each instrumental loop is like a mantra (the somewhat dry character of minimalism and its problematic sonic “trances” might suggest that such music is better at inducing states of altered consciousness in its performers than in the public). In Glass’s music, we have no longer the Stravinskyan kind of ostinato, depicting primitive savagery, but a repetitiousness that is naive (because tonal), and more systematic too. His extreme repetition becomes ambiguous: is it mystical and therefore positive, or a parody of mechanical absurdity? The ambiguity, which both Reich and Glass play on, recalls what we saw of Glass’s tonality, either a critical reflection on the oppressive tonal music of the culture industry or merely an extreme aesthetic conservatism.

In the late 1960s there was an aesthetic vacuum, and Glass, even more than Reich, took advantage of it. At issue was the creation of a style that would go beyond rhapsodic Americanism (including the jazz-inspired creations of George Gershwin and Aaron Copland), a mere exoticism relative to the European mainstream. What was needed was a genuinely American avant-garde⁴ that would deliver a popular and national victory in the international quest for genius. America seemed to call for a project both popular and conceptually ambitious (but not too much so: John Cage proved too extreme for his compatriots), worthy of the great country that had won its place as the most powerful in the world. As though trying to fill this role in this vast new land, Glass felt a need to reinvent all of music, very gradually and from scratch, beginning from the blank slate left by Cage and Edgard Varèse. He wrote at first in a way that Varèse would have understood: without notes, for percussion alone (1+1); then for one part only (Two Pages), then with the simplest possible harmony (Music for Fifths), then in contrary motion, rediscovering counterpoint little by little. He similarly starts from zero when it comes to timbre, with music absolutely devoid of orchestration, in contrast to all previous modern composers — the French impressionists, the Vienna School, Igor Stravinsky, Varèse, and their descendants with the exception of Cage, whose typically American innocence Glass inherits. This innocence begins precisely, judiciously, with the use of typically American instruments, namely electronic organs from popular music and saxophones from jazz. Instrumentation, more than the caricatural ostinatos already widely exploited since Stravinsky and his countless imitators, is what gives Glass’s sound its personality. His downfall, a consequence of his own success, is perhaps to have had to discover the orchestra little by little, unnecessarily, as his commissions grew more prestigious, costly, orchestral.

Economy of means is the principle underlying all of Glass’s work. It is reflected in the postmodern proliferation of the “chamber opera,” from A Madrigal Opera (1980) to The Trial (2014), the genre just as narrative and therefore accessible as grand opera but shorter, more efficient, and cheaper to produce. Glass maintains that his nature “drove him to write a lot of music”;⁵ he might have added: “with minimal means,” to explain how he has been able to write such an impressive and ever-growing quantity of works (often in reality recycled). This extreme economy is what gives rise to the precious innocence so often taken as the mark of true art in the 1970s. Postmodernist art, just as ambitious as the modernist kind, seeks after the spontaneity associated with “genius,” a notion then still at the peak of its glory, and one that Picasso, at the end of his life, linked precisely to the unique, pure, simple, infantile, immediate. Glass was looking for a serious, even solemn kind of tonal music that would get back to music “in the first degree,” in all senses of the term. This aspiration is what most distinguishes postmodernism from the various neoclassicisms in which tonality (indeed a more complex tonality) is often associated with irony, with the second degree. If Glass absorbed any neoclassical influence, it came not from Darius Milhaud, his teacher for a few weeks, but rather from Erik Satie, who, despite his humorous titles and performance directions, was perhaps the first to search for the pure, naïve essence of music, in his case via slowness and the stripping away of various musical parameters (including orchestration much of the time). His is the “typically French” spirit that Jean Cocteau (a poet celebrated by Glass in his triple homage Orphée, La Belle et la Bête, and Les Enfants terribles) wanted in music,⁶ a serious lightness that would ultimately, thanks to Glass (and his Parisian lessons with Nadia Boulanger?), migrate to the United States. One finds the germ of this transparent simplicity in Dream (1948), an intentionally naive tonal work by the very young Cage (also a great admirer of Satie), or indeed in the remarkably spare piano pieces created in the 1930s by the guru George Gurdjieff and his musical disciple Thomas de Hartmann, both of whom were involved in a sect that practiced prayer, gardening, and gymnastics. The case of these latter figures confirms that mysticism — a search for transparence as well as tradition — had a large part in the minimalist and conservative (tonal) strand within postmodernism. Perhaps Glass needed a “beyond,” a Buddhist Nirvana, to feel his ingenuous neo-tonality released from responsibility to music history, answerable only to the principle of the divine.

This American aesthetic innocence might also have something to do with innocence of the horrors of the Holocaust. If, as Theodor Adorno declared, it is no longer possible to write music after the death camps (and still less naive music, presumably), if “the concept of a cultural resurrection after Auschwitz is illusory and absurd,”⁷ Europe’s American saviors might find themselves exempt. Or again, perhaps the American “responsibility” mentioned above, not aesthetic as in France but ethical, owes something to the spirit of Protestantism. Perhaps postmodernism flourished in Protestant, freethinking cultures that rebut the absurd abuses of modernist dogma and effect a drastic return to the “letter” of music, while also stressing the artist’s responsibility to the public: musicians must earn their living, and pecuniary success is the surest sign of righteousness. And indeed, Glass’s American commentators, including some serious musicologists, often point to his extraordinary commercial success, his Oscars and prestigious collaborations in the worlds of pop and film music. In Europe, it is worth noting, postmodernism has gained the most ground in, aside from Poland, northern Protestant countries with strong choral traditions, such as the Netherlands, Denmark, and Estonia (homeland of Pärt).

Glass’s success could probably have happened only in the United States, thanks to the culture industry flourishing in that ultra-capitalist country⁸ but also to a certain American cultural protectionism or even isolationism. By their own admission, art critics on the other side of the Atlantic eagerly awaited in Einstein on the Beach not merely a renewal of opera (Britten’s numerous dramatic masterpieces in English would have sufficed) but a specifically American renewal. Just as Hollywood hardly ever distributed European films, it seemed necessary for the United States to reinvent opera and then the orchestra in its own fashion. The Americans may be partly mistaken, insofar as electric music, more fundamentally their own, would have better expressed this hypothetical national essence. In the case of Glass, the theme for the opening titles of the Paul Shrader film Mishima (1984), with its powerful mechanical arpeggios in a high register (electric violins doubling synthetic bell-tones), is more impressive than anything in his orchestral works. Even in Perpetulum (2018) or Águas da Amazônia (2019), personality seems to come from the performing forces — a simple percussion ensemble — which limit the melody and harmony in the vibraphone and marimba in favor of precise timbres, mechanical and therefore all the more American. As for Glass’s orchestra, it is most successful when frankly avowing its populism, as in Low Symphony (1992), built on themes from the album Low by Brian Eno and David Bowie (inspired by Glass’s own Music with Changing Parts of 1970: the loop has come full circle). This success naturally led to a sequel, Lodger Symphony (2018), also after Bowie. Glass’s great merit is precisely to have been one of the first to unite popular and art music. This is a hallmark of the third millennium, in which aesthetic doctrines seem to be relaxing, allowing classical musicians to mix anything with anything (thus, for instance, the violinist Laurent Korcia combines Debussy, Stéphane Grappelli, Astor Piazzolla, and Michel Legrand on his 2003 recording Double jeu).

Beyond just narrowing the gap between these two worlds, Glass reunites them in unprecedented fashion in certain successful pieces. These works, all of them non-orchestral, often benefit from the greatest possible economy of means, especially in their performing forces. The piano piece Metamorphosis II (1988) sounds like a pop ballade without words. Its melody, a simple segment of a descending scale, A-G-F, and then a leap up to D-E, works better than a pop melody, in fact, being free of reductive lyrics and electronic arrangements that depend on the sonic trends of the moment. Here economy finds its niche within the tonal universe in general, a niche both popular and highbrow (the double success represents yet another economy, as does the composer’s performance of the piece himself). Here at last Glass achieves his long-cherished goal of recovering the timeless, ageless essence of music. Though not a musical masterpiece, Metamorphosis II is paradoxically a conceptual piece, a kind of aesthetic manifesto for music in the first degree. Or, if you like, Glass pulls off a “happening” whose theme is “naïve musician with naïve music,” drawing more attention to the musician’s touching sensibility than to the transcendence of the piece. He finds his way back to the figure of the troubadour, the complete artist at once poet, composer, and performer. In that sense he fulfills, at least this once, the ambitious postmodern project of returning to the sacred sources of art.

Translated from the French by Tadhg Sauvey

^{1. K. Robert Schwartz distinguishes this first modernist period from a second postmodernist one that he calls “maximalist”; see the chapters “Philip Glass, Minimalist” and “Philip Glass, Maximalist” in his Minimalists (London: Phaidon, 1996), 108–168. ↩}

^{2. See his “Oeuvre” page in this database: https://brahms.ircam.fr/en/arvo-part#parcours. ↩}

^{3. See Jacques Amblard, “Postmodernismes,” in Théories de la composition musicale au XXe siècle, vol. 2, ed. Nicolas Donin and Laurent Feneyrou (Lyon: Symétrie, 2013), 1436–37. ↩}

^{4. See ibid., 1437 et seq. ↩}

^{5. See Glass’s comments on his website (www.philipglass.com). ↩}

^{6. Jean Cocteau, Le Coq et l’Arlequin [1918] (Paris: Stock, 2004). ↩}

^{7. Theodor W. Adorno, “Those Twenties,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 47. ↩}

^{8. On which see Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991). ↩}