String Quartet No. 3, Mishima
     I. 1957: Award Montage
     II. November 25—Ichigaya
     III. Grandmother and Kimituke
     IV. 1962: Body Building
     V. Blood Oath
     VI. Mishima/Closing

String Quartet No. 2, Company
     I. ???? = 96
     II. ???? = 160
     III. ???? = 96
     IV. ???? = 160

Selections from Etudes for Solo Piano

Philip Glass remains the most popularly recognized of the Minimalist composers who came of age in the late 1960s. The materials of classic Minimalist music were reduced to bare essentials; its composers reveled in doing much with little. Early Minimalist works might typically involve pulsating rhythmic and/or melodic repetitions that transformed gradually over a long expanse through incremental changes in sustained sounds; or, alternatively, their individual sounds might themselves be sustained far longer than the ear was accustomed to. In either case, the effect could be at once static and energized, the sounds vivid and eminently apprehensible. Some listeners complained that Minimalism was too easy; and yet, in the context of the serial complexity that dominated academic new music at that time, it was refreshing to the ear, as cleansing to the sonic psyche as a spoonful of sorbet between courses of intricately spiced dishes.

Glass’s teachers included Vincent Persichetti, Darius Milhaud, and William Bergsma, and in the early 1960s he spent two years studying addition to the Qatsi trilogy directed by Godfrey Reggio: Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi, and Naqoyqatsi. He has been much honored for his achievements, with awards including membership in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (as Chevalier) and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Praemium Imperiale of Japan, the National Medal of Arts, and the Glenn Gould Prize. In 2018 he was recognized with the Kennedy Center Honors.

His String Quartet No. 3, Mishima (1985) comprises six movements arranged from his score for Paul Schrader’s film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, a stylized treatment of the life of the 20th-century author Yukio Mishima, who, after directing a failed coup against Japan’s Armed Forces, committed ritual suicide. Glass wrote: “The film follows a complex narrative structure which divides the life of this famous contemporary Japanese novelist into 3 parts—his childhood, his mature years, and the last day of his life. These subjects were intercut to produce a shifting kaleidoscopic vision of Mishima’s life. The scenes of his childhood were filmed in black and white and scored for string quartet. At the time of writing the film music, I anticipated the string quartet section would be extracted from the film score and made into a concert piece in its own right.”

String Quartet No. 2, Company, was derived from music Glass wrote for an adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s 1979 autobiographical novella (or prose poem) of that name; the adaptation was made by actor-director Frederick Neumann for the experimental performance group Mabou Mines, of which he and Glass were both members and with which Glass has been affiliated for more than half a century. Unlike the Third Quartet, the Second makes no explicit reference to the narrative of its source. In fact, Glass labels its four movements in the most objective way possible, identifying them simply with metronome markings. Glass commented: “I liked the idea of using the medium of the string quartet that would allow for both an introspective and passionate quality well suited to the text. Beckett picked four places in the work which he referred to as the ‘interstices, as it were.’ Not surprisingly these four short movements have turned out to be a thematically cohesive work which now, as my String Quartet No. 2, has taken on a life of its own.”

As an emerging composer, Glass formed the Philip Glass Ensemble in 1968 to perform his works. The group consisted of amplified wood-winds and keyboards, singers, and (beginning in 1970) an indispensable sound engineer. He himself served as a keyboard player, and he began writing etudes as personal exercises for advancing his keyboard technique. His friend Dennis Russell Davies, a conductor-and-pianist who had been championing his music, was so taken by the idea that in 1994 he commissioned Glass to compose a set of six piano etudes; and that project then expanded to ten—the Études for Solo Piano, Book One. A second set of ten was premiered in 2012 and published two years later—the Études for Solo Piano, Book Two. Book One focuses on specific techniques generally required for rendering the composer’s music, such as adhering to unvarying tempos or playing repetitive figures over long time spans without inducing muscular fatigue. Book Two tends toward pieces of more wide-ranging conception and, arguably, of greater difficulty. The Études for Solo Piano have proved popular with choreographers, and pianists have embraced them not just as studies to address technical matters but as rewarding concert pieces in their own right.