Review by Alexandra Hamilton-Ayres

Although he is heralded as one of the great minimalist composers, Glass doesn’t endorse the term. When he was younger, putting on loft performances in 1960’s New York, he called himself, simply, a “musical theatre composer.” Today, he doesn’t describe himself as a film composer, either, but prefers to define his style as “music with repetitive structures.” In the autobiography, he discusses his visual artist friends from that period—the likes of Sol LeWitt and Richard Serra, who were the “official” minimalists. Because Glass associated with them, his music was correspondingly branded as such. He also writes about working with conductors who presumed his music was “minimalist” in a derogatory sense—in other words, that it was just a mere series of repetitions—and so didn’t bother to rehearse it properly, until they found out, all too late, that the score in question was far more intricate than all that, and was actually constantly evolving. It has always been the case that the superficial simplicity of a piece of music is only ever a mask of elegance, concealing a far more complex sonic journey. The assumption that Glass is therefore easy to play is a foolish one. This is also true of J.S. Bach’s music, where the melodies are simple and clear, yet the harmony is meticulously mathematical.