So I’m rather a new-music junkie. Granted, it’s gotta be in a genre I’m interested in, but hook me up with a new artist and I’ll go whole hog. This week, on the recommendation of Daniel, I’ve been exploring the music of composer Philip Glass. I didn’t know much about Philip Glass before this week; if you’d asked me I would have remembered that he was very into minimalism and possibly 12-tone music, but that’s about it. I would’ve guessed that he’s not my cup of tea whatsoever. But, having been promised that his newer works were more accessible, I decided to give it a shot.

My first stop: Glass’s personal website. It has a nice overview of his stuff and also… an audio player! The player gives a pretty nice sampling of his stuff. It includes cuts from his music for the movie The Hours, which is beautiful stuff. It also has a sampling of his Etudes for Piano which I found to be very nice. Then there’s some weird stuff - for instance, the soundtrack for a very weird independent art film called Koyaanisqatsi. Definitely enough good stuff to get me interested, though.

My next stop: the local library. I currently have checked out to me nearly every Philip Glass CD that’s in their system. While it’s not an extensive collection, it’s enough to get a sampling. There’s the recording of his String Quartets - fairly nice. Then there’s Einstein on the Beach, which is a whopping four (four!) CDs of “opera”, though it’s not like any opera you’ve ever heard or thought of. It’s either brilliant or totally bizarre… maybe a bit of both. Following that I’ve been listening to his Symphony #4, Heroes. It, too, is pretty good. I still have Dance Nos. 1 - 5 and music in twelve parts to sample, though I doubt I’m going to find them as enjoyable; I know from some online reading that twelve parts is his serious work in the twelve-tone motif, which is too far down the esoteric path for me.

I still want to get my hands on Symphony #1, which Daniel highly recommended; the little samples on Amazonmp3.com sound good. Other than that, I feel like I’ve at least given Glass a good shot this week.

My conclusions: The soundtrack from The Hours is a keeper and will get regular play time. The piano etudes probably will as well. Symphonies 1 and 4 are probably worth having and will get played semi-regularly. The older, more esoteric stuff is somewhat interesting, but probably not something that I’d listen to much. But hey, it’s a new musical discovery, and one that found me some good new music, at that. Thanks, Daniel!