Philip Glass assured his place in music history through a breathtakingly simple act of displacement: he took musical gestures that had served for centuries as secondary—busily windmilling arpeggios, stubborn ostinatos, the kind of figures that are more often played by a pianist’s left hand than their right—and treated them as his primary material. Because listeners have been conditioned to think of these as accompaniments, much of Glass’s music has a quality of incompleteness and longing: we cannot help but feel the phantom limb of the absent melody that these figures surely ought to be accompanying.

For this reason, his music thrives in interdisciplinary works, when there actually is some other element in need of musical illumination: a stage picture, a dance, a cinematic scene, a spoken text. By many accounts, Glass is a friendly, obliging collaborator, and his music—fruitfully self-effacing, rarely complex enough to saturate or overwhelm the listener’s attention—behaves the same way. It might be this personality trait that has enabled him to achieve his paradoxical status as an icon of the avant-garde and also one of the most commercially successful of American composers. As he wrote in his memoir, Words Without Music (2015), whenever he is asked how he would define himself, his answer is simple: “I’m a theater composer.”

This statement has the surface banality and hidden abundance of Glass’s best compositions. What does it mean to be a theater composer? It means that one’s music is, from the moment of conception, in dialogue with other media. Music written for the theater cannot demand listeners’ utmost attention; it must tacitly encourage the mind to wander among multiple stimuli.

The foundational paradox of Glass’s career is that the same mysterious qualities—the way his music often seems to accompany some unheard melody, as well as its tendency to precipitate a state of blissful distraction—allowed him to write both his most avant-garde and his most commercial works. His first opera, the nonnarrative Einstein on the Beach (1976), is revolutionary in part because the music, with its fathomless openness, gleefully repels every attempt to parse its meaning. In a Wagner or a Puccini opera, listeners rarely have any doubt about what they’re supposed to be feeling. But the music of Einstein, conceived in tandem with the otherworldly stage pictures of the director Robert Wilson, alternately eases and shocks the listener into a dazed, altered state that is somehow both absorption and distraction. Its task is to denature listeners’ consciousness so that they are maximally receptive to the image before them.

This was a radical approach to opera making. And yet music that maximizes its audience’s receptiveness to an image is also exactly what is required of the soundtrack for a car commercial. Picture it: a shining black luxury SUV driving effortlessly through nighttime rain, a ten-year-old safely cocooned in the leather of the backseat, looking out the window. What else could accompany such an ad but sleek, minor-key Glassian arpeggios?

Since the beginning of his career, Glass has regularly been subjected to an age-old complaint: anyone could write music that’s mostly made of cartwheeling arpeggios outlining only the most rudimentary chord progressions. But as John Cage once said when faced with the accusation that “anyone could do that”: sure they could, but they don’t. Plenty of composers could, in theory, have noticed that a pianist’s left-hand figures can be so pleasurable and comforting to listen to that it might be worth promoting them to center stage, but Glass is the one who actually did.

Any artist who invents a distinctive, instantly recognizable mood is sure to leave a mark on the history of their art form. And Glass did invent a mood, one that feels inseparable from American urban life in the late twentieth century. His unadorned cyclical patterns sometimes exude a chilly, untouchable melancholy; they are sad in the way that ruthlessly optimized, factory-produced luxury goods are sad. Practically none of the composers associated with what has come to be known as minimalism seem to feel especially affectionate toward the label—Glass prefers to call his work “music with repetitive structures”—but the term is a better fit for him than for many others, since he tends to build his music from simple, discrete building blocks: a triad, an ascending minor scale, a slurred two-note pattern. These gestures are endlessly replicable, like Warhol’s soup cans. And the sheen they give off, as they churn along, bespeaks an innocently optimistic vision of modern life as cheerful and outdated as Chicago’s skyline. The harmonies he wields had been available to musicians for many centuries, but the extreme cleanness of his textures—there is no dirt or sweat in his music, no humanizing messiness—could only have been dreamed up in his own time, in a world of cities organized into sleek and separate skyscrapers, cities made mainly of glass.

Apophrades is Harold Bloom’s term, from The Anxiety of Influence (1973), for the uncanny reversal that occurs when an artist has so singular a voice that artists from prior generations seem, in a recurrent temporal flickering, to be imitating them, as when Wallace Stevens seems to be stealing from John Ashbery. Glass has, I think, achieved a kind of apophrades, not with any particular precursor but with the arpeggio itself. These days, if you play a simple, repeated arpeggiated figure, many music lovers are likely to think not of Schubert or Bellini or Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata but of Philip Glass.

The arc of Glass’s six-decade musical career has been on my mind because of the world premiere, on July 5, of his newest orchestral work, his Symphony No. 15, Lincoln, which was performed at Tanglewood by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Karen Kamensek, and the baritone Zachary James. This work’s path to the concert stage proved unexpectedly difficult. It was originally commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in honor of the center’s fiftieth anniversary, in 2022. Had the work been completed on schedule, it would have premiered midway through the Biden administration, at a moment that looks in hindsight like the eye of the storm. But it was not, and its unveiling was postponed to the spring of 2026, by which time the Trump administration had seized control of the Kennedy Center and attempted, grotesquely, to rename it after Trump himself.

Glass would have been justified in pulling his new piece from the Trump-stained Kennedy Center even if it were an abstract instrumental composition. There was all the more reason to do so, however, with a vocal symphony that sets several of Abraham Lincoln’s canonical speeches and that feels like a latter-day echo of Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait (1942), which the BSO performed at Tanglewood alongside this new symphony. One could imagine finding a way to treat the performance of such a piece in the midst of Trump’s Washington as a form of protest. But the composer understandably felt that “the values of Kennedy Center today are in direct conflict with the message of the symphony,” as he wrote in a letter to the National Symphony, and the premiere was deferred once again.

In the end, Glass’s new symphony premiered fifty years to the month after the first performance of Einstein on the Beach, in Avignon, France, in July 1976. I’ve never experienced Einstein in the theater, but whenever I return to the achieved innocence of its music, I find myself refreshed and replenished with creative energy. To listen to certain sections of Einstein—“Train 1,” for instance—is to encounter what sounds like an extraterrestrial preschool’s worth of alien toddlers let out for recess, running around and shrieking with the sheer joy of being alive on whatever their home planet is.

Three quarters of the way through the twentieth century, decades after Albert Einstein’s theories had inadvertently enabled the creation of unimaginably toxic, potentially world-destroying weapons, American society was, it’s safe to say, pretty thoroughly disillusioned with any notion that scientific and technological progress leads mainly to wholesome outcomes. And at a far more modest level, new-music aficionados had been confronted for decades with ever more complex musical systems, harmonic frameworks that sometimes aspired to an Einsteinian upending of the musical cosmos. (What is serial music if not an insistence on totalizing relativity?)

For both ailments, Einstein on the Beach was a tonic. Its simplest gestures—the counting out of numbers until the meaning drains from their names; the giddy, light-speed repetition of familiar harmonic patterns—mark a return to fundamentals. In this work, Glass and Wilson pick up the basic ingredients of music and mathematics—time and space—and wash them in some bright stream.

Einstein is blessed, in practically every bar, with the curiosity and neuroplasticity of a year-old baby; or maybe we, the listeners, are the baby and the piece is a parent who lovingly, attentively shows us the world. These are your hands. These are your feet. These are numbers: one-two-three-four-one-two-three one-two-three-four-one-two-three. This is an octave, a third, a fifth; this is an arpeggio. (Einstein’s sonic texture, shot through with the cheerful candor of those brightly blazing Seventies synthesizers, is somehow inseparable, in my mind, from early episodes of Sesame Street.) Theodor Adorno once wrote, with grudging admiration, that Stravinsky’s orchestrations were so uncannily natural that “the voices of his instruments are like animals whose very existence seems to express their names.” In Einstein, it is not the instruments but music’s essential materials that seem to say their names, announcing themselves as if for the first time. This is one of those precious works of art where it will always be morning.

A few years ago, in these pages, I discussed the rare cases in which composers find an operatic subject that suits them so perfectly that the characters and events of the drama seem to be emanations from the inner workings of their music.¹ Any composer can hope for this kind of immaculate alignment once in a career, if they’re lucky. Glass had the good fortune of achieving this unity of music and subject matter with his second opera, Satyagraha (1980), a luminous depiction of crucial moments in the life of Mahatma Gandhi.²

The composer knew from an early date that Gandhi’s life and teachings would be fruitful terrain for his music: he proposed Gandhi as a subject in his first discussions with Wilson for the piece that ultimately became Einstein. Wilson wasn’t interested, and so Satyagraha is the first Glass opera in which the composer’s mature style is unshadowed by Wilson’s magnetic and quietly dominant sensibility.

Satyagraha (the Sanskrit term could be translated as “truth force” or “the insistence on truth”) is composed of a series of tableaux from Gandhi’s life, including his time at the South African ashram known as Tolstoy Farm and the moment when thousands of his followers (Satyagrahis) took a collective vow to resist a prejudicial government decree. The opera’s three acts correspond to past, present, and future, and each features a figure who influenced Gandhi’s philosophy or was influenced by it: Leo Tolstoy presides over the first act, Gandhi’s contemporary Rabindranath Tagore appears in the second, and the third is infused with the presence of Martin Luther King Jr., an emissary from a future when storm clouds still hang heavy and so much work remains to be done.

Those who have criticized the opera for failing to reckon with the complexities of Gandhi’s biography—“Satyagraha does not bring us much closer to Gandhi’s complicated personality or to his far-from-simple political ideals,” Donal Henahan complained in a New York Times review of the American premiere—miss the point. Satyagraha is not a biopic. The music is itself an act of nonviolent resistance; it enacts the inner process of self-fortification that would be required to participate in a Gandhian political action. Yes, it changes only subtly for many minutes on end, but if you’re going to undertake, say, a twenty-four-day protest march, you have to be willing to perform the same action for a very long time, even if that action is simply walking or calmly taking up space. No sit-in, boycott, or strike would be effective if it only lasted a few minutes, nor would it be effective to abruptly change tactics midway through the action.

This is what makes Satyagraha the ideal Glass opera: here and here only did he find a subject that demands music that peacefully, implacably persists and does little else. Most Western listeners are unlikely to understand the opera’s Sanskrit libretto, but who could fail to understand the meaning of that gentle minor scale that the flutes play in “Tolstoy Farm,” that simple gesture of ascent that must raise itself up, over and over?

Though Satyagraha is a sublime piece, certain technical problems emerge in it that hadn’t been present in the early works that Glass composed for the Philip Glass Ensemble. Satyagraha was the first score that the composer, in his early forties at the time, had written for a conventional orchestra or operatic ensemble since his student days two decades earlier, and this lack of experience sometimes shows. Glass tends to write for every instrument, including the voice, as if it were a synthesizer; there are passages for wind instruments and singers that remain in a brutally high range for a brutally long time.

It’s puzzling that Glass writes such unidiomatic, audibly punishing sections in his operas, because if his music is to achieve its hypnotic effect, it has to sound effortless. Its textures must be unbroken; one cycle of a phrase must flow with mandalic seamlessness into the next. And even in a good performance, there are passages in Satyagraha and its successor, Akhnaten (1984), that are likely to sound sweaty and borderline desperate. Some vocal sections are voiced so densely, in such a high range, that the texture grows clotted with thick agglomerations of choral sound. The resulting grandiosity is surely unintentional. This kind of effect, unfortunately, became all the more frequent in the orchestral music he wrote in subsequent decades.

Whatever happened to the curious, playful infant consciousness of Einstein on the Beach? Sad to say, that infant grew up and got a corporate job. The arpeggios that in Glass’s early works shine like gold in a stream later circulate like mere money. His music’s evolution over the past four decades, which feels less like growth than entrenchment or congealment, is on full display in his symphonies.

Though Glass only began composing symphonies in his mid-fifties, he has now written fifteen, a figure that sounds high until you consider that he has also written more than thirty operas. “Symphony” is a slippery term—it’s been a couple of centuries since the word briefly had a somewhat stable definition as a three- or four-movement work for orchestra with no soloists—and Glass has achieved his symphonic tally in part by gathering an unusually motley collection of pieces under that label: Symphony No. 12, Lodger, is essentially an album of orchestrated songs, while Symphony No. 14, Liechtenstein Suite, is a modest eighteen-minute suite for string orchestra.

As a self-professed theater composer most comfortable writing music that wafts up from an orchestra pit or floats above cinematic images, Glass has expressed some anxiety about placing his music in the concert stage’s unforgiving spotlight: he acknowledged in his memoir that he’s surely “one of the all-time late starters among symphony composers” and that “after years of writing for theater and opera, it was a real jolt for me to drop all of the extramusical content.” Glass has written some successful nonprogrammatic concert music; in the hands of a sensitive pianist, his many solo-piano études can cast a sustained, crystalline spell. But few of his symphonies are among his stronger pieces. In his operas and film scores, I appreciate the music’s welcoming, informal quality, the way it invites the listener’s mind to come and go as it pleases. But symphonies asks listeners for undivided focus of a kind that Glass’s music can’t always sustain.

To write about these symphonies is to run up against a limit of critical language. Many of Glass’s symphonies are at the same time hilariously bad and also sort of delightful. The challenge is that it’s all too easy to point out the features that make them ridiculous, whereas the things that make them enjoyable lie at a sublinguistic level. Even when they’re irritatingly brainless, they are exceptionally pleasant to listen to. They sometimes sound like massage parlor music—in several of them, the harp cloyingly doubles the strings’ melodies—but they also have the effect of a good massage. If I am driving, or folding laundry, or out for a run, a Glass symphony makes the time pass fleetly and fluidly. Only rarely is an idea so crashingly awful that it breaks the reverie. This is music that rewards sustained distraction.

If you depart the realm of pure ASMR and turn on your brain, however, you’ll notice that Glass’s most familiar and beloved gestures can sound slightly grotesque when they’re transplanted to an orchestra. His symphonies sometimes sound like a double parody: they seem to be self-mockery, a bombastic satire of his pioneering early works, and they’re also a send-up of the entire canon of orchestral music. Those fastidiously clean arpeggios and repeated rhythmic figures, so thrillingly sleek when they’re played by synthesizers and saxophones, sound clumsy and self-important when they’re rendered by gigantic string and brass sections. At the same time, to ask an orchestra to play such gestures ad nauseam is, somehow, to ridicule the very apparatus of the orchestra. The cymbals go crash! crash! crash! The triangle goes ding! ding! ding! The whole thing seems to be saying symphony! symphony! symphony!

More than one listener has noticed a kinship between Glass’s symphonies and those of Anton Bruckner, a connection that has been further underlined by the composer’s long collaboration with the Bruckner Orchestra Linz and its former chief conductor Dennis Russell Davies. I think Bruckner is indeed Glass’s most important symphonic forebear, and the best evidence for this is the way that these two composers demand practically identical qualities of the musicians who perform their works. Above all, musicians who play Bruckner and Glass need to be extraordinarily patient. It is deceptively easy for an orchestra to doom a performance of either composer’s work by ratcheting up the tension too quickly or adopting an excessively passionate affect. Bruckner’s symphonies, like Glass’s, can easily sound like empty parodies of symphonic bombast if they’re badly played.

The second most important quality for performing Glass and Bruckner symphonies is beauty of sound. Some composers’ works can sound exciting even when they’re played by a mediocre ensemble: Beethoven’s symphonies teem with so many memorable melodies, so many astonishing twists and turns, that they’re hard to ruin. But Bruckner and Glass symphonies are effective only if they’re played by the very best orchestras, ensembles with a gleaming, burnished sound. The musical material may not seem especially interesting moment by moment, but when played by a great orchestra, the cumulative effect can be magnificent.

These composers’ symphonies also share an unusual harmonic austerity, a quality that can frustrate music lovers who turn to symphonies for a certain kind of tension and release. “Look, there are no real orgasms in Bruckner’s music,” Leonard Bernstein once declared in exasperation. (He was surely contrasting Bruckner with his climax-happy favorite, Mahler.) Bernstein is right that the musical dramas enacted in Bruckner’s symphonies are awesome in scale but enigmatically sexless; when the music gets agitated, it gets louder and louder, jumps up and down, and then, more often than not, stops in its tracks and falls silent. It does not ripplingly crash ashore, as happens so often in Mahler’s symphonies.

In Glass’s symphonies, not only are there no orgasms, I can’t discern any sexual energy. There does not seem to be a self, an ego, present at all; the musical voice emanates from some other region of consciousness. Glass’s harmonies, like Bruckner’s, are often clerically austere; his chords seem to have just returned from a silent meditation retreat that has scrubbed them of all yearning. They are mostly free of dissonant, layered harmonies whose tension might evoke desire or subjectivity or uncertainty.

It never fails to surprise me that early in his career Glass collaborated closely with Samuel Beckett and that his music’s repetitive structures were inspired in part by the effect of Beckett’s plays. As he noted in his memoir, Beckett’s Play “provided no clue as to what the emotional shape of the music might be…. What I noticed during the run was that, from one night to the next, my experience of the theatrical event was substantially different, depending on how my attention was functioning. The epiphany—the emotional high point—came in different places,” and the music therefore had to be “an accomplice in triggering a moving epiphany.” This openness of form, the absence of an obvious climax or catastrophe, is what makes Glass’s early works—especially his works of music theater—so refreshing. The trouble with the symphonies is that he has maintained this formal indeterminacy (there are no obvious climaxes) but conjoined it with an instrumental and gestural palette of all too conventional grandeur.

These symphonies are most effective when their mood is serene, benevolent, or tranquil, and when their scale is modest; it’s no coincidence that the strongest among them, the sly and strange Symphony No. 3, is scored for strings alone. When Glass reaches for clangorous symphonic effects, there is an unbridged gap between the cool, unambiguously major- or minor-key harmonies, with their disinclination to development or transformation, and the sheer bombast of the sound. In the louder moments, the listener is left asking a question that the best music renders irrelevant, impossible to even formulate: Why is this happening?

Abraham Lincoln has appeared recurrently throughout Glass’s body of work across more than forty years: he is a character in the
CIVIL war
S, a multiform Robert Wilson collaboration from the early 1980s; The Perfect American (2013), an opera whose title refers to Walt Disney but that features a role for an animatronic Lincoln; and the opera Appomattox (2007, revised 2015). Glass has always been attracted to political and intellectual leaders possessed of an unbreakable, wayward stoicism—Gandhi, Akhenaten, Kepler—and Lincoln is an ideal American representative of this lineage. I wish I could report that the Lincoln Symphony represents a Falstaff-like resurgence of creative energy or the arrival of the inscrutable, newly childlike innocence that marks Dmitri Shostakovich’s fifteenth and final symphony. Alas, Glass’s fifteenth is one of his weaker efforts.

Glass and his collaborator Stokes Howell have gathered a beautifully varied selection of Lincoln’s oratory: the text includes self-effacing autobiographical anecdotes as well as soul-shaking pronouncements on the irreducible wrong of slavery. You wouldn’t know this from the music, however, which seems mostly oblivious to the text it sets. There is an extreme paucity and poverty of musical ideas; the music simply trundles forward, blurrily impervious to every Lincolnian shift in tone. Lincoln’s account of his brief, unheroic military career—his toughest battles, he tells us, were with the mosquitoes—is endearing and funny, but there’s not an ounce of wit in the accompanying music, which toots solemnly along, its dully burnished mid-tempo arpeggios indistinguishable from the music of an earlier section in which Lincoln darkly warns against the possible rise of an American tyrant.

Later the music’s indifference to the text becomes borderline offensive: after an a cappella spoken rendition of Lincoln’s condemnation of slavery (“If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong”), the ensemble eases into an incomprehensibly mild, toothless moderato, orchestral elevator music. The spoken sections are, however, more effective than the sung ones, since Glass’s text setting is unrelentingly awkward. “In my tenth year I was kicked [pause] by a horse [pause] and was killed [pause] for a time,” Lincoln sings at one point, stopping every three syllables as if out of breath. Lincoln was a young man when he wrote many of these speeches—he delivered the Lyceum Address when he was twenty-eight—and yet Glass, in his setting of them, has managed to make one of America’s greatest orators sound tired, tiresome, and slightly confused.

Glass’s percussion writing has always been a liability in his orchestral music: the percussion gestures are so unimaginative and their timbres so unintegrated with the rest of the ensemble that they often sound like electronically generated MIDI instruments. In this piece, the percussion parts seem to have been chosen by some random instrument generator. Why, in one movement, is a shaker shimmying alongside Mr. Lincoln? When he recounts stories from his youth, why does a triangle ding insistently behind him? Why is his somber farewell address accompanied by the cheerful, chirping two-step of tambourine and wood blocks?

Midway through the premiere, feeling distressed, I thought to myself: but surely this piece has a strong connection to Satyagraha, a piece I love, and its depiction of Gandhi leading his followers through analogous moments of political and spiritual crisis. Why does Satyagraha work so beautifully while this one falls flat? Had I somehow misremembered Satyagraha? Or—oh no—does my admiration for Satyagraha depend on the fact that I don’t speak Sanskrit? If I did, might I be as put off by Glass’s text setting in that piece as I’m bothered by his treatment of English? One of Glass’s most brilliant moves, back in the days of Einstein, was to substitute the simple counting out of numbers for a conventional operatic libretto. Might there be an inverse relationship between a Glass text’s comprehensibility and its aesthetic power?

I returned to Satyagraha and felt relieved: it really is a masterpiece. It is patient, luminous, and wise. Each scene possesses an inner musical current, simple and strong, and Glass lets each idea unfold across broad, rippling plains of time. His new symphony, by contrast, interrupts itself every few minutes, seemingly out of uncertainty or embarrassment. To paraphrase his collaborator Samuel Beckett, this is music that churns on, having no alternative, saying nothing new.

In an interview in 1999 on NPR’s Fresh Air with Ira Glass, who happens to be his cousin, Glass once reflected that “the real issue, I’ve always said to younger composers, it’s not how do you find your voice but how to get rid of it. Getting the voice isn’t hard, it’s getting rid of the damn thing.” In reality, though, a composer can’t aspire to “get” a musical voice like Glass’s. His instantly recognizable voice is a blessing (though he acknowledges that at times it tilts into being a curse) that is inextricable from his singular personality, composed as it is of fruitfully contradictory elements: his likable, disarmingly plainspoken sensibility, his Buddhism-infused worldview, his canny business sense, and his understanding of what was missing in the classical music market. It’s a distinctly American bundle of contradictions, and by now it’s hard to imagine American music without Glass’s voice as a stubbornly vital ingredient. His great early works, Einstein above all, had the impact of an asteroid crashing into earth. And if, in subsequent decades, he’s had trouble digging himself out of a crater, it’s a crater that, through the sheer force of that early vision, he created himself.