I figure the motherfucker can take a hit on the chin because a lot of people have very little nice to say about Philip Glass. He’s a love/hate kind of black licorice kind of composer. I’ll go so far as to say a lot of people who profess love only do so to sound smart and they don’t really know many contemporary composers. Those who hate have heard enough to be turned off, and I agree that were he limited to stuff like Einstein On the Beach, I’d be pitching my tent in the hate camp. I know someone who hates him so much that she went as far as telling me a story about telling someone else how much she hates him. I guess that’s what I’m doing now, sort of.

Except I don’t hate him. Where he hits for me, he hits hard and I love him. This is one of those pieces. There’s a quieter, contemplative drama that just grabs me and holds me in for the entire piece.

There is one thing missing for me with this though. I’d mentioned recently that a lot of modern “classical compositions sound to me more like soundtracks than stand-alone pieces of music. This is one of those cases. It’s missing a film to accompany the music. It sounds incomplete without moving images and the video is compelling to an extent, but Metamorphosis needs a movie. Who the hell am I to say so though? I guess I comfortable enough, knowing that Glass’ most popular, or at least well-known music, is soundtrack work to movies. It seems to me that the intelligentsia puts soundtrack music somewhere below other music on the artsy scale. That shouldn’t be the case but it does seem so to me.

Anyway, this was my own soundtrack this morning. A quiet urgency unattached to any definable cause or motivation. I’m a bit squirrelly for reasons I can’t explain.