Philip Glass's music comprised much of the soundtrack to my childhood. Growing up in the early 1980s, my generation witnessed the cultural mainstream's gradual embrace of Glass's aesthetic — in the form of everything from Pepsi commercials and knock-knock jokes to the scoring of Godfrey Reggio's Qatsi trilogy — as a kind of reception of the future of music. I have vivid early memories of sitting stock still in the family room of my parents' house, utterly transfixed by a Sesame Street segment called "Geometry of a Circle." The clip featured an ensemble of singers and an arpeggiating electric-organ performing Glass's vaguely unsettling motifs over an evolving series of animated geometric shapes on the screen, and it served as something of an LSD dose for the preschool set. Later on, I discovered my parents' CBS Masterworks LP of Einstein on the Beach and, when allowed to drop the record needle, often chose to dance and sing along to the empyrean, pulsating enumerations of the iconic "Knee 5." ("One two three four….") Urged into movement and sound purely by Einstein's propulsive score, I recognized the visceral, internal logic of Glass's music and was certain — even at that early age — that I was hearing something important.

I was reminded anew of my very first encounters with Glass's compositions when I attended a performance of Satyagraha during the Metropolitan Opera's 2007–08 season. Unlike much else from that era, Glass's aesthetic has aged remarkably well in our era of digitized sound, and the impression of a deep, almost monastic consequence to his music has remained. Bits and pieces from the composer's second opera — the halfway point in his trilogy of operatic portraits of men who changed the world — had been rattling around in my skull for a while; the opera's introductory arioso (a cascading minor melody buttressed by a ruminative cello ostinato) and the ascendant Act III finale are two of what might be called Glass's "golden oldies." But I was hardly prepared to encounter such a cogent live performance of the score coupled with a production that organically revealed the work's uncanny balance of timelessness and prescience. (With the 2008 presidential campaign already well underway, it was hard to miss a certain resonance in the production's staging of the opera's Act III, titled "King"). I walked away from the performance incredulous that Satyagraha had ever really been performed in another production, in any other way. But it had been, of course — along with several other distinct productions of Einstein, Akhnaten and Orphée, in addition to the high-profile world-premiere stagings of The Juniper Tree, The Voyage, Waiting for the Barbarians and Appomattox that have made Glass today's foremost living composer for the opera stage. This month, his latest opera, Kepler, receives its U.S. premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Born in Baltimore in 1937, Glass attended the University of Chicago at the age of fifteen; while there, he studied mathematics and philosophy while deepening his understanding of musical composition under the tutelage of Darius Milhaud; he would later spend four years at the Juilliard School. After graduating and traveling to Paris, he plugged away under the exacting pedagogy of Nadia Boulanger and developed the indelible compositional voice that is unmistakably his own. But it was his subsequent work with Ravi Shankar and Alla Rakha that imparted to his music what we continue to identify as distinctively Glass — cyclical, phasing rhythms; mesmeric melodic tropes based on raga-like modes; subtle harmonic shifts that bloom into larger themes and variations. His concurrent interest in the theatrical works of Beckett, Brecht and Jean Genet, explored during his work with the Mabou Mines theater company, inspired the distinctly non-narrative (perhaps anti-narrative) tendencies of his earliest works. What's been fascinating to witness in Glass's development as a composer, though, is the simultaneous evolution of his distinctive musical language (the surreal brutality and lyricism that run through Waiting for the Barbarians seem to me to evince hues of both Shostakovich and Debussy) and the increasing inclination toward linear narrative structures. If there once seemed to be some questions about Glass's bona fides as a composer of genuine opera, his mature works reveal the subtle profundities that also mark the best art by his friends and contemporaries from the downtown scene of the late 1960s and '70s, including Chuck Close and Richard Serra. Glass's responsive film music; the work of his second operatic triptych, grounded in the prose and cinema of Jean Cocteau (Orphée, La Belle et la Bête and Les Enfants Terribles); and the grim fantasy of The Juniper Tree — his 1984 collaboration with Robert Moran — seem to affirm an almost Verdian understanding of the primitive power of storytelling.

Having listened to Philip Glass's music for much of my life, I have to admit that I simply don't get those who don't get the composer's ceaseless explorations of the elemental potential of music. People who get bored at the perceived tedium of his works usually strike me as either not paying close enough attention to what Glass is attempting to say, or being obstinately opposed to the idea of his music before a note of it has even been played. Responding to his detractors, I find myself echoing a credo constructed by New York Times music critic Robert Palmer to describe Einstein on the Beach, but which soon mushrooms out to encompass all truly great modern works of art: "One listens to the music… and somehow, without quite knowing it, one crosses the line from being puzzled or irritated to being absolutely bewitched. The experience is inexplicable but utterly satisfying, and one could not ask for anything more than that."

ADAM WASSERMAN

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