These very early Philip Glass works date from the late 1960s, well before the composer entered into mainstream culture with his operas and movie scores. The pieces are therefore hardcore minimalism–unrelenting in their adherence to the repetition principle.
Music in Similar Motion begins pleasingly enough, graced by the organ’s cool textures. The gradually modulated melodic fragments create a sense of timelessness over the work’s 18 minutes; only a temporary key change breaks the pattern. How Now for piano is even more fragmentary and slowly evolving. This piece requires significant patience, and a feeling of relief may well ensue as you sense what must be the approaching end of the work’s 27-minutes–only to realize that only nine minutes have elapsed(!).
But the toughest nut is Music in Fifths. Here we are subjected to repetitive scale-like runs not dissimilar to rudimentary keyboard exercises–something that sounds admittedly less tiresome on the organ, but is nonetheless best endured with some chemical aid or another. Steffen Schleiermacher certainly deserves recognition for the incredible concentration he musters to play this endlessly repetitive music with such rhythmic acuity and evenness of tone, and he’s aided by fine recorded sound. Glass devotees no doubt will be enraptured. Others seeking background music to set a meditative mood also will find this release quite useful.
