I first heard Glassworks in a 1984 Volkswagen Fox, which for a lot of reasons, (including this one) has become my favorite kind of car. My friend came to pick me up at work so we could eat dinner together, and on the trip from the parking lot of Best Buy, across the street to the parking lot of Subway, I heard the first soundbites of genius I'd encountered in a long time.

It was not snowing that day, but it really should have been. A few weeks later I listened to the same CD again, this time while driving around my apartment complex in a Honda Civic, and it WAS snowing. Big fluffy flakes which were wet enough to make the car slide around, and big/fluffy enough to catch on your face and feel like Wynona Rider at the end of Edward Scissorhands.

Just setting the scene. If you can get ahold of this CD, try to listen to it while driving around at night in the snow. That's all.

I am having a hard time expressing all of the unusual intricacies so please excuse how I may jump around.

First of all Glass emphasizes pattern. He will begin with a series of notes, maybe a few bars or so, and then repeat the pattern throughout the piece like crazy. this sounds like most music, I know, but with a lot of composers and artist, the pattern is altered in tempo and perhaps not even really emphasized so much as used for the chorus. With Philip Glass's style, when I say the saem series of seven or eight notes, I mean the same series of seven or eight notes. This pattern will be changed usually only in key, and will serve as your melody, if there is in fact any discernable melody.

Perhaps one of the reasons the repeated pattern doesn't disappoint or irritate the listener is that there are sometimes hundreds of tracks recorded for a single song. Like an orchestra of typical classical music, there are literally hundereds of parts, which makes it very difficult to say whether there is or is not a repeated pattern of melody.

What the layered effect also does is create its own melodies, or perhaps give the listener an opportunity to create his or her own melody. Each time the track is played, you hear something different. I think this maybe due to the fact that human ears can only process so much information at one time, and when there are hundred and hundreds of things going on, you have only so much time to focus on a sound before thousands of other sounds block it out or lead to other thousands of sounds.

Philip Glass also has a way, in his music, of providing for a rest. The third track on Glassworks is a good example of this. You are instantly blasted with hundreds of sounds, repeating the pattern, (usually either a tonic scale of notes going up or going down in order, "duh duh duh DUH, duh duh duh DUH, DUH Duh duh duh, DUH Duh duh duh") repeating the pattern, you're going crazy, your heart is racing, or like me you may become overwhelmed because it truly is unlike anything you've ever heard anywhere else, so you start crying like a baby, and it keeps building and building and just when you don't think you can possibly take any more, the layered craziness stops, and it's a smooth, chord-based slow melody, instead of the thousands of individual instruments (ALL of which are real, and being played by actual people, not funneled into some computer somewhere and being spat out) playing all of these notes, and it's just calm and relaxed, and then it builds and you are thrust back into three minutes of craziness again.

Philip Glass writes (wrote?) music like children would imagine it. When I said it was different than anything ever written it was not an exaggeration. Glass takes the theories of composition and uses them as his own personal playground; the thickness of it is unmatched. If there is an opportunity for you to pick up Glassworks, it's a nice primer for the rest of his work, and certainly worth the five dollars it will cost you from the clearance bin at Musicland.

Recommended: Yes

Great Music to Play While: Driving