Philip Glass

American Masters on PBS presented this Philip Glass documentary last night, and I managed to stay awake until 11:00 to see the whole thing. I found it fascinating to look at the life of a famous composer whose two small children get to run around - at home in NY as well as in Nova Scotia - with loving parents.

Glass says that when he sits down to compose, he doesn't quite know what he's doing, that it's all just trying to find that underground river. You know it's there, but you can't see it. Sometimes I think of the music as floating out it the ether. You can't see that either, but somehow you divine it, or, at least, some of it.

Another interesting thing he said is that in Western music, it is the relationship between melody and harmony which drives the music forward. He learned from Ravi Shankar that in Indian music it is the relationship between melody and rhythm which propels the music. He sees his music as a fusion of the two ways of thinking.