Very happy that you enjoyed the film Mary --- as you can tell, I did too.
An article in the Austin papers about Book of Longing finally getting a Texas performance this past Februray may also be of interest. I am copying it below.
Also I noted is the list of suggested Glass compositions (Glass Guide) toward the end.... I keep wondering about the timing of the Cello solo for girlfriend Wendy Sutter and the domestic scenes in the movie. Wendy was the celloist in Book of Longing, and had a memorable spot where she turned her back to the audience (and to Glass) during a solo. Life....
They admire Glass, they admire Glass, they admire Glass...
Composer has his detractors, but his influence is undeniable
By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin AMERICAN-STATESMAN ARTS WRITER Sunday, February 15, 2009
Often, a conversation about Philip Glass starts with the jokes.
"A friend of mine gave me a Philip Glass record. I listened to it for five hours before I realized it had a scratch on it."
Or: "There's one piece by Philip Glass that I really like. Which one? Oh, any one."
More than four decades after Glass shook the notoriously staid classical music world with "Einstein on the Beach" - a sprawling, plotless five-hour opera of relentlessly repetitive, harmonically basic music - the composer's influence is as indelible as ever.
And though his detractors mock Glass' cyclical arpeggios and motorized minor-key progressions as simplistic, they can't argue with the composer's ubiquity. He is America's only truly famous living composer of classical music. And from film scores to American Express commercials to operas to being parodied on "South Park," his music is quite simply everywhere.
So is he. Particular and controlling about how his music is interpreted, the 72-year-old Glass still plays dozens of gigs every year.
Saturday, Glass, his ensemble and four solo vocalists will play the University of Texas' Bass Concert Hall with
"Book of Longing." Based on a book of poetry by legendary wordsmith Leonard Cohen, Glass' musical version crafts Cohen's poems - a personal, confessional rumination on the loves and losses of bygone days - into a 100-minute, 22-song cycle. Cohen's recorded voice, along with projections of his paintings and drawings, add a multimedia touch. "Book of Longing" was commissioned by UT's Performing Arts Center in collaboration with several other institutions. Although it premiered in 2007, the piece plays Austin for the first time now that the Bass has reopened after an 18-month renovation.
Glass' influence on today's creative artists is undeniable. For Austin composer Graham Reynolds, Glass' affect has been profound. Reynolds remembers when, as a pre-teen kid in New England, he was pouring through the stacks of classical albums in his local library and found an album of Glass music. "I don't even remember which album it was, but it was just so different than any other in the classical music section," says Reynolds, whose film score credits include Richard Linklater's "Waking Life."
As Reynolds sees it, repetition is essential to the enjoyment of Glass' music. "There's a tension to the repetition that pulls you in," he says. "And when there is such intense repetition, each event or change in the music becomes a big event and has greater impact."
Reynolds defends Glass against the critics who characterize the composer's music as oversimplified. "Both classical music and jazz have gotten further away from seeing value in repetition and basic tonality - that somehow using simple harmonic is regressive," says Reynolds, whose nonprofit organization Golden Hornet Project presents music by what Reynolds calls "indie classical" composers. "I admire (Glass') willingness to use a pared-down musical language. He's reinvigorated the basic musical tools."
Stephen Mills, artistic director of Ballet Austin, has used Glass' music for three major ballet works including "Hamlet," which premiered in 2000 and today concludes a restaging at the Long Center. Mills finds Glass' music far from being simplistic. "There's an underlying complexity to it," Mills says. "Once you delve deeper into it, you discover how complex the rhythms are."
Mills points out that Glass' music resists mimetic interpretation when it comes to creating choreography. "While it's formal, it's isn't dictatorial, it doesn't force a specific kind of movement," says Mills, who first used Glass' music on a ballet commissioned by American Ballet Theatre. "It allows you as a choreographer to put your own stamp on the dance."
Mills says he's always found Glass' music immediately appealing and never understood the critics who complain about repetition and simplicity.
"Glass is a prime example of an artist devoting himself creatively to something very specific and continuing to work on it over his entire career," Mills says. "That's very admirable."
Glass guide: critic's picks
Often better known for his swirling film scores and driving, edge-filled large-scale works, Philip Glass is sometimes overlooked for his smaller-scale music which tends to be more immediately accessible. Three to check out:
• 'Songs and Poems for Solo Cello,' (Orange Mountain Music, 2008). This achingly beautiful seven-movement piece reveals Glass at his most emotionally direct. Written for and performed by cellist Wendy Sutter (the composer's current girlfriend), Songs and Poems is both pretty and melancholic.•
>'Kronos Quartet Performs Philip Glass,' (Nonesuch Records, 1995). Supreme interpreters of Glass' music, the quartet brings sublime precision and emotion to these intricate and haunting chamber pieces.
• 'Glass: The Concerto Project, Vol. III,' (Orange Mountain Music, 2008). On Glass' own label, this is the third of four intended releases of the composer's concertos. The Concerto Grosso captures both light and dark moods while the Concerto for Saxophone Quartet is uncharacteristically mercurial.
- Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Grateful for Austin
Philip Glass and Austin could form a mutual appreciation society. For more than two decades Glass has been making almost yearly visits to Austin, garnering a large and loyal audience. Likewise the composer has grown to appreciate Austin.
'There are certain cities in the country that have always been beacons of culture in unexpected places,' Glass said recently by phone from his home in New York. 'My performing career really began in places like that - places that are not on the main road so to speak but were still important places. There seemed to be a connection between my artistic interests and what was going on (in Austin).'
Beginning in the early 1990s, former UT Performing Arts Center director Pebbles Wadsworth was instrumental in getting Glass to Austin on an almost annual basis and she instigated UT's commission for 'Book of Longing,' which plays Saturday at Bass Concert Hall.
But the last time Austinites got a glimpse of Glass was in 2007 in a non-UT gig: Austin Lyric Opera presented the United States premiere of 'Waiting for the Barbarians,' the composer's politically forthright opera that other U.S. opera companies were reluctant to premiere.
'I've been able to do things (in Austin) I haven't been able to do elsewhere,' Glass said. 'And I'm grateful for that.'
- Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
'Book of Longing'
When: 8 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 21
somewhere along the line I had hit 'mark forums read'. Now that I am a bit more familiar with the territory, from time to time I will go back and read a topic (except politics which automatically gets marked read 
).
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