ABSTRACT
My first acquaintance with the music of Philip Glass probably didn’t occur until the late 1990s. At that time, when I was a further education student in north Wales, minimalist music was not included on the Welsh Joint Education Committee’s GCSE or A-level syllabuses. My listening experiences of his music was primarily based on radio broadcasts by Classic FM – the Violin Concerto, for instance – and my reading around his music was based on monthly classical music magazines (such as an interview with Glass in an issue of the now-defunct Classic FM magazine during 1997). When the opportunity to study his music in more detail arose during my undergraduate studies at Bangor University, I immediately took advantage. My then-to-be PhD supervisor, Pwyll ap Siôn, taught us with great enthusiasm in Davies Room about the four founding fathers of minimalism, and the numerous composers that followed subsequently in their footsteps, and I became fascinated with contemplating the effect of Glass’s music as used in a wide range of televisual and filmic contexts – from documentaries on British castles and BMW adverts to blockbuster movies. It is also undoubted that experiencing inspirational live performances of Koyaanisqatsi and Book of Longing by the Philip Glass Ensemble at the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff sparked my early interest in appreciating musical multimedia within minimalist contexts. Needless to say, Nicholas Cook’s publication on the subject (Cook 1998) proved to be a valuable resource in my quest for an understanding of how music could be analysed in relation to texts, sounds and visual images, which proceeded naturally to my doctoral research in this area.
