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But what does matter is how Glass and his music got here because, in his 76th year, Glass is arguably the most influential composer across the whole range of the musical world, from film scores to music theatre, from rock and pop to new music, of any of the composers in this series so far – even more so than Steve Reich. Now, it matters not a jot how much it makes my toes curl, of course, since Glass's symphonies have important champions, such as conductors Dennis Russell Davies and Marin Alsop, as well as John Adams, who conducted the Ninth earlier this year. The more the music shouts, the bigger and louder it gets (try the 20-minute second movement to hear an example of what I'm talking about), and the more its simple harmonic material is repeated, the more cringingly, emptily redundant the whole thing becomes. But all I can find in Glass's Ninth (the whole piece is here) is a vapid combination of vamp-till-ready underscore inflated through the means of pseudo-symphonic rhetoric and souped-up orchestration until it blows up into something actually unpleasant, an artificially pumped-up symphony that sounds like it has overdosed on synthetic musical implants.
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Many of you will no doubt violently disagree with me, since there are thousands of listeners out there for whom Glass's symphonies mean something important. But I can't hear anything in Philip Glass's symphonies – and there are now a mighty 10 of them at the time of writing – apart from windily grandiose bombast, mind-numbing note-spinning, and time-filling composing-by-numbers.