From Steven Trasher’s new Village Voice profile of composer Philip Glass, whose music is great and repetetive and great and repetitive and great:

“Yet despite his extensive uptown showcasing lately (his opera Satyagraha was at the Met and a live concert of his Koyaanisqatsi score was at Carnegie Hall within a week of each other last fall), Glass still has deep roots in the East Village. He has lived quite near the Voiceoffices for the past four decades. Many weekdays find him walking around the neighborhood and cutting a stoic, solitary profile; the prolific composer seems oblivious to furtive glances from nerdy fans as he dreams his mathematical scores.

Regardless of success, neither Glass’s life nor his music have ever abandoned their East Village sensibilities. He worked as a cab driver and furniture mover until he was in his early forties, and his identification (politically and artistically) has never left theidea of downtown (even though most of the struggling artists, drug addicts, and alcoholics who inhabited it when he arrived in the late ’60s largely have).

And when Occupy Wall Street confronted Satyagraha at Lincoln Center last December, he was happy to come out and give the General Assembly a ‘mic check.'”

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A bit of Glass from Koyaanisqatsi: