The Composer

In the Review’s October 22 issue, Matthew Aucoin surveys Philip Glass’s six-decade musical career, occasioned by the premiere of his new symphony, Lincoln, at Tanglewood this past summer. “Any artist who invents a distinctive, instantly recognizable mood is sure to leave a mark on the history of their art form,” Aucoin writes. “And Glass did invent a mood, one that feels inseparable from American urban life in the late twentieth century.”For twenty-first century American life, the classical music world may look to Aucoin, who, when he is not writing about Thomas Adès, Pierre Boulez, and the state of music criticism for the Review, is primarily a composer and conductor. His operas, including Eurydice and Crossing, have been performed everywhere from New York’s Metropolitan Opera to the Los Angeles Opera, and the Metropolitan’s Eurydice was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording in 2023. Aucoin was also the recipient of a 2018 MacArthur Fellowship. A studio recording of his operatic work Music for New Bodies will be released later this month.This week I emailed Aucoin to ask him about the rigors of performing Philip Glass’s concatenating arpeggios and the pleasures o...