When I think about the music of Philip Glass, I think about time. The music is intricate and polyphonic. It’s layered, with patterns that keep shifting in the subtlest of ways. Though the harmonies are clearly important in the musical narrative, Glass’s music is multi-linear in a way that evokes the music of Bach. It is music on the horizontal, as opposed to the vertical. If anything, it is circular music.
I notice this in all of his music, and it’s true of the two works on this album, both for piano and string orchestra. They feature multiple independent voices. The piano has two voices (one in each hand), and there are five independent voices in the strings. Unlike music from the baroque and classical periods, the bass does not double the cello but has its own separate line. In The Hours, there is also the addition of the celesta and the harp.
Each voice not only has its own melodic patterns, but often its own unique rhythm. There are times when each bar is being felt in a completely different inner pulse by each voice. The right hand of the piano may be feeling the large beats as groups of two bars, while the left hand is feeling each bar in three, and at the same time the violins feel each bar in two. Imagining this music raises, moment by moment, the question of how the members of the ensemble will connect with each other and maintain the integrity of their individual voices. The two are inevitably in tension.
In Baroklyn’s reading of these Glass works, we focused on the larger beats. Instead of lining up each single step, we wanted every voice to have its own ebb and flow, coinciding with other voices in certain larger pulse divisions. This allows us to hear the particular phrasing of the voices more independently, and brings out the strangeness in the music. The goal was to create a whole, but a whole made up of all the distinctive particularities of the individual lines and musicians.
Glass’s music is famously known for its repetitions. What I find fascinating is that these are not electronically generated loops. A group of people are playing these repetitions live. Every repetition is a reaction to the one before and an anticipation of one to come. We hear differently because our hearing changes with each note; we carry the whole unfolding of the music with us as we listen. We hear it as a constant becoming, not as a set of musical facts. This is exactly why I don’t hear Glass’s music as mechanical. It makes me think about the hourglass rather than the factory clock. A clock divides time into discrete, measured steps, in a way that in many parts of contemporary life feels natural. In music we can feel a vestige of the unnaturalness of that relentless pulse, an unhuman rigidity. Like our experience of time, music sometimes seems to move faster, sometimes slower, sometimes chaotically, sometimes evenly. The hourglass, with its unsubdivided and embodied flow, is how I think of this music.
Listening is the biggest challenge for all of us: for audience members sitting in a concert hall, for individual listeners sitting alone with headphones, for musicians who are in the middle of performing the music. This is music that can easily wash over you if you will let it. But if you really listen and are present, it's a constantly turning kaleidoscope of sound. You can follow one voice and then move your focus to another, and do it so quickly that you have the illusion of hearing all of them simultaneously. Playing Glass’s music has taught me how to be present not only in all of the music that I play, but in many other aspects of my life.
Baroklyn is an eleven-member string ensemble that I formed in 2017, initially to allow myself the opportunity of exploring works of Bach for keyboard and strings. Delving into Bach’s music is my life’s work for reasons that I feel deeply but can’t fully explain. There is something about the multiplicity of voices that I am drawn to, each one conveying its own individual narrative while also being in dialogue with the surrounding voices. As a pianist, I have spent much of my time listening to and trying to realize the voices that are present within the two staves of his keyboard works. Sometimes there can be as many as five independent lines. The challenge is to understand this cast of characters, and then to express them through differentiation of articulation and phrasing, through timbre and dynamic variation, through agogic distortion, and using only ten fingers. All the while, the goal is to find the path between Scylla and Charybdis, between the extraordinary variety of the moment, on the one hand, and the overarching structures on the other. It’s in that tension where, for me, the music happens.
Another element of Bach’s music that speaks to me, an element which is inextricably linked to his polyphony, is the vocal nature of his musical lines. They are genuinely voices. Every single line of music that he wrote can be sung and would be beautiful on its own. This is as true of lines in cantatas specifically written for a voice with an accompanying text, as it is for lines in a two-part invention for keyboard. I can’t play this music without thinking about breath, and about the necessity of supporting each voice when it reaches for a larger intervallic leap. No two notes in succession will ever be perfectly evenly spaced if a human being is singing it.
Working with Baroklyn has allowed me to expand my interaction with these elements, beyond my own two hands at the piano and into a three-dimensional world with a group of other musicians. Like a theater director, I lead the ensemble and mold the vision. It is my reading of the text that is forming the values of the interpretation, the mood and color of the sound, the constantly shifting hierarchy of the voices, the arc of the musical narrative. But I am collaborating with a highly sophisticated and empathic group of musicians whose knowledge and sensitivity is contained within our performance.
Even more than performing, I love rehearsing. Rehearsal is the point where the possibilities are endless. With Baroklyn, I come to my friends and colleagues with all of my ideas and then we begin to experiment. We work in detail, scene by scene. I don’t always know how a string player would realize an intention on their instrument in the same way that I would know how to realize it on the piano. The process of deciding on bowings is fundamentally creative, and different choices can change the feeling dramatically. There is one section in the second movement of the Tirol, for example, where I wanted the violinists to evoke a murmuration of starlings. The music swirls and shimmers, expanding into thickness and suddenly thinning. We devised a plan where they each used different types of bowings and bow strokes, but felt the phrasing and the dynamics together. The effect is cinematic.
Baroklyn is slow paced. I choose the musicians in the ensemble very carefully, based not only on their performance as string players, but on their ability to listen and connect with the people around them. All of the musicians live in the world of chamber music, and are creative, expressive people. Rebecca Fischer has been the concertmaster since its founding. We met in 1997 as fellows at the Tanglewood Music Center, where we immediately felt drawn to each other’s particular musicality. I also met violinists Suzy Perelman and Colleen Jennings back at Tanglewood, and had memorable experiences with them. Violinist Pauline Kim Harris and I met back in 1995 as students at the Juilliard School, where we collaborated in a trio with her sister, Christine. And cellist Alexis Pia Gerlach and I go way back to 1985 when we started playing chamber music together at the Manhattan School of Music Preparatory Division.
Cellist Julian Müller was a student of mine in a class at the Mannes School of Music, where he made a strong impression on me as a true team player with a warm heart. Other Baroklynites were gathered along the way—friends of friends, colleagues from quartets, people I met during my travels. I look forward to our times together when we can have deep and fulfilling conversations in music.
It is not an accident that Baroklyn’s first foray outside of Bach was into the world of Philip Glass. Glass’s music shares so much with Bach’s in its polyphony, the integrity of each voice, the connection with singing. Both composers are highly practical, in that they made use of the musical forces they had at hand. They recycled material to suit the commission of the moment. Bach used material from cantatas in keyboard concertos, Glass used piano etudes in piano concertos. Sometimes Bach would score for an oboe, another time using the same melody for a violin. I wonder whether it is because of that need to recycle that the music is so malleable. Neither Glass nor Bach writes music which begins in the physicality of a particular instrument. There isn’t a specific bowed or keyed logic that is inherent to the work. As long as the voices are each making choices that are consistent with a certain vision, and they are collaborating with the voices around them in an engaging and responsive way, the music has cohesion. This may account for why their music has been reimagined by instruments as unusual as the glass harmonica and the theremin, by a cappella choirs and jazz trios, by rock bands and DJs. The generosity of their music is that they enable not just the recreation of an old world but the invention of a new one.
– Simone Dinnerstein, 2026