Hey podcast listeners, it's Anne. Do you recognize this music?

As by the composer Philip Glass, and you may have heard it or something like this, in movies,

symphonies, operas, dance performances, Philip Glass has had a huge influence on contemporary

classical music, and he just turned 80 years old. To celebrate his birthday, we're revisiting

a conversation Steve Paulson had with him a couple of years ago.

This is from around the time that Philip Glass had come out with a memoir called Words Without Music.

Early in your memoir, going back to when you were a teenager, you say you often wondered,

where does music come from?

Yes.

Have you ever come up with an answer?

Where it came from?

I never found out where it came from.

But I decided by the time I was in my 20s by then, about 10 or 15 years ago, I've been asking

the wrong question.

The real question should have been, what is music?

And that one, unfortunately, the answers to that question would be, well, music is a language.

Unfortunately, with that answer, though it's accurate, there's not much juice in the answer.

It doesn't tell you a lot.

It was kind of unsatisfied with the status of the question and the answer for a while. And then years later,

I was giving a talk and I think actually in the last four or five years. So by that time,

it was in my 70s. And I was a good 40 years later. And someone said to me something like,

oh, what is music?

...