From Mark Swed’s liner notes: “Philip Glass’ string quartets may contain his most intimate music. They are works through which a very public composer, perhaps the most important opera reformer of our age and a longstanding collaborator in large-scale music theater, holds up a mirror to himself and his way of composing… ‘In an odd way,’ Glass explains, ‘string quartets have always functioned like that for composers. I don’t really know why, but it’s almost impossible to get away from it. It’s the way composers of the past have thought and that’s no less true for me… It’s almost as if we say we’re going to write a string quartet, we take a deep breath, and we wade in to try to write the most serious, significant piece that we can.’ … Glass says that as he sat down for the eighth time to write a quartet – the String Quartet No. 5 (1991) – he had discovered that perhaps not taking a serious tone might be the most serious way to deal with it. ‘I was thinking that I had really gone beyond the need to write a serious string quartet and that I could write a quartet that is about musicality, which in a certain way is the most serious subject.”

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