Robert Black - Glass: The Not-doings Of An Insomniac

Constantly traveling, Philip Glass often finds himself on the road in a hotel room in an unfamiliar city. Time-zone changes often bring on bouts of insomnia. On a trip in Europe in 2015, Glass used these waking hours to consider pieces he had always dreamt about but never had a chance to realize with his other composing commitments. Traveling with a small inexpensive spiral-bound music notebook, Glass composed his Partita for Solo Double Bass for Robert Black, double bassist for the Bang on a Can All-Stars. The piece is cast in seven movements and unlike his other works for solo instruments, between each movement are poems by his friends or long-time associates - Lou Reed, John Cale, Laurie Anderson, Yoko Ono, David Byrne, Leonard Cohen, Patti Smith and Arthur Russell. The album is rounded off with the premiere recording of Prelude to Endgame for double bass and timpani. Glass composed the music for the 1984 production of Endgame, a Samuel Beckett play, by the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts.