for those who are interested in the Tibetan iconography of Tibetan Buddism, you might think of it as the play of the wrathful and peaceful deities
: I was asked to compose a piece of somewhat indefinite length said Philip Glass when preparing to play for the first public appearance of the 14th Dalai Lama in New York City, not actually a problem for me [1]. The song is of utmost beauty. The piece demonstrates Glass's turn to more traditional models: the composer added a conclusion to an open-structured piece, wikipedia tells us [2], which, it continues in the words of Steffen Schleiermacher "can be interpreted as a sign that he [had] abandoned the radical non-narrative, undramatic approaches of his early period. I listen to it in loop, I have a stack of the scores to be played just before the whole of Aguas of Amazonia—my favoured composition of the time these last six months—that I listen for . . I love minimalism. Maybe poor musical education or complete lack of innate musical abilities or mediocre intellect leave me staring in awe at some of the best musical creations ever conceived, such as the Musical offering, seeing how deep is the work and how shallow is my penetration of it. But I am an explorer and like to try to delve into the darkness, to find the gems. When you succeed, then, maybe everything sounds like the Toccata E Fuga, the divine composition. Minimalism, being so much simpler, is an easy journey for the mind, it grips the soul by the heart. It all speaks to me. It dances and murmurs, marches and run and sits and float and swim all at the same time, and speaks and speaks and speaks with the hands, with its notes, with a melody sometimes, a mathematical theme, a mechanical beauty, a universal harmony, a fundamental truth, a naked secret. In my list of favourite songs, many would be classified as minimalistic, although composers of the genre often reject the classification. Satie was seeing himself as a "phonometrician" (meaning "someone who measures sounds") [3] and Glass as a composer of "music with repetitive structures" [4]. It is quite understandable there is a sense of triviality that makes it look like the retard of classical music [5]. And it might just as well be, I do not know and could know figure out from competing arguments. I believe in hierarchy and if this is true, it only tells me how formidable and immense is the musical universe I am blind and deaf to. For my selection of favourite classical music compositions, I wanted a piece of contemporary minimalism to be featured, the genre being so dear to me. But there are so many pieces, all talking to me in a different way, I could not really decide for one to represent neatly, or symbolically, or formally, in any way at all, all the others. I was thinking of Tiersen with a piece such as La Maison or La Dispute. I finally settled for The Deutsch Mark Is Coming (from Good Bye, Lenin!) for its captivating rhythm which I find is the most faithful musical rendition of our recently past century. Can't you feel the forceful, ruthless, terrible march of progress and nations in this song?