Philip Glass has insisted that if his music involves a "crossover," it is on the part of the audience, not the composer. It might be more appropriate to say that Glass, particularly with the Low Symphony of 1992, is a composer that spans categories (and audiences) rather than occupying a niche between them. The Low Symphony is a curious treatment of themes from three songs, "Subterraneans," "Some Are," and "Warszawa," from Low, an album released by David Bowie and Brian Eno in 1977. It seems only appropriate that Glass would make the transition into mainstream pop culture via two other genre-defying artists.

Seminal figures in the progressive rock scene, Bowie and Eno created a sort of pop-experimental, proto-minimalist style that shared certain resonances with "art" music composers of the time. The similarities were not coincidental. In the late 1960s, Eno had been deeply impressed by a performance of Steve Reich's music. Later, when Philip Glass toured England in 1971, Eno and Bowie both attended a concert of his music at the Royal College of Art in London. It is possible, then, that Glass's Low Symphony contains ideas that Bowie/Eno borrowed from his music in the first place.

The opening of the first movement, "Subterraneans," is surprisingly lyrical. Gone are Glass' staple arpeggios and driving additive rhythms, in favor of sustained harmonies, feathery woodwind trills, and earnest, tuneful melodies. It suddenly changes moods, utilizing a battery of percussion instruments to set out on a rhythmic trajectory; the now-familiar themes are laid atop the pulsing texture with trademark ambiguity.

The second movement, "Some Are," begins with a repetitive texture in the strings reminiscent of Glass' string quartets. As the percussion and brass take over the rhythmic role, the strings pick up the theme, which betrays Bowie's pensive song style.

The final movement, "Warszawa," begins with gloomy deliberateness, a slow dirge of winds and percussion giving way to a unison, mostly unaccompanied lament in the low strings. The cellos and basses then undertake an accompanimental role, as the upper strings take melody. They too then become part of the texture as the winds enter with melodic material. The boundaries between foreground, middleground, and background are again blurred, as melodies step slip in and out the limelight and the overall textural composite.

The Low Symphony might remind the reader of Glass' previous foray into pop music, Songs from Liquid Days of 1986. It exhibits a thoughtfulness and integrity sometimes missing in the earlier pop collaboration—a collaboration that was initially conceived by record company executives who wanted to recoup some of the losses incurred from the recording of Glass' opera Satyagraha. The Low Symphony is a much more integrated and convincing juncture of styles and genres.

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