The transgression of the boundary between high art and low art, classical and pop music, is a theme that seems to have recurred in virtually every generation of composers from Mahler to the minimalists. No other artist working at the turn of the turn of the twenty first century embodies this tendency more than Philip Glass, the former student of Vincent Persichetti and Nadia Boulanger who helped turn early minimalism's experimentalist austerity into a pop culture commodity. And no other works better represent his overt attempts at stylistic border crossing than his orchestral collaborations with pop stars David Bowie and Brian Eno—including the work under consideration here, Glass' Symphony No. 4 "Heroes." In retrospect, a crossover between these two musical realms would seem natural, since the original Bowie/Eno projects that inspired Glass' symphonic adaptations were themselves borne of a certain highbrow/lowbrow tension. Bowie, the rock star, and Eno, the rock music producer who occasionally moonlighted as a minimalist composer (or, arguably, vice versa), spent substantial time during the late '70s in Berlin recording a series of ostensibly rock-oriented projects with artsy aspirations. These included three albums, Low, Heroes, and Lodger. As Glass later explained, in these albums Bowie and Eno "used techniques similar to procedures used by composers working in new and experimental music. As such, [their work] was widely appreciated by musicians working both in the field of pop music and in experimental music." Likewise, Bowie acknowledge the influence of Glass' early works, which he and Eno had both heard in concert earlier in the decade. This influence proved reciprocal, as later in 1993, Glass borrowed three songs from Low for his "Low" symphony, and, after two more intervening symphonies, began adapting several tunes from the Heroes album for his own "Heroes" symphony in 1996. Upon mentioning his work-in-progress to Twyla Tharpe, the famous choreographer expressed interest in using the score as the basis for an extended dance piece. The resulting work is cast in six movements approaching 45 minutes in length. Glass adapts the melodies from the Bowie/Eno album rather freely, as in the opening movement, "Heroes," which retains the general harmonic contour of the original song, but fills it with Glass' characteristically busy arpeggiation and colorful orchestrations. Often, the result sounds much more traditional than either Glass or Bowie/Eno; the mysterious modal harmonies and odd meters of the second movement, "Abdulmajid," accentuated by castanets, recall the exoticist fascinations of Saint-Saëns or a contemporary. Occasionally, Glass leans toward the melodramatic, as in the heavy-handed chromatic descents in "Sense of Doubt," or the pensive angst of "V2 Schneider," leading some critics to hear the works as camp rather than crossover. Ironically, though, others hear emerging from Glass' orchestral deliberations on Bowie and Eno's rather lyrical melodies a sound more aligned with the lush neo-Romanticism of Elgar or Delius. By crossing over to the world of pop music, Glass actually takes a step in the direction of his classical training.

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