My first piano teacher, Ms Papathanasiou, had a traditional approach. She started me with Bach inventions and Mozart sonatas, the usual path for young pianists. But I kept bringing in Philip Glass scores, pointing to "Opening" and asking how to handle those impossible rhythms - triplets in the right hand against steady eighths in the left.
She could have insisted on the classical path. Instead, she watched me struggle through those Glass patterns, guiding my hands until they found their independence. Glass's patterns looked simple on paper. But playing them showed me how hard it is to make two hands move in different time. Mozart never asked for that.
Glass taught me to listen differently. His music shows that you don't need constant change to make something complex. The same notes played over and over become something else when you stay with them long enough. Like words that lose their meaning when you say them too many times, except here the meaning doesn't disappear - it changes.
When I first heard Max Richter, I recognized Glass's ideas but felt something new. Richter uses Glass's repeating patterns but adds what Glass took away. He brings back melody. He lets the music be sad or happy again. If Glass built a house of pure geometry, Richter planted a garden around it.
Listen to "On the Nature of Daylight." The chords repeat like Glass, but over them floats a melody that Glass would never allow. Richter isn't rejecting Glass's ideas about patterns. He's showing how they can carry feeling too.
In my last year of lessons, my teacher and I played Wim Mertens' "4 Mains" at a student concert. Two people, four hands, one piano. The music sat between Glass and Richter - mathematical but warm. It showed me that minimalism could grow without losing what made it special.
This change in music says something about art itself. The modernists stripped everything down to basics. They wanted pure forms, clean lines, fundamental truths. But maybe truth isn't always pure. Maybe sometimes it needs its complications back.
Richter proves that minimalism didn't have to stay minimal forever. It could take what it learned from all that stripping down and build something new. Not by forgetting its discoveries, but by finding new uses for them.
Playing Glass as a kid taught me about patterns. Growing into Richter's music showed me that patterns can mean something too. Between them lies not just forty years of music history, but a different way of thinking about what art can do.