Glass Can

You already know that there’s more music out there than you’ll ever hear — furious garage bands on one-man labels, anonymous DJs haunting the Internet with MP3 mash-ups, small reissue pressings of obscure vintage soul and reggae. But sit down. You’re forgetting the concert musicians — the ones who not only read music but also write it down. The ones who paid tuition.

The University of Kansas gives its music students a glimpse of what success in that field looks like when Terry Riley and Philip Glass visit for a series of private workshops and discussions. Saturday, the two composers join the Bang on a Can All-Stars for a public concert at KU’s Lied Center, a one-stop introduction to the modern canon that will include Riley’s “In C” and Glass’ “Music in Fifths.”

“We play bold music for people who are ready for it,” All-Star bass player Robert Black writes on the group’s Web site. It’s an accurate summary of the idiomatic ensemble’s distillation of modern concert music’s many names and subsets (microtonalism, polytonalism, Tony Toni Toné-alism), even if it’s also eminently risible in its apparently unironic machismo.

If you are ready, and if you like what you hear, Glass alone has a back catalog that will keep you busy until the White Stripes are eligible for the Rock Hall of Fame.

Much of the sonic palette of the past forty years — in the concert hall and on the rock stage — can be traced to Riley, whose 1964 minimalist composition “In C” inspired Pete Townshend’s synth programming on “Baba O’Riley” and influenced a generation of composers.

“Minimalism at least refers to a certain moment of music,” Glass tells the Pitch. It’s a word that critics have sometimes applied carelessly in the years since “In C” — to new age music, for instance.

“I don’t think Terry would like that,” Glass says of the link some listeners have drawn between the father of minimalism and, say, Yanni. “He [Riley] wrote a very important piece of music. To call it new age — it’s a dismissive term in the music world. He’s a very serious composer.”

New age music, Glass says, doesn’t exist. “It’s a label in a record store.”

Riley and Glass will spend half an hour before a KU Wind Ensemble performance Friday night addressing students’ questions about (according to a KU press release) “making it as a young composer.” The discussion’s brevity might encourage artists (half an hour? It must be easy!), but Glass’ and Riley’s careers have followed markedly different trajectories that defy simple explanation. Riley remains active, but his recordings have never been as widely heard as those by the prolific Glass.

“All I really know is what I did,” says Glass, whose commission schedule is as relentless as the “Train 1” movement of his marathon opera Einstein on the Beach. “But I know a lot about what you can do to work independently, and there are definitely things you can learn [about] succeeding in the world of making music rather than in the academic world. For a long time, I made a living playing much more than writing. I see a generation of composers following in my footsteps, becoming performers.”