And now for something completely different.

Last week, I talked about the evolution of my musical tastes growing up. Truth is, I left a few things out: see, once upon a time ago, I was a musician. A singer, actually: I joined choir in grade school, discovered I had some talent, and followed that singing career to the top choirs in high school, which earned me a scholarship at Hollins University for Vocal Performance.

I was a music major.

As part of my music major, I had to take music theory and music literature courses. But one particular course combined the two: 20th Century Music. Taught by my music theory professor, Dr. Michael Sitton, I was exposed to the wide variety of musical styles and compositions that made up that century. One of my absolute favorites was minimalism, which led to the discovery of Philip Glass.

It’s been a while, but I remember Dr. Sitton describing minimalism utilizing a repeated refrain, with subtle changes during the course of the song or movement, so subtle that you don’t realize the song is changing until the very end. And to demonstrate this, he played for us “Opening” from Philip Glass’ Glassworks.

I fell in love. We’d been given list of musical compositions for our quizzes and exams, and we had to memorize pieces so thoroughly that when Dr. Sitton played just a snippet, we could identify the song immediately. Glassworks “Opening” was on that list, and trust me when I say that memorizing this piece was an absolute pleasure. It makes me wish I’d taken piano lessons long before I turned 19, because I would kill to play this.

I hope you love it as much as I still do.

Like it? Love it? Hate it? Sound off below!

Reminder: Music Monday is about the music, not the videos. Videos are just the medium I’m using to share the music, and some videos aren’t actually videos at all. Enjoy the songs, but if YouTube forces you to watch some sort of advertisement before you can get to the music, please be patient.