“Philip Glass is without a doubt America’s most famous living composer of classical music… Yet Glass’s seventieth birthday, which fell on January 31st of this year, failed to create much hullabaloo in the ordinarily anniversary-addicted classical world.” The problem may be that Glass’s prolific catalog includes as many clunkers as masterpieces, and much of his output does have a tendency to sound the same. “Certainly, no one can deny that Glass possesses an instantly recognizable signature sound; the question now is whether that signature is being produced by automatic pen.”