He decided early that Philip Glass was too simple. Just insufficient. The kind of music that seemed to repeat itself because it ran out of ideas and hoped no one would notice. He said this a lot.

“Nice patterns, but where does it go?”

He preferred density, chords that required negotiation. Pieces that made you feel you solved something by surviving them. Phillip Glass was wallpaper. He said this to anyone who would listen, which, in music circles, is often too many. Years passed. He continued playing, writing, struggling with the usual inventory of concerns. Not enough gigs. Not enough money. Too many expectations. The quiet suspicion that everything he made was too much or not enough, depending who was around.

One afternoon, waiting in a rehearsal space smelling of old cables and disappointment, someone put on a Phillip Glass recording. The piece began. A pattern. Then another. Then the first one again, slightly altered. The same material, circling. He prepared his usual critique. But the music did not move forward in the way he expected. It did not develop toward a destination. It confused him. Then, it occupied him. He noticed the repetition was not exact. Small shifts occurred. What he had dismissed as static was, now, unstable. He tried to follow it. This proved difficult. There was nothing to hold onto in the usual way. No dramatic turn. Just a slow, steady unfolding that required a different kind of attention.

The piece ended without announcing that it had done so. He sat there. It occurred to him that the problem might not be the music. It might be expectations. His. He had been listening for argument, for progression, for proof. Glass was offering something else, a condition not a statement. He did not suddenly become a convert. He still found parts of it frustrating. Still felt the urge for something more, something beyond the pattern. But he stopped calling it simple. Began to suspect that simplicity was not the absence of complexity, but maybe its relocation.

Later, when people asked him what he thought of Glass, he would pause.

“It’s not simple,” he would say. “It’s just not trying to do what I was trained to hear.”

And that, he considered, was a different kind of difficulty altogether.