"Traditions are imploding and exploding everywhere - everything is coming together, for better or worse, and we can no longer pretend we're all living in different worlds because we're on different continents"
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Traditions, in Philip Glass's telling, are not gently evolving; they are detonating. The phrasing "imploding and exploding" catches the double motion of globalization: cultures collapsing inward under pressure while simultaneously scattering outward, replicated and remixed across borders. It's a composerly metaphor - dynamics, compression, release - that makes social change feel like sound: sudden crescendos, feedback loops, the thud of old forms losing structural integrity.
Glass came of age as a modernist in the late-20th-century churn, when recording technology, mass media, and cheaper travel turned "world music" from distant curiosity into a pipeline. His own career embodies that convergence: minimalism built from Western classical rigor but energized by non-Western rhythmic structures and collaborative ecosystems (film, opera, pop-adjacent projects). So when he says "everything is coming together", it's not kumbaya cosmopolitanism. It's an admission that contact isn't neutral; proximity amplifies friction as much as empathy.
The subtext is a warning against the comforting lie of separateness. "We can no longer pretend" indicts the old moral dodge: that suffering, conflict, or ecological fallout are someone else's problem because they're far away. The line also punctures the romantic view of tradition as stable heritage. In Glass's world, tradition is a live system - one that can be sampled, commodified, defended, weaponized, or reborn. "For better or worse" lands like a held chord: unresolved, refusing to tell you whether to celebrate hybridity or mourn what gets erased.
Glass came of age as a modernist in the late-20th-century churn, when recording technology, mass media, and cheaper travel turned "world music" from distant curiosity into a pipeline. His own career embodies that convergence: minimalism built from Western classical rigor but energized by non-Western rhythmic structures and collaborative ecosystems (film, opera, pop-adjacent projects). So when he says "everything is coming together", it's not kumbaya cosmopolitanism. It's an admission that contact isn't neutral; proximity amplifies friction as much as empathy.
The subtext is a warning against the comforting lie of separateness. "We can no longer pretend" indicts the old moral dodge: that suffering, conflict, or ecological fallout are someone else's problem because they're far away. The line also punctures the romantic view of tradition as stable heritage. In Glass's world, tradition is a live system - one that can be sampled, commodified, defended, weaponized, or reborn. "For better or worse" lands like a held chord: unresolved, refusing to tell you whether to celebrate hybridity or mourn what gets erased.
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