The Lot Radio & the American Contemporary Music Ensemble (ACME) would like to wish Philip Glass a happy 80th birthday by performing two of his string quartets, No 3, "Mishima" and No 5, and welcome special guest Timo Andres to perform Dance No 4 for solo organ String Quartet No 3 is comprised of music Glass wrote for the 1985 film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, written and directed by Paul Schrader. Glass has written some of the most iconic film scores, and Mishima is certainly no exception. The vibrancy of this music almost defines the film, and it's emotional intensity allows for its success as pure concert music too. String Quartet No 5 was written six years after Mishima. It's five movements are performed without interruption, one flowing into the next for a seamless musical experience that ends where it begins. Dance No 4 for solo organ was written in 1979 for the Lucinda Childs Dance Company and is the fourth movement of the work Dance which also features films by Sol LeWitt. Childs and Glass first collaboration was the epic opera Einstein on the Beach. Dance is considered a masterpiece of postmodern dance. The most obvious unifying factor in Glass' music is his use of repetition. To me, the act of repeating a musical gesture so many times voids that gesture of any obvious or overt emotional implication. With that implication stripped away, the gesture, heard over and over again, takes on meaning that is unique to each listener, the musical elements exceed themselves, the sum becomes larger than its parts. Of the repetition in his music, Glass writes "It was not meant to be mindless, but to be organic and powerful, and mindful, too. If you listened to the structure, you could hear the phrases changing constantly, even though the stream of music was so constant that it might feel like it wasn’t changing."