I was thinking that I had really gone beyond the need to write a serious string quartet and that I could write a quartet that is about musicality, which in a certain way is the most serious subject. Indeed, the tone of the Fifth Quartet is a luminous one, set in the very opening bars, where a pluck and a shimmering leap up through the instruments transforms the trademark Glass arpeggio into a sweet bell-like announcement. Similarly transformed are all of the familiar conventions of Glass' style, his rhythmic and harmonic fingerprints, his elusive repetitiveness where subtle shifts continually occur. Like much of Glass' music, the Fifth Quartet is a study in contrasts. Fast-moving rhythmic sections contrast with slow, chordal ones.
Dynamics shift, loud and soft.
The introduction's tone pervades the quartet, not only in the way the material from the opening becomes increasingly incorporated into a traditional structure of four connected main movements but also in Glass' seemingly effortless ability to resolve his contrasts. In the second movement, a syncopated, swaying, barcarolle-like melody in shifting meters alternates with the plucked and bowed chords of the introduction, unified by a rocking bass pattern. A quicker middle section to that movement prepares for the soaring scales of the fifth movement, into which the quartet's introductory material gradually returns, the two merging into a transcendent weightless resolution. Written in three movements, the first begins with a melancholy sequence of chords, in slow, regular, almost funereal succession, followed by a series of variations that explore the variances of Glassian arpeggio and figuration, their arc form reaching a restrained but still impassioned climax before receding into repeated-note patterns. The slow central movement contains one of Glass' most exquisitely scored melodies, first soaring high and slow in the violins an octave apart against thick, decorated whole-note chords in viola and cello below, creating a startling sensation of the spirit leaving the body.