The score for the movie adaptation of Michael Cunningham's The Hours, composed by
Philip Glass. The music is somewhat continuous, all built upon the same basic motives. The repetition of a three-note phrase is key to the course of the whole, emerging time and time again as the framework for variations around which the rest of the music is arranged. Beyond the simple three-note bits, repetition in general stands as an important part of the music, with the various works eventually dovetailing together in the same basic framework, bringing a sense of return as they come up. The movie features three separate stories of women, all interlinked in the same Virginia Woolf novel, whose lives share recurring themes with one another's. The music stands here to make an auditory note of the parallels with its repetition. The sounds stay relatively mundane for the majority of the work, mirroring the everyday lives which form the basis of the characters' struggles, but it can also go quite dark for periods, touching on the suicidal tendencies held by the various characters in the story. Standing alone, this album might seem rather lackluster with its general sense of dreariness and the unstopping repetitions, despite the prime performance by the
Lyric Quartet. Alongside the movie or the novel, however, the score holds a deeper meaning, fitting in with the moods of the story quite well. ~ Adam Greenberg