I pick up the phone and dial. A rich, solicitous male voice answers.

I immediately blank on my carefully prepared preamble and blurt out, "Is Philip Glass there?"

"This is he."

"Whoa. That was a sentence I never thought I would utter." Oh, yikes. Can’t stop the conversational misfires. Philip Glass is half a world away, stuck on the phone with what probably sounds to him like a stoned eighth grade mall rat.

Philip Glass listens; then laughs. Charitably. Mercifully. Graciously.

How do you quantify an artist of Glass’ magnitude? A fiercely intelligent composer of deeply considered, purposeful works that changed our understanding about what music could actually be, he affected how we experience and talk about aural pieces and wed them to other art forms. Midway through the 20th century, Glass shifted our perceptions of sound in a way that remains relevant into the 21st century, and he still is pursuing broad-ranging collaborations and projects.

Almost anybody who has set foot in a Cineplex has heard Glass’ work. The general point of entry into his vast canon is through his soundtracks. While smarty-pants culturally savvy types often name-check him in relation to what they are renting (brilliant Errol Morris documentaries, the cinematic version of physicist Stephen Hawking’s universe-bothering A Brief History of Time, Martin Scorsese’s Kundun), people who have seen, say, Clive Barker’s Candyman or The Truman Show or even the new Battlestar Galactica on the Space channel probably don’t reflexively venerate his genius so much as they just dig the music accompanying the visuals.

Which is fine with Glass. The suggestion that his name is dropped as cultural shorthand for an arid brand of chilly, sexless intellectualism incites the gentlemanly Glass to exasperation.

"’Shorthand’ is ‘short’ because people are being lazy. It’s hard to hold onto an idea that is SO WRONG," he sighs, pained. "They are not actually listening if they can say that. How can you listen to The Hours and hold on to that? This is not ‘intellectual’ music. This is emotional music."

He is right to be offended. For every interesting musical notion he played with in a formal (though avant-garde) arena, he has delivered a handful of heartfelt works. For every Einstein on the Beach, with its so-Philip-Glass-ic hypnotic, cyclic thematic variations, there has been the Middle Eastern heat of The Screens, or the claustrophobic tension of The Thin Blue Line, or the darkly seductive re-scoring of 1931’s Dracula. It’s hard to even suggest Einstein is sterile, since the foundation of Glass’ reputation-making opera was a sort of iconoclastic play. What’s more emotional than play?

Equally offensive to Glass is the thought that idealism/intellectualism/other neuronic activities have been so thoroughly divorced from passion in our collective social consciousness. The Baltimore-born musician gravitated towards music young, hitting Julliard after studying math and philosophy in Chicago. The idea of music moved him as much as music did: jazz, "popular" music, sound structures from other cultures, and eccentrics and boundary-shovers in all creative areas excited the young Glass, who viewed New York’s poets, filmmakers, and performance artists as his peers.

"It was a very rich listening environment," he recalls of the Big Apple of the late ’50s. "I was aware I was in the middle of New York history, and fortunate it was my mission to make this music, brought before me as a student and influenced by other artists, in a sympathetic place that was self-nourishing and self-sustaining. And fortunate enough to be able to start doing music that was brand new. And more than welcomed– we were ushered in, even by the older generation. It was an exciting convergence of technology, popular music, theatre work, and performance."

To witness Glass’ startling originality, drive to Calgary, where the Philip Glass Ensemble is performing the entire score of Koyaanisqatsi while screening the environmental elegy.

For the other side of the Glass spectrum, be at the Edmonton show. "I like very much the solo concerts. Basic musical ideas. No amplifying; no hocus pocus," he chuckles. "I introduce the pieces, whatever comes to mind about when I wrote it. I get rid of the invisible wall."

Glass says he enjoys connecting with both the audience and his original creative impulse. "Writing is appropriate to experience–life experience as well as musical experience. It’s impossible to delineate or explain. Nothing is transparent, and everybody brings their own conditioning and background into it. When we talk, I listen, for you to reveal yourself."

There’s the key to Glass’ music. He’s a man who plays to reveal himself, and listens for you to do the same.