Mishima (Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters)

Philip Glass built his score for the Mishima film as a set of interlocking string quartets that feel less like accompaniment than like the architecture of a mind. The Kronos Quartet performs music that is characteristically Glassian — repeating figures that shift phase with each other, gradual harmonic transformations that the ear barely tracks but the body registers — yet applied here to material of unusual emotional density, because the film is about a man whose entire life was an argument about beauty, death, and art made flesh. The strings are raw, direct, without the electronic colorings Glass often favored; the sound is almost classical chamber music, but the repetitive structures give it a ritual, ceremonial quality, as though the music is performing a ceremony whose meaning is not fully legible. Phrases circle back and return slightly altered, the way obsessive thought works, the way someone rehearses a moment they cannot stop imagining. There is violence latent in the textures — not the violence of dynamics or dissonance but the violence of absolute commitment to a single direction. Glass was working at the peak of his compositional discipline here, producing something more emotionally concentrated than his operas of the period. You'd reach for this when you want music that thinks — rigorous, unsentimental, beautiful in the way a blade is beautiful.