The Endless Scroll.

Philip Glass is without a doubt America's most famous living composer of classical music. In fact, he may be America's only famous living composer of classical music--the single one who would draw nods of recognition (or irritation) if you were to start waving eight-by-ten glossies of modern-music masters at passersby in Times Square. His Hollywood film scores, his collaborations with pop stars such as David Bowie and Linda Ronstadt, his ubiquity as a purveyor of motorized musical melancholy, all have placed him at an altitude of celebrity that eludes even the loftiest of his colleagues--Steve Reich, John Adams, Elliott Carter, and the rest.

Yet Glass's seventieth birthday, which fell on January 31st of this year, failed to create much hullabaloo in the ordinarily anniversary-addicted classical world. Last year, when Reich turned seventy, Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and BAM joined forces to present a month of celebratory concerts. Glass, on the other hand, has been more or less overlooked at New York's culture palaces. The obvious explanation is that his intellectual reputation is not nearly as secure as that of Reich, his old Juilliard classmate and minimalist comrade. New-music mavens bestow varying degrees of respect and awe on Glass's major achievements of the nineteen-seventies--the evening-length instrumental cycle "Music in Twelve Parts," the mind-bending music-theatre event "Einstein on the Beach"--but they're apt to dismiss his post-1980 output, even if few can claim to have heard all of the fifty or so works that have cropped up in the present decade alone.

Quantity is the problem: Glass writes faster than most of us can listen. In this respect, he resembles two earlier twentieth-century figures, Paul Hindemith and Darius Milhaud, both of whom shifted in middle age from a brazenly youthful style to a mature, workmanlike one, generating hundreds of semi-interchangeable works. Hindemith was often linked to the concept of "music for use": if asked to write a piece for three bassoons and ukulele, he would comply, not worrying about the approval of the invisible judges of posterity. In the face of such Stakhanovite productivity, the listener is tempted to throw up his hands in frustration and dismiss the entire catalogue as so much musical scribbling. But it's worth taking the trouble to discover first-rate pieces amid the reams of pretty good ones. Certainly, no one can deny that Glass possesses an instantly recognizable signature sound; the question now is whether that signature is being produced by automatic pen.

Controversy surrounds Glass's music, but there is little disagreement over Glass the man. In the cash-strapped, attention-deprived world of contemporary music, he is prized for his generosity and humility. Last month, the Paula Cooper gallery hosted a gala for the MATA Festival, a young composers' series that Glass co-founded ten years ago. At one point, the composer Lisa Bielawa praised Glass's "quiet," "silent," and "private" support for younger composers of many different stylistic persuasions, even those who resist his influence. Glass stared at the floor while Bielawa talked. After the concert, he shook a few hands and walked alone into the Chelsea night, no doubt planning next week's oratorio.

Two big new Glass works had their premieres this year: the two-act opera "Appomattox," which was recently given its first performance at the San Francisco Opera, and "Book of Longing," a hundred-minute song cycle based on texts by Leonard Cohen, which played first in Toronto and came to the Lincoln Center Festival in July. Around the same time, Glimmerglass Opera presented an elegant revival of Glass's 1993 opera "Orphee," an ingenious adaptation of the script of Jean Cocteau's film of the same name. Glass won't be neglected in New York over the long term: in the spring, the Metropolitan Opera will present a revival of the 1980 opera "Satyagraha," and Gerard Mortier, the incoming director of New York City Opera, has promised a long-overdue revival of "Einstein on the Beach." Meanwhile, recordings of Glass music seem to arrive about once every two weeks from Orange Mountain Music, the composer's own label.

To encounter a new Glass work these days is to pass through a familiar sequence of emotions. More often than not, you start ...