There are those who take as gospel everything that appeared in the composer's much-disputed volume of memoirs, Testimony, taking it as licence to interpret all his major works as coded acts of dissent against the Soviet regime, and there are those who regard the man's life and his music as separate, and take what he composed at face value.
Eastwood said he wanted to see what he might compose himself.
What he has composed, in the final reckoning, is a threnody for himself.
But in what he did compose he left us a real tracing of the places his spirit had been.
When Gershwin's friend Kay Swift observed him playing "dark, doom-laden chords" and asked him what he was composing, he said: "Oh, nothing.
Over such a length of time Glass's music has inevitably evolved; what he is composing now is far removed from the austere minimalist scores that first made his name.
The prevailing tone could be described accurately as elegiac, since what he is composing, in paragraph after elegant paragraph, is nothing less than an elegy for a vanished culture and the vanished human beings who sustained it.
With his wife administering the campaign organization, Sunday was free to do what he did best: compose and deliver colloquial sermons.
"To me, what he did was he composed something," Muhly says of his projected protagonist.
As a candidate for the N.F.L.P.A. job, he composed what he called "Playbook: An Enterprise Philosophy to Maximize the Business and Political Interest of the N.F.L.P.A".
Instead, he retreated to the studio, where he composed what he thought of as "ideal" performances by splicing together various takes, eliminating errors, and including only the best bits.
