Orange Mountain Music is proud to present The Not-Doings of an Insomniac, a piece that Philip Glass composed in 2015 for double bassist Robert Black. The Not-Doings of an Insomniac is a Partita for solo double bass in 7 movements with poetry by Lou Reed, John Cale, Laurie Anderson, Yoko Ono, David Byrne, Leonard Cohen, Patti Smith and Arthur Russell recited Black.

As a traveling musician, for the past 50 years, today, Glass often finds himself on the road in hotel rooms in unidentifiable cities. Constant travel and time-zone changes often bring on bouts with insomnia. On a trip in Europe in 2015, Glass took these waking hours to consider pieces he had always dreamed about but never had a chance to realize with his other composing commitments. Traveling with a small inexpensive spiral-bound music notebook, Glass composed his Partita for solo double bass for Robert Black, the double bassist for the Bang on a Can All-Stars. The piece is cast in seven movements and unlike his other works for solo instruments, between each movement (Not Dreaming, Not Tasting, Not Smelling, etc) are poems by friends or long-time associates of Glass’s.

The album is rounded off with the premiere recording of Prelude to Endgame from 1984 for double bass and timpani played by Robert Black and Jonathan Haas. Endgame is a play by Samuel Beckett. Glass composed the music for the 1984 production of the play by the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass..