I’ve loved Ann Southam’s Glass Houses ever since I heard pianist Sarah Cahill play one years ago. The music finds an ecstatic joy in severe, repeat­ing struc­tures, a quality it shares with much of my favorite mini­mal­ist art (as it turns out, the ‘Glass’ in the title was partly an homage to Philip’s music). One can also hear the influ­ence of East-coast fiddle music in the bright, nimble melodies arranged in strophic phrases. But the trick of the pieces lies in the way they are notated, with inde­pen­dent hands; the left hand repeats an unchang­ing pattern through­out, while the right cycles through the melodies, which are completely inde­pen­dent metri­cally, there­fore lining up a differ­ent way each time. To execute this requires a level of brain division I don’t think I’ve had to do before. I spent days doggedly stum­bling through no. 14 before I was able to play even the first couple of patterns without derail­ing myself.