Philip Glass

Influences: Bach, Schubert, and Ravel.

Pasacaglia - by the nineteenth century the word came to mean a series of variations over an ostinato pattern, usually of a serious character.^[4] A similar form, the chaconne, was also first developed by Frescobaldi. The two genres are closely related, but since "composers often used the terms chaconne and passacaglia indiscriminately [...] modern attempts to arrive at a clear distinction are arbitrary and historically unfounded".

In music, an ostinato (derived from Italian: "stubborn", compare English: obstinate) is a motif or phrase which is persistently repeated in the same musical voice. An ostinato is always a succession of equal sounds, wherein each note always has the same weight or stress. The repeating idea may be a rhythmic pattern, part of a tune, or a complete melody in itself.

One of the best known examples of the passacaglia in Western classical music is the Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor, BWV 582 for organ by Johann Sebastian Bach,