Eleonor Sandresky has worked closely with Glass as a musician for over three decades and often performs with the Philip Glass Ensemble. Piano etudes are often designed to address a technical challenge in playing the piano. In the case of Glass's etudes, many of the pieces were designed to address deficiencies in his own playing. Apart from technical challenges, Glass's music clearly expresses a certain mood and tone in stark contrast to one another. Inasmuch, Sandresky is an ideal interpreter of Glass's music. However, in this case, that was not the tie that binds. Some of these same qualities of mood and technical challenge inhabit Sandresky's etudes - yet she pursues a different more serious undertaking, seeking to capture in her music the unobtainable, the strange energies that surround and infiltrate our lives.