Woodard’s piece in the LA Times.  Woodard touches upon the  crux here, about how out of the box "Songs and Poems" is for Glass.  Personally, I don’t believe that Glass borrowed from any tradition of writing for solo cello rather this piece exposed a certain compositional kinship with Bach. I have always thought that there’s a kind of, for lack of a better term, musical purity in both composers work.  It’s part of the reason that most all of Bach’s music would sound good on any instrument as would Glass’ music.