Philip Glass believes that music is an agent of change. He is expecting too much of himself

Philip Glass, who turned 70 in January this year, has his ears attuned to frequencies too high-pitched for most of us: he seeks to eavesdrop on what earlier ages thought of as heavenly harmony, and strains to hear the distant music of the spheres.

In his Fifth Symphony - an ecumenical meditation on human history from creation to resurrection, composed to mark the millennium - a chorus quotes a Hindi poem which describes a sky filled with jingling harps and drums that beat like hearts. Glass's operatic heroes are evangelists who bring that resonant heaven down to our cacophonous earth: a pharaoh in Akhnaten, a physicist in Einstein on the Beach, and a civil-rights leader in Satyagraha (a month-long run of which English National Opera begins this coming week, in a new production by Improbable). Akhnaten outlaws a barbarous polytheism and imposes the worship of one universal god who, though invisible, is made audible through the eerie voice of a counter-tenor. Einstein on the Beach exhibits the cosmic playground of the new physics: thanks to relativity, light moves, clocks without hands tell the time backwards as well as forwards, and spaceships hover. Satyagraha is an epic of liberation which describes Mahatma Gandhi's campaign against racial discrimination as a young barrister in South Africa.

The title means "truth-force" in Sanskrit, and the action, rather than bothering with the self-destructive operatic staples of lust and ven geance, demonstrates how an idea can alter and redeem the world. Like secular angels, Tolstoy, Tagore and Martin Luther King silently look down as Gandhi leads peaceful armies of Indian miners and labourers on protest marches. At the end, Gandhi proclaims his eternal existence as a principle of righteousness, not a man: he has invented, as Glass says, "the persona we know as Mahatma ('Great Soul')".

After this trilogy, first performed between 1976 and 1983, Glass's later operas describe the creation and destruction of remote, alternative worlds. The Voyage, commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera to commemorate the fifth centenary of Columbus's 1492 expedition, deals with the concept of discovery. The navigator is guided by a scientist, another of Glass's intellectual seraphs: like Stephen Hawking, he is confined to a wheelchair, but the rickety contraption soars through space as if afloat on Wordsworth's "strange seas of thought". In The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (1988), set to a libretto by Doris Lessing, Glass adventures into science fiction. His subject here is climate change and planetary death, and the Ice Age returns in a blast of C sharp minor that sounds like the instant onset of terminal winter.

The crazily idealistic Glass believes that music can be a means of salvation. Hence the global ambition of his grandiose projects. The Fifth Symphony anthologises excerpts from Genesis and the Koran, combining them with Hawaiian, Jewish and Japanese myths about creation in the hope of making peace between warring religions. The Civil Wars is a multimedia, multinational opera whose abstruse characters include a wise owl and a booming contralto called Earth Mother. It consists of sections that were meant to be staged in five different countries, before convening at the Los Angeles Olympics Arts Festival in 1984. The ten-hour performance planned for Los Angeles never happened, and the parts have so far never been joined into a whole. Money ran out, and The Civil Wars collapsed under its own weight. Or does Glass simply expect too much of his own art?

It is all very well to equate music, as Satyagraha does, with the shining, self-evident virtue of truth. But George Bernard Shaw called music "absolutely unmoral" - incapable of distinguishing between soul and body, as happy giving vent to our carnal vices as it is appealing to our nobler natures. For me, Glass's hypnotically repetitive scales and shimmering arpeggios have a sensuous enchantment that precludes any profounder meaning. He is at ease setting unintelligible languages - Akkadian and biblical Hebrew in Akh naten, Sanskrit in Satyagraha - because words exist merely to supply syllables from which his characters produce a bright sonic haze.

Glass longs for music to be a gospel, an agent of change. Yet his own music more often plays a subordinate role, as when it accompanies cinematic images. His score for The Hours is a connective medium, unifying the three separate times and places between which Stephen Dal dry's film commutes; fluent as the river in which Virginia Woolf drowns herself, it corresponds to the unstoppable time that trickles or gushes through the action. Like the best film scores, it is content to work subliminally, rather than dominating the drama and motivating the characters, as music must do in an opera.

Glass asks a painfully ironic question about his vocation in Songs from Liquid Days (1986), a vocal cycle that begins with his setting of a poem by Paul Simon. The song derives from an indefinable hum, which might - as the vocalist says - be the sound of a prayer or a mantra but could also be "the hum of a calm refrigerator cooling on a big night". We keep our ears pricked for the voices of angels, or the chiming of the crystalline spheres that were once supposed to regulate the cosmos. Yet what we hear could just as well be our elec trical appliances mumbling to themselves. Does Glass, for whom music is a holy art, ever worry that he is most gainfully employed as a provider of reassuringly monotonous muzak?

"Satyagraha" is at English National Opera, London Coliseum, London WC2, from 5 April. For more information, visit: http://www.eno.org

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