Here we go again.

I remember seething with frustration last autumn when I had to spend a ridiculous amount of time picking my way through a monumental series of clashes in concert programming as Glasgow Music, blinkers riveted on, wilfully programmed an intensive strand of self-promotions that clashed ruthlessly with already programmed events by the national companies, increasing the choices for music-lovers (which actually meant diluting any potentially cumulative significance of everything). You might recall the string of cancellations and poorly attended events that ensued.

In a sense recent history may be about to repeat itself. Next weekend, the opening weekend of May, broad-based music-lovers with enquiring minds are confronted with a "preposterous" number and range of choices. And the word "preposterous", I should explain, is not mine, but was uttered twice last weekend by two different concert-goers and ardent music-lovers at two different events I was reviewing in the RCS and the City Hall.

The facts first: next weekend, Glasgow will host two simultaneous festival-type events between Friday May 1 and Sunday 3. The BBC SSO and Radio 3 will promote their annual Tectonics extravaganza, a futuristic exploration of contemporary music, with wall-to-wall concerts based in the City Hall/Old Fruitmarket complex. At exactly the same time, up the road in the Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow Music will promote its own Minimal festival, also wall-to-wall events featuring many of the biggest names and luminaries from that scene.

Meanwhile, straddling this, and both of the main concert halls, are the national companies with major programmes. The SCO and Joseph Swensen are in the City Hall on Friday, with Swensen directing Britten's tremendous Frank Bridge Variations and playing the solo part himself in Samuel Barber's fine Violin Concerto; while on Saturday, in the big Hall, the mighty Finn, John Storgards, will conduct the RSNO in an unmissable (and there's your problem) programme featuring Sibelius's Nightride And Sunrise, Grieg's spring-fresh Piano Concerto and Nielsen's volcanic Fourth Symphony.

What to do? It's a treasure chest of choices. Or it's a non-navigable nightmare. Or, as a colleague expressed it pithily last week in an email: "It's just daft." Make your decisions, make your choices. I know what I'm doing. But it leaves this music lover very deeply frustrated and actually quite angry at what I have to miss. I'm not alone. Is this any way to run a successful classical music business in these hard-pressed times, when absolutely everybody is scrabbling with structures and ventures to get audiences in through the door? That's a rhetorical question; or maybe not.

Anyway, if it helps anyone, both festivals have produced well laid out brochures which may guide you through the choices. On last Wednesday's Arts page Kate Molleson's feature gave something of a flavour of the Tectonics programme. I'll confine myself today to a few thoughts on the Minimal strand of the weekend. Within itself, it's a big deal. Both of the surviving giants of the movement that swept the world, Philip Glass and Steve Reich, will be here, each with one of their established masterpieces, respectively, Music In 12 Parts and Music For 18 Musicians. Reich will also bring a new piece, written specially for percussionist Colin Currie and his own group.

The seminal minimalist, Terry Riley, now dead, will be present spiritually through a kids' event that will focus on his genuinely ground-breaking In C, which opened the gates through which minimalism gushed forth. I go a long way back with minimalism. It was Riley's In C that started it for me. Next came Reich, pre-Drumming. It was through Reich's tape piece, Come Out - or Come Out To Show, as it should properly be called - that I seriously "got" and was hooked by minimalism: the process of phasing sounds rather than merely repeating them. And when Reich and his musicians brought Drumming, then a very new piece, to Aberdeen University, circa 1972/73, I was blown away by the detail and ethos of the whole thing, not least all these sensational percussionists with their long hair, white kaftan shirts and their hypnotically pulsing music that gripped.

I was always less of a Philip Glass man. I dutifully followed the operas (I remember sitting two feet from Dame Janet Baker at a London performance of Akhnaten and trying to read the expression on her face); but ultimately, opera, including John Adams's later efforts, was not, for me, the enduring vehicle for minimalism. That vehicle is in the instrumental formats which characterise the coming Glasgow presentation. And I'm warmly delighted that my old chum, the late Steve Martland, will be remembered in a tribute programme. I never put Steve in any category: we used to just sit on the phone and talk the nights away about music. Steve, a good provocateur, is much missed.