Philip Glass

Philip Glass was born on January 31, 1937, in Baltimore, Maryland, the youngest of three children of Ida and Benjamin Glass. His parents were of Lithuanian Jewish descent, and his father ran a radio repair shop that also sold records ^[1]. When certain discs failed to sell, Benjamin Glass brought them home to figure out why, and the family ended up listening to Beethoven quartets, Schubert sonatas, and Shostakovich symphonies. Glass has often credited this accidental record library with shaping his ear before he had any formal idea of what a composer was ^[2].

He began violin lessons at six and took up the flute at eight, studying at the Peabody Conservatory in his home city. A precocious student, he entered the University of Chicago at fifteen through its early admissions program, where he studied mathematics and philosophy while teaching himself piano and working through scores on his own ^[1]. He graduated in 1956, at nineteen, already set on music.

From Chicago he went to the Juilliard School in New York, where he gave up the flute and concentrated on composition. His teachers there included Vincent Persichetti and William Bergsma, and among his classmates was Steve Reich, whose path would intersect with his again a decade later ^[3]. Glass wrote a good deal of music in a mild American modernist idiom during these years, most of which he later withdrew from his catalog.

In 1964 Glass won a Fulbright scholarship and moved to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger, the legendary pedagogue who had trained Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter, and many other American composers. Boulanger put him through a severe regimen of counterpoint and analysis that he later described as the technical foundation of everything he wrote afterward ^[2].

The decisive encounter of these years, however, came from outside the conservatory tradition. Glass was hired to transcribe the music of the Indian sitarist Ravi Shankar into Western notation for the soundtrack of the film Chappaqua. Wrestling with rhythms that would not fit into conventional bar lines, he began to grasp a different way of organizing time: music built from additive rhythmic cycles rather than divided measures ^[3]. The experience upended his assumptions. He traveled through North Africa and India in 1966, deepened his interest in Indian music and Tibetan Buddhism, and returned to New York in 1967 determined to start over.

Back in New York, he renounced his earlier scores and began writing radically stripped-down pieces based on repeated figures and gradually shifting rhythmic patterns. Works such as Strung Out (1967) for amplified violin and Music in Fifths (1969) announced a style of stark repetition and steady pulse ^[4]. To perform this music he founded the Philip Glass Ensemble in 1968, a group of keyboards, winds, and voices, heavily amplified, that played in downtown lofts and galleries because concert halls would not have them. Through most of these years he supported himself as a plumber, a furniture mover, and a taxi driver ^[1].

The turning point in the Philip Glass biography arrived in 1976 with Einstein on the Beach, a nearly five-hour opera created with the director and designer Robert Wilson. It had no plot in the ordinary sense; its texts were numbers, solfege syllables, and cryptic spoken passages, and audiences were invited to come and go during the performance. Premiered at the Avignon Festival and then given two sold-out performances at the Metropolitan Opera House, which the creators rented themselves, it became one of the most discussed theatrical works of the decade and left Glass deeply in debt but suddenly famous ^[5]. He kept driving a cab for a time even after the premiere.

Einstein turned out to be the first panel of a trilogy of what Glass called portrait operas about figures who changed the world through ideas rather than force. Satyagraha (1980), sung in Sanskrit to texts from the Bhagavad Gita, portrays Mohandas Gandhi's early years in South Africa, and Akhnaten (1983) depicts the Egyptian pharaoh who attempted a monotheistic revolution ^[4]. Both entered the repertory of major houses, a rare fate for contemporary opera.

During the same period his concert music reached a wide public. Music in Twelve Parts, completed in 1974, summarized his early technique on a monumental scale, while the 1982 album Glassworks, recorded for CBS, was designed to fit the length of a cassette side and introduced his sound to listeners far outside new music circles ^[3].

Among Philip Glass achievements, his film music has probably traveled furthest. His score for Godfrey Reggio's wordless documentary Koyaanisqatsi (1982), a torrent of arpeggios and low choral chanting set against time-lapse images of nature and cities, became inseparable from the film itself and spawned two sequels, Powaqqatsi and Naqoyqatsi ^[6]. Glass went on to score Paul Schrader's Mishima (1985), Errol Morris's documentary The Thin Blue Line (1988), and dozens of other pictures.

Hollywood recognition followed. He received Academy Award nominations for Martin Scorsese's Kundun (1997), Stephen Daldry's The Hours (2002), and Notes on a Scandal (2006), and his score for The Hours won a BAFTA Award ^[6]. The Truman Show (1998), which used both new and existing Glass music, brought him a Golden Globe. His willingness to work in cinema, television, and even advertising drew criticism from some quarters of the classical establishment, but it also made him one of the few living composers whose style ordinary filmgoers could identify by ear.

He collaborated across genres with unusual freedom: with David Bowie and Brian Eno, whose albums Low and Heroes he reworked into symphonies; with the poet Allen Ginsberg on Hydrogen Jukebox; with Paul Simon, Suzanne Vega, and Laurie Anderson on the 1986 song cycle Songs from Liquid Days; and with Ravi Shankar again on the 1990 album Passages ^[3].

Glass has married four times. His first wife was the theater director JoAnne Akalaitis, with whom he founded the experimental company Mabou Mines and had two children, Juliet and Zachary ^[1]. His second marriage, to the physician Luba Burtyk, ended in divorce. His third wife, the artist Candy Jernigan, died of liver cancer in 1991 at the age of thirty-nine, a loss he has spoken of as devastating. He later married Holly Critchlow, with whom he had two more sons before that marriage also ended ^[2].

A practicing Buddhist since his travels in the 1960s, Glass has been a longtime supporter of Tibetan causes and helped found the Tibet House US cultural organization in New York with Robert Thurman and Richard Gere in 1987 ^[7]. He has described his spiritual practice, along with daily composing habits begun early in the morning, as central to his enormous productivity.

His 2015 memoir, Words Without Music, recounts his Baltimore childhood, the Paris and India years, and the decades of taxi driving and plumbing that preceded recognition. Reviewers noted its plainspoken, unembittered account of an avant-garde artist's long apprenticeship ^[2].

Rather than slowing down, Glass widened his range after 1990. Having once avoided the standard orchestral genres, he turned to them with appetite, completing his Symphony No. 1 (Low) in 1992 and continuing through a Symphony No. 14 premiered in 2021, along with concertos for violin, cello, timpani, saxophone quartet, and two pianos ^[4]. His catalog of operas passed two dozen, including The Voyage, commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera for the Columbus quincentenary in 1992, and later works such as Kepler and The Perfect American, an opera about Walt Disney premiered in Madrid in 2013 ^[5].

Honors accumulated in his later decades. He received the Praemium Imperiale from the Japan Art Association in 2012, the U.S. National Medal of Arts, Kennedy Center Honors in 2018, and the Glenn Gould Prize in 2015 ^[7]. His twenty Etudes for solo piano, completed in 2012, became recital staples for a younger generation of pianists, and he continued to perform them himself into his eighties.

Akhnaten's 2019 production at the Metropolitan Opera, featuring the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo and a troupe of jugglers, won the Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording in 2022, evidence that music once confined to lofts had become mainstream repertory ^[5].

Anyone asking who was Philip Glass, or rather who he is, since he remains among the most performed living composers, runs into a paradox: the man most associated with the word minimalism rejects it, preferring to call his work music with repetitive structures or simply theater music ^[3]. Whatever the label, the style he forged in the late 1960s, alongside Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and La Monte Young, redirected Western concert music away from postwar serial complexity toward pulse, tonality, and audible process.

His influence spread far beyond the concert hall. Film composers, ambient and electronic musicians, and rock artists absorbed his arpeggiated figures and slowly turning harmonies; bands from Radiohead's orbit to countless soundtrack studios show his fingerprints. The portrait opera model he invented with Einstein on the Beach opened space for a generation of composers, including former assistants such as Nico Muhly, to treat opera as living contemporary art rather than museum culture ^[4].

Among the durable Philip Glass facts is the sheer scale of the output: more than twenty operas, fourteen symphonies, a shelf of concertos, string quartets, piano cycles, and scores for over fifty films ^[6]. Critics remain divided over whether such abundance diluted the radicalism of the early work, but the music's reach is not in dispute. A sound that once emptied concert halls now fills opera houses, cinemas, and streaming playlists, and its maker, well into his ninth decade, is still writing ^[7].