Philip Glass
Philip Glass is an American composer and pianist. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential composers of the late 20th century. Glass's work has been associated with minimalism, being built up from repetitive phrases and shifting layers. He described himself as a composer of "music with repetitive structures", which he has helped to evolve stylistically.
Glass founded the Philip Glass Ensemble in 1968. He has written 15 operas, numerous chamber operas and musical theatre works, 15 symphonies, 12 concertos, nine string quartets, various other chamber music pieces, and many film scores. He has received nominations for four Grammy Awards, including two for Best Contemporary Classical Composition for Satyagraha and String Quartet No. 2. He has received three Academy Award for Best Original Score nominations for Martin Scorsese's Kundun, Stephen Daldry's The Hours, and Richard Eyre's Notes on a Scandal. He also composed the scores for Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, Hamburger Hill, The Thin Blue Line, Candyman, The Truman Show, and The Illusionist.
Glass is known for composing the operas Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha, Akhnaten, The Voyage, and The Perfect American. He also wrote the scores for Broadway productions such as the revivals of The Elephant Man, The Crucible, and King Lear. For the latter he won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Music in a Play.
Glass has received many accolades, including a BAFTA Award, a Drama Desk Award, and a Golden Globe Award, as well as nominations for three Academy Awards, four Grammy Awards, and a Primetime Emmy Award. He has also received the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1995, the National Medal of Arts in 2010, the Kennedy Center Honors in 2018, and the Grammy Trustees Award in 2020. In 2025, he received a Lifetime Achievement from the World Soundtrack Academy.
Early life and education
Glass was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on January 31, 1937, the son of Ida and Benjamin Charles Glass. His family were Latvian-Jewish and Russian-Jewish emigrants. His father owned a record store and his mother was a librarian. In his memoir, Glass recalls that at the end of World War II his mother aided Jewish Holocaust survivors, inviting recent arrivals to America to stay at their home until they could find a job and a place to live. She developed a plan to help them learn English and develop skills so they could find work. His sister, Sheppie, would later do similar work as an active member of the International Rescue Committee.Glass developed his appreciation of music from his father, discovering later that his father's side of the family had many musicians. His cousin Cevia was a classical pianist, while others had been in vaudeville. He learned his family was also related to Al Jolson. Glass's father often received promotional copies of new recordings at his music store. Glass spent many hours listening to them, developing his knowledge of and taste in music. This openness to modern sounds affected Glass at an early age:
The elder Glass promoted both new recordings and a wide selection of composers to his customers, sometimes convincing them to try something new by allowing them to return records they did not like. His store soon developed a reputation as Baltimore's leading source of modern music. Glass built a sizable record collection from the unsold records in his father's store, including modern classical music such as Hindemith, Bartók, Schoenberg, Shostakovich and Western classical music including Beethoven's string quartets and Schubert's B Piano Trio. Glass cites Schubert's work as a "big influence" growing up. In a 2011 interview, Glass stated that Franz Schubert—with whom he shares a birthday—is his favorite composer.
He studied the flute as a child at the Peabody Preparatory of the Peabody Institute of Music. At the age of 15, he entered an accelerated college program at the University of Chicago where he studied mathematics and philosophy. In Chicago, he discovered the serialism of Anton Webern and composed a twelve-tone string trio. In 1954, Glass traveled to Paris, where he encountered the films of Jean Cocteau, which made a lasting impression on him. He visited artists' studios and saw their work; Glass recalls, "the bohemian life you see in Orphée was the life I... was attracted to, and those were the people I hung out with."
Glass studied at the Juilliard School of Music where the keyboard was his main instrument. His composition teachers included Vincent Persichetti and William Bergsma. Fellow students included Steve Reich and Peter Schickele. In 1959, he was a winner in the BMI Foundation's BMI Student Composer Awards, an international prize for young composers. In the summer of 1960, he studied with Darius Milhaud at the summer school of the Aspen Music Festival and composed a violin concerto for a fellow student, Dorothy Pixley-Rothschild. After leaving Juilliard in 1962, Glass moved to Pittsburgh and worked as a school-based composer-in-residence in the public school system, composing various choral, chamber, and orchestral music.
Career
1964–1966: Paris
In 1964, Glass received a Fulbright Scholarship; his studies in Paris with the eminent composition teacher Nadia Boulanger, from autumn of 1964 to summer of 1966, influenced his work throughout his life, as the composer admitted in 1979: "The composers I studied with Boulanger are the people I still think about most—Bach and Mozart."Glass later wrote in his autobiography Music by Philip Glass in 1987 that the new music performed at Pierre Boulez's Domaine Musical concerts in Paris lacked any excitement for him, but he was deeply impressed by new films and theatre performances. His move away from modernist composers such as Boulez and Stockhausen was nuanced, rather than outright rejection: "That generation wanted disciples and as we didn't join up it was taken to mean that we hated the music, which wasn't true. We'd studied them at Juilliard and knew their music. How on earth can you reject Berio? Those early works of Stockhausen are still beautiful. But there was just no point in attempting to do their music better than they did and so we started somewhere else."
During this time, he encountered revolutionary films of the French New Wave, such as those of Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, which upended the rules set by an older generation of artists, and Glass made friends with American visual artists, actors and directors. Together with Akalaitis, Glass in turn attended performances by theatre groups including Jean-Louis Barrault's Odéon theatre, The Living Theatre and the Berliner Ensemble in 1964 to 1965. These significant encounters resulted in a collaboration with Breuer for which Glass contributed music for a 1965 staging of Samuel Beckett's Comédie. The resulting piece was directly influenced by the play's open-ended, repetitive and almost musical structure and was the first one of a series of four early pieces in a minimalist, yet still dissonant, idiom. After Play, Glass also acted in 1966 as music director of a Breuer production of Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children, featuring the theatre score by Paul Dessau.
In parallel with his early excursions in experimental theatre, Glass worked in winter 1965 and spring 1966 as a music director and composer on a film score with Ravi Shankar and Alla Rakha, which added another important influence on Glass's musical thinking. His distinctive style arose from his work with Shankar and Rakha and their perception of rhythm in Indian music as being entirely additive. He renounced all his compositions in a moderately modern style resembling Milhaud's, Aaron Copland's, and Samuel Barber's, and began writing pieces based on repetitive structures of Indian music and a sense of time influenced by Samuel Beckett: a piece for two actresses and chamber ensemble, a work for chamber ensemble and his first numbered string quartet.
Glass then left Paris for northern India in 1966, where he came in contact with Tibetan refugees and began to gravitate towards Buddhism. He met Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, in 1972, and has been a strong supporter of the Tibetan independence ever since.
1967–1974: Minimalism: From ''Strung Out'' to ''Music in 12 Parts''
Shortly after arriving in New York City in March 1967, Glass attended a performance of works by Steve Reich, which left a deep impression on him; he simplified his style and turned to a radical "consonant vocabulary". Finding little sympathy from traditional performers and performance spaces, Glass eventually formed an ensemble with fellow ex-student Jon Gibson, and others, and began performing mainly in art galleries and studio lofts of SoHo. The visual artist Richard Serra provided Glass with Gallery contacts, while both collaborated on various sculptures, films and installations; from 1971 to 1974, he was Serra's regular studio assistant.Between summer of 1967 and the end of 1968, Glass composed nine works, including Strung Out, Gradus, Music in the Shape of a Square, How Now and 1+1 which were "clearly designed to experiment more fully with his new-found minimalist approach". The first concert of Glass's new music was at Jonas Mekas's Film-Makers Cinemathèque in September 1968. This concert included the first work of this series with Strung Out and Music in the Shape of a Square. The musical scores were tacked on the wall, and the performers had to move while playing. Glass's new works met with a very enthusiastic response by the audience which consisted mainly of visual and performance artists who were highly sympathetic to Glass's reductive approach.
Apart from his music career, Glass had a moving company with his cousin, the sculptor Jene Highstein, and also worked as a plumber and cab driver. He recounts installing a dishwasher and looking up from his work to see an astonished Robert Hughes, Time magazine's art critic, staring at him. During this time, he made friends with other New York-based artists such as Sol LeWitt, Nancy Graves, Michael Snow, Bruce Nauman, Laurie Anderson, and Chuck Close.
With 1+1 and Two Pages, Glass turned to a more "rigorous approach" to his "most basic minimalist technique, additive process", pieces which were followed in the same year by Music in Contrary Motion and Music in Fifths. Eventually Glass's music grew less austere, becoming more complex and dramatic, with pieces such as Music in Similar Motion, and Music with Changing Parts. These pieces were performed by the Philip Glass Ensemble in the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1969 and in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1970, often encountering hostile reaction from critics, but Glass's music was also met with enthusiasm from younger artists such as Brian Eno and David Bowie. Eno described this encounter with Glass's music as one of the "most extraordinary musical experiences of life", as a "viscous bath of pure, thick energy", concluding "this was actually the most detailed music I'd ever heard. It was all intricacy, exotic harmonics". In 1970, Glass returned to the theatre, composing music for the theatre group Mabou Mines, resulting in his first minimalist pieces employing voices: Red Horse Animation and Music for Voices.
After differences of opinion with Steve Reich in 1971, Glass formed the Philip Glass Ensemble, an amplified ensemble including keyboards, wind instruments, and soprano voices.
Glass's music for his ensemble culminated in the four-hour-long Music in Twelve Parts, which began as a single piece with twelve instrumental parts but developed into a cycle that summed up Glass's musical achievement since 1967, and even transcended it—the last part features a twelve-tone theme, sung by the soprano voice of the ensemble. "I had broken the rules of modernism and so I thought it was time to break some of my own rules", according to Glass. Though he finds the term minimalist inaccurate to describe his later work, Glass does accept this term for pieces up to and including Music in 12 Parts, excepting this last part which "was the end of minimalism" for Glass. As he pointed out: "I had worked for eight or nine years inventing a system, and now I'd written through it and come out the other end." He now prefers to describe himself as a composer of "music with repetitive structures".