BIOGRAPHIES
PHILIP GLASS Composer
He was born in 1937 and grew up in Baltimore.
He studied at the University of Chicago, the
Juilliard School and in Aspen with Darius
Milhaud. Finding himself dissatisfied with much
of what then passed for modern music, he
moved to Europe, where he studied with the
legendary pedagogue Nadia Boulanger (who
also taught Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson and
Quincy Jones) and worked closely with the sitar
virtuoso and composer Ravi Shankar.
He returned to New York in 1967 and formed the
Philip Glass Ensemble–seven musicians playing
keyboards and a variety of woodwinds, amplified
and fed through a mixer. The new musical style
that Philip was evolving was eventually dubbed
“minimalism.” Philip never liked the term and
preferred to speak of himself as a composer
of “music with repetitive structures.” Much
of his early work was based on the extended
reiteration of brief, elegant melodic fragments
that wove in and out of an aural tapestry. Or,
to put it another way, it immersed a listener
in a sort of sonic weather that twists, turns,
surrounds, and develops.
Through his operas, his symphonies, his
compositions for his own ensemble, and his
wide-ranging collaborations with artists ranging
from Twyla Tharp to Allen Ginsberg, Woody Allen
to David Bowie, Philip has had an extraordinary
and unprecedented impact upon the musical and
intellectual life of his times.
The operas–Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha,
Akhnaten, and The Voyage, among many others–
play throughout the world’s leading houses,
and rarely to an empty seat. Philip has written
music for experimental theatre and for Academy
Award-winning motion pictures such as The
Hours and Martin Scorsese’s Kundun while
Koyaanisqatsi, his initial filmic landscape with
Godfrey Reggio and the Philip Glass Ensemble,
may be the most radical and influential
mating of sound and vision since Fantasia. His
associations, personal and professional, with
leading rock, pop and world music artists date
back to the 1960s, including the beginning of
his collaborative relationship with artist Robert
Wilson. Indeed, Philip is the first composer to
win a wide, multi-generational audience in the
opera house, the concert hall, the dance world,
in film and in popular music–simultaneously.
There has been nothing “minimalist” about his
output. In the past 25 years, Philip has composed
more than 20 operas, large and small; eight
symphonies (with others already on the way);
two piano concertos and concertos for violin,
piano, timpani, and saxophone quartet and
orchestra; soundtracks to films ranging from
new scores for the stylized classics of Jean
Cocteau to Errol Morris’s documentary about
former defence secretary Robert McNamara;
string quartets; a growing body of work for
solo piano and organ. He has collaborated
with Paul Simon, Linda Ronstadt, Yo-Yo Ma,
and Doris Lessing, among many others. He
presents lectures, workshops, and solo keyboard
performances around the world.