Philip Glass

Philip Glass’s musical accomplishments are as varied as those with whom he has collaborated over a career, from the smallest lofts of New York to the grandest opera stages. Born in Baltimore, in 1937, Glass worked as a boy at his father’s record store. He graduated from the University of Chicago at the age of 19, having studied mathematics and philosophy, and then received his masters in composition from the Juilliard School of Music in 1962. Over the next three years, Glass composed over 100 works, receiving numerous awards and grants. Still, he wanted to seek a new direction. Glass went to Paris to to study with the renowned teacher Nadia Boulanger from 1964 to 1966. While in Paris, Glass also found inspiration from conversations with sitarist Ravi Shankar and percussionist Alla Rakha. He formed the Philip Glass Ensemble in 1968, in New York. Using electronically amplified instruments, Glass began to create his signature kind of sound with musical phrases that are repeated and slowly modified, or as he refers to it, “music with repetitive structures.” From a vast list of compositions, a small sample title list includes Einstein on the Beach (1976), Satyagraha (1980), The Photographer (1982), Akhnaten (1984), White Raven (1998), The Fall of the House of Usher (1988), Hydrogen Jukebox (1990), The Voyage (1992), La Belle et La Bête (1994), Penal Colony (2001), Galileo Galilei (2002), and Waiting for the Barbarians (2005). He has collaborated with Woody Allen, David Bowie, Lucinda Childs, Allen Ginsberg, Grupo Corpo, Doris Lessing, Jerome Robbins, Yo-Yo Ma, experimental theatre collective Mabou Mines (of which he was a co-founder), Errol Morris, Martin Scorsese, Paul Simon, Twyla Tharp, and Robert Wilson, amongst others.