Philip Glass

Philip Morris Glass (born January 31, 1937) is an American music composer. He is considered one of the most influential composers of the late 20th century and is widely acknowledged as a composer who has brought art music to the public (along with precursors such as Richard Strauss, Kurt Weill and Leonard Bernstein).

Although his music is often, though controversially, described as minimalist, he distances himself from this label, describing himself instead as a composer of "music with repetitive structures."periodical=PhilipGlass.com Although his early, mature music is minimalist, he has evolved stylistically.periodical=The New York Times Currently, he describes himself as a "Classicist", pointing out that he is trained in harmony and counterpoint and studied Franz Schubert, Johann Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart with Nadia Boulanger.

Glass is a prolific composer: He has written works for his own musical group which he founded, the Philip Glass Ensemble (for which he still performs on keyboards), as well as operas, musical theatre works, eight symphonies, eight concertos, solo works, string quartets, and film scores. Three of his film scores have been nominated for Academy Awards.

Glass counts many artists among his friends and collaborators, including visual artists (Richard Serra, Chuck Close), writers (Doris Lessing, David Henry Hwang, Allen Ginsberg), film and theatre directors (including Errol Morris, Robert Wilson, JoAnne Akalaitis, Godfrey Reggio, Paul Schrader, Martin Scorsese, Christopher Hampton, Bernard Rose, and many others), choreographers (Lucinda Childs, Jerome Robbins, Twyla Tharp), and musicians and composers (Ravi Shankar, David Byrne, the conductor Dennis Russell Davies, Foday Musa Suso, Laurie Anderson, Linda Ronstadt, Paul Simon, Joan LaBarbara, Arthur Russell, David Bowie, Brian Eno, Roberto Carnevale, Patti Smith, Aphex Twin, Lisa Bielawa, and John Moran)

. Among recent collaborators are Glass's fellow New Yorker Woody Allen, and poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen.

Life and work

For a list of works, see List of compositions by Philip Glass

Beginnings, early education and influences (1937–1964)

Glass was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of Ida (née Gouline) and Benjamin Charles Glass, and the grandson of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania. His father owned a record store, and consequently Glass's record collection consisted to a large extent of unsold records, including modern music (Hindemith, Bartók, Schoenberg, Shostakovich) and Western classical music (Ludwig van Beethoven's String Quartets and Schubert's b}} Piano Trio, which he cites as a "big influence"), at a very early age. He then studied the flute as a child at the Peabody Conservatory of Music and entered an accelerated college program at the University of Chicago at the age of 15, where he studied Mathematics and Philosophy. In Chicago he discovered the serialism of Webern and composed a twelve-tone string trio.last=Schwarz In 1954 Glass went to Paris for the first time, encountering the films of Jean Cocteau, which made a lasting impression on him. He visited artist's studios and saw their work; "the bohemian life you see in [1] Orphée was the life I (...) was attracted to, and those were the people I hung out with."

Glass then went on to the Juilliard School of Music where the keyboard became his

Paris (1964–1966)

In 1964 Glass received a Fulbright Scholarship and went to Paris, where he studied with the eminent composition teacher Nadia Boulanger from autumn of 1964 to summer of 1966, analyzing scores of Johann Sebastian Bach (The Well-Tempered Clavier), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (the Piano Concertos). Glass's years in Paris as a student of Boulanger had a lasting impression and influence on his work ever since, 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 stated in his autobiography Music by Philip Glass (1987) that the new music performed at Pierre Boulez's Domaine Musical concerts in Paris lacked any excitement for him (with the notable exceptions of music by John Cage and Morton Feldman), but he was deeply impressed by new films and theatre performances. He encountered revolutionary films of the French New Wave, such as those of Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, which ignored the rules set by an older generation of artists.location=New York , and Glass made friends with American visual artists (the sulptor Richard Serra and his wife Nancy Graves), actors and directors (JoAnne Akalaitis, Ruth Maleczech, David Warrilow, and Lee Breuer, with whom Glass later founded the experimental theatre group Mabou Mines). Together with Akalaitis (they married in 1965), Glass in turn attended performances by theatre groups including Jean-Louis Barrault's Odéon theatre, the 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 (Play, 1963). The resulting piece (written for two soprano saxophones) 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 (Chappaqua, Conrad Rooks, 1966) 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 Beckett: a piece four two actresses and chamber ensemble, a work for chamber ensemble and his first numbered string quartet (No.1, 1966).

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 cause ever since.

Minimalism: From Strung Out to Music in 12 Parts (1967–1974)

seealso Minimalist music
Shortly after arriving in New York City in March 1967, Glass attended a performance of works by Steve Reich (including the ground-breaking minimalist piece Piano Phase), 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 in with fellow ex-students Steve Reich, 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 became Serra's regular studio assistant..

Between summer of 1967 and the end of 1968, Glass composed nine works, including "Strung Out" (for amplified solo violin, composed in summer of 1967), Gradus (for solo saxophone, 1968), Music in the Shape of a Square (for two flutes, composed in May 1968, an homage to Erik Satie), "How Now" (for solo piano, 1968) and 1+1 (for amplified tabletop, November 1968) which were "clearly designed to experiment more fully with his new-found minimalist approach", as the musicologist Keith Potter pointed out. The first concert of Philip Glass's new music was at Jonas Mekas's Film-Makers Cinemathèque (Anthology Film Archives) in September 1968. This concert included the first work of this series with Strung Out (performed by the violinist Pixley-Rothschild) and Music in the Shape of a Square (performed by Glass and Gibson). 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 open-minded audience that 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 worked as a plumber and cab driver (in 1973 to 1978). 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, who created a now famous portrait of Glass. (Glass returned the favour in 2005 with "A Musical Portrait of Chuck Close" for piano, dedicated to the visual artist.)

With "1+1" and "Two Pages" (composed in February 1969) 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 (a kind of homage to his composition teacher Nadia Boulanger, who pointed out "hidden fifths" in his works but regarded them as cardinal sins). Eventually Glass's music grew less austere, becoming more complex and dramatic, with pieces such as Music in Similar Motion (1969), and with Music with Changing Parts (1970). 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 also met with enthusiasm from younger artists such as Brian Eno and David Bowie (at the Royal College of Art in ca. 1970). Eno described this encounter with Glass's music as his "most extraordinary musical experiences of [2] life", as a "viscous bath of pure, thick energy", concluding, "this was actually the most detailed musics I'd ever heard. It was all intricacy exotic harmonics". In 1970 Glass returned to the theatre with composing music for the theatre group Mabou Mines, resulting in his first minimalist pieces employing voices: Red Horse Animation and Music for Voices (both 1970, and premiered at the Paula Cooper Gallery).

After certain differences of opinion with Steve Reich in 1971, Glass formed the Philip Glass Ensemble (while Reich formed Steve Reich and Musicians), an amplified ensemble including keyboards, wind instruments (saxophones, flutes), and soprano voices.

Glass's music for his ensemble culminated in the four-hour-long Music in Twelve Parts (1971–1974), which began as a sole 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.last=Page 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.".

Another Look at Harmony: The Portrait Trilogy (1975–1979)

Glass continued his work on South Street with a series of instrumental works, “Another Look at Harmony” (1975–1977). For Glass this series demonstrated a new start, hence the programmatic title "Another Look at Harmony": "What I was looking for was a way of combining harmonic progression with the rhythmic structure I had been developing, to produce a new overall structure. (...) I'd taken everything out with my early works and it was now time to decide just what I wanted to put in – a process that would occupy me for several years to come." Parts 1 and 2 of "Another Look at Harmony" were included in a collaboration with Robert Wilson, a piece of musical theater that was later designated by Glass as the first opera of his portrait opera trilogy: Einstein on the Beach. Composed in Spring to fall of 1975 in close collaboration with Wilson, Glass's first opera was first premiered in summer 1976 at the Festival d'Avignon, and in November of the same year to a mixed and partly enthusiastic reaction from the audience at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. Scored for the Philip Glass Ensemble, solo violin, chorus, and featuring actors (reciting texts by Christopher Knowles, Lucinda Childs and Samuel M. Johnson), Glass's and Wilson's essentially plotless opera was conceived as a "metaphorical look at Albert Einstein: scientist, humanist, amateur musician – and the man whose theories (...) led to the splitting of the atom", evoking nuclear holocaust in the climactic scene, as critic Tim Page pointed out.

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