Musicians - Philip Glass

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	Musicians - Philip Glass

Philip Glass (born January 31, 1937) is an American composer. His music is frequently described as minimalist, though he prefers the term theatre music. He is considered one of the most influential composers of the 20th century and is widely acknowledged as a composer who has brought art music to the public (apart from precursors such as Kurt Weill and Leonard Bernstein), in creating an accessibility not previously recognised by the broader market. Glass is extremely prolific as a composer and counts many visual artists, writers, musicians and directors among his friends, such as Richard Serra, Chuck Close, Doris Lessing, the late Allen Ginsberg, Robert Wilson, Godfrey Reggio, Ravi Shankar, David Bowie, and the conductor Dennis Russell Davies, who all collaborated with him. He is Buddhist and a strong supporter of the Tibetan cause. In 1987 he co-founded the Tibet House with Columbia University professor Robert Thurman and the actor Richard Gere.

Life and Work

Beginnings, education and influences

Glass was born in Baltimore, Maryland as the son of Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine. His father owned a record store, and his very refined record collection consisted to a large extent of unsold records, and thus Glass encountered modern music (Hindemith, Bartók, Shostakovich) and classical music, (Ludwig van Beethoven's String Quartets and Schubert's two Piano Trios), 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 16, where he studied Mathematics and Philosophy. He then went on to the Juilliard School of Music where he switched to play the keyboard primarily; his composition teachers included Vincent Persichetti and William Bergsma. In the summer of 1960 he studied with Darius Milhaud, and composed a Violin Concerto for a fellow student, Dorothy Pixley-Rothschild.

A next step was Paris, where he studied with the eminent composition teacher Nadia Boulanger from 1963 to 1965, analysing scores of Johann Sebastian Bach (The Well-Tempered Clavier), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (the Piano Concertos) and Beethoven. Glass later stated in his autobiography Music by Philip Glass (1987) that the new music performed at Pierre Boulez's Domaines Musicale concerts in Paris lacked any excitement for him (with notable exceptions of the music by John Cage and Morton Feldman), but he was deeply impressed by performances of new plays at Jean-Louis Barrault's Odéon theatre and the films of the French New Wave, by auteurs such as Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut.

After the work with Ravi Shankar in France on a film score (Chappaqua), Glass travelled, mainly for religious reasons, to north India in 1966, where he came in contact with Tibetan refugees. He became a Buddhist, and met Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, in 1972.

His distinctive style arose from his work with Ravi Shankar and his perception of rhythm in Indian music as being entirely additive. When he returned home he renounced all his earlier compositions which were written in a moderately modern style comparable to the music of Darius Milhaud, Aaron Copland and Samuel Barber, and began writing austere pieces based on additive rhythms and a sense of time influenced by Samuel Beckett, whose work he encountered when he was writing for experimental theater. The first of the early pieces in this minimalist idiom was the music for a production of Beckett's play Comédie, 1963, in 1965 for two soprano saxophones, a fourth was a string quartet (No.1, 1966). He has two children from his marriage to JoAnne Akalaitis, a theater director (m. 1965, div. 1980), Zachary (b.1969) and Juliet (b. 1971).

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Musicians - Philip Glass

Life and Work

Beginnings, education and influences

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