Philip Glass

Philip Glass was born on 31 January 1937 in Baltimore, Maryland, in the United States, into a Jewish family of Lithuanian origin. His father, Ben Glass, ran a record and radio-repair shop. When records sold badly, he took them home to find out why: young Philip thus discovered the chamber music of Beethoven, Schubert, Shostakovich and Bartók. He learned violin at six, then flute, which he studied at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore.

Very precocious, he entered the University of Chicago at fifteen, studying mathematics and philosophy while discovering Webern, Ives and jazz. In 1958 he entered the Juilliard School in New York to study composition. There he composed in a modern, dissonant style but was dissatisfied. In 1964, on a grant, he went to Paris, where for two years he studied with the famous teacher Nadia Boulanger, who drilled him relentlessly in the harmony and counterpoint of Bach and Mozart.

In Paris he was hired to transcribe the music of the Indian sitar player Ravi Shankar for a film. Working with him and the tabla player Alla Rakha, he discovered the structure of Indian music, based on rhythmic cycles that add up. It was a revelation. He then travelled to North Africa, India and the Himalayas and became passionate about Tibetan culture and Buddhism. Back in New York in 1967, he developed a new style based on short, repeated patterns that change gradually.

In 1968 he founded the Philip Glass Ensemble, a group of amplified instruments — electric keyboards, saxophones, flutes, voice — to play his music, at first in art galleries and lofts. His music was initially rejected by the traditional musical world. To make a living he worked in New York as a removal man, plumber and taxi driver until the age of forty-one. It is said that one day, while installing a dishwasher, he was recognised by an astonished art critic.

In 1976, with the director Robert Wilson, he created Einstein on the Beach, an opera of nearly five hours with no interval and no real plot, during which the audience may come and go as they please. The singers sing numbers and the names of notes. Performed in Avignon and then at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, it caused a sensation. It forms the first part of a trilogy of “portraits” of men who changed the world, with Satyagraha (1980), about Gandhi, sung in Sanskrit, and Akhnaten (1984), about the Egyptian pharaoh.

In the 1980s his music reached a very wide audience. His album Glassworks (1982) was designed to be listened to on a Walkman. He composed the score for Godfrey Reggio’s documentary Koyaanisqatsi (1982), which shows without words the relationship between humanity, nature and technology. He went on to write more than thirty film scores, including Kundun (1997), The Truman Show (1998) and The Hours (2002), which earned him several Oscar nominations. He has also collaborated with pop musicians such as David Bowie, Paul Simon and Brian Eno.

Glass is one of the most prolific composers of our time: some thirty operas, around fifteen symphonies, many concertos, string quartets and Études for piano (1991–2012), which he performs himself in concert. He dislikes the word “minimalist” and prefers to speak of “music with repetitive structures”. In 2015 he published a memoir, Words Without Music. His influence is immense, from film music to pop and electronic music.