Philip Glass

Composer

• Born: January 31, 1937
• Place of Birth: Baltimore, Maryland

MUSICIAN AND COMPOSER

Glass, a founder of minimalism in music, wrote in a motoric, repetitive style for stage and film.

AREAS OF ACHIEVEMENT: Music; theater

Early Life

Philip Glass was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on January 31, 1937. At age six he began studying violin, and two years later he studied flute at the Peabody Conservatory. He began composing at age twelve. Entering the University of Chicago when he was fifteen, he graduated in 1956. There he studied piano and was introduced to the twelve-tone technique of Arnold Schoenberg; after composing in that style, he abandoned it before graduating.

Glass took extension courses in 1956 and 1957 at the Juilliard School of Music in New York. After a stint in Baltimore to earn money back, he enrolled full-time at Juilliard, where he studied with William Bergsma and Vincent Persichetti, graduating with a master’s degree in composition in 1961. He also studied analysis with Darius Milhaud at Aspen in 1960.

His earliest compositions were in the tonal vein of the American Symphonist school; most were performed at Juilliard and several were published. He also wrote music for the dance department, which anticipated his later work for the theater. On a Ford Foundation grant, he spent 1961 to 1963 composing music for ensembles selected from the Pittsburgh public schools.

Life’s Work

Glass then went to Paris in 1964 on a Fulbright scholarship to study with the renowned teacher Nadia Boulanger. He was not impressed by the modern school of composition in Paris at the time, headed by Pierre Boulez. He composed little, using the time, as he has said, to reeducate himself in music. The turning point in his development came while in Paris when he was hired by a filmmaker to transcribe for Western musicians Indian musician Ravi Shankar’s score for the film Chappaqua (1966). In the process he discovered the cyclic structures and additive processes of Indian classical music such as the raga.

His new style emerged in the music he wrote as theater pieces for the Mabou Mines troupe in 1965. Employing spare ensembles, these works have instrumental lines that repeat short melodic segments and are divided into repeated modules.

Following years were spent wandering in North Africa and India before Glass returned to New York in 1967. There, on March 18, he heard a recital of the music of fellow composer Steve Reich at the Park Place Gallery. The two began performing in each other’s ensembles and analyzing each other’s compositions.

The earliest pieces Glass composed beginning in 1967—Strung Out, Music in the Shape of a Square, and In Again Out Again—culminate in One Plus One, his first fully additive composition, which shows the influence of Indian music gained by studying with Alla Rakha, Shankar’s tabla player, who was then living in New York. These early pieces were scored for small numbers of players; One Plus One is performed by just hands rapping on a tabletop, with an attached microphone.

Until the late 1970s Glass wrote all his compositions for performance by the Philip Glass Ensemble. Most performances were held in lofts, studios, galleries, nightclubs, restaurants, and museums in New York. His first traditional concert-hall performance was at Town Hall in 1974.

During these years Glass developed his characteristic style. The works can be considered minimalist in the sense that they use small ensembles of instruments and voices and that they develop out of the repetition of small fragments or phrases of diatonic notes, arpeggios, or melodic phrases, which are repeated in motoric, mechanical rhythms. Amplified keyboards and woodwinds are the core of his ensembles, which occasionally add specific singers or instruments. The titles of some compositions suggest their minimal nature: Two Pages (1968), Music in Contrary Motion (1969), Music in Fifths (1969), and Music in Similar Motion (1969). As well as minimalist, his style might be called additive or process music. Glass preferred to say he wrote music with repetitive structures. The resulting cycles of pulsating rhythms often seem to be closer to rock music than to classical symphonic music.

Glass collaborated extensively with artists and theatrical groups, which called attention to the connections that musical minimalism had with the minimal aesthetic in other arts. Although based on “minimal” elements, a work such as Music in Twelve Parts (1974) is large-scale, with several instruments, dense and complex textures, and great length—up to four hours.

Glass’s collaboration with the theater director Robert M. Wilson on the five-hour stage work Einstein on the Beach, which premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in 1976, brought Glass to world prominence. Instead of having a narrative plot, the multimedia work (often called an opera) incorporates dance, film, monologues, costumed actors, lighting effects, and stage design in a series of visions, images, or icons, drawn from Einstein’s life, such as his violin, or twentieth century science, such as a spaceship. The libretto is composed of numbers, the solfège syllables, notebook jottings, and monologues.

Following Einstein on the Beach, Glass became primarily a composer for theater, dance, and film. Satyagraha (1980) presents a biography of Mahatma Gandhi, mixing elements of narrative, fairy tale, and comic book. More traditional is Akhnaten (1984), about the pharaoh who introduced monotheism.

Glass was soon one of the most recognizable and commercially successful American composers. His output included over twenty operas, eight symphonies, numerous concertos, and solo piano works. His many collaborations brought him an ever-ever wider audience and proved his versatility; some of his more notable projects included works with dancers, such as Twyla Tharp and Lucinda Childs; pop singers, including Paul Simon and David Byrne; and writers, including Allen Ginsberg and Doris Lessing. He scored many films, notably an experimental trilogy directed by Godfrey Reggio consisting of Koyaanisqatsi (1982), Powaqqatsi (1988), and Naqoyatsi (2002). These films used Glass's soundtrack in place of any conventional dialogue or narration to explore the interconnections and disjunctions between the natural world, humankind, and technology as portrayed by a variety of images, mainly using time-lapse or slow motion cinematography. Somewhat more conventional film scores were produced for Errol Morris's groundbreaking documentary The Thin Blue Line (1988), Martin Scorsese's Kundun (1997), and Stephen Daldry's The Hours (2002).

The late 1990s and early twenty-first century also saw Glass continue to develop styles outside of his well-known minimalism, including romantic and lyrical works. Some of his later works included the opera In the Penal Colony (2000), Piano Concerto No. 2: After Lewis and Clark (2004), Songs and Poems for Solo Cello (2005–07), the opera Appomattox (2007), Symphony No. 10 (2012), the piano piece Two Movements for Four Pianos (2013), and Symphony No. 11 (2017). His twelfth symphony was premiered by the Los Angeles Philharmonic at Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2019. His music was also reused in different contexts, including soundtracks for video games, television shows, film trailers, and films. His composition "Confrontation and Rescue" was used in the popular television series Stranger Things (2016-2025). In addition to his music, Glass wrote a memoir titled Words Without Music in 2015.

Significance

Glass developed early in his career a distinct repetitive, additive style of music that became a signature of musical minimalism. This style, sometimes reviled because of its simplicity, lends itself as accompaniment or background music for theater and stage works, and as a result Glass has become one of the most prolific American composers, collaborating on works for theater, for film, and with pop musicians.

Bibliography

Cummings, Robert. "Philip Glass: Biography." AllMusic. AllMusic, 2016. Web. 22 Mar. 2016.

Glass, Philip. Music by Philip Glass. Edited by Robert T. Jones. New York: Harper & Row, 1987. Print.

Kostelanetz, Richard, ed. Writings on Glass: Essays, Interviews, Criticism. New York: Schirmer, 1997. Print.

Mertens, Wim. American Minimal Music: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass. New York: Alexander Broude, 1983. Print.

"Philip Glass Biography." Philip Glass. Dunvagen Music, 2015. Web. 22 Mar. 2016.

Potter, Keith. Four Musical Minimalists. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Print.

Schwarz, K. Robert. Minimalists. London: Phaidon, 1996. Print.

Strickland, Edward. Minimalism: Origins. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993. Print. Wagner, Emma. "Classical Music Heard in Stranger Things 4." New York Public Radio, 15 July 2022, www.wqxr.org/story/classical-music-stranger-things-4/. Accessed 27 Sept. 2024.