Born in Baltimore on January 31st, 1937, Philip Glass discovered music in his father's radio repair shop. In addition to servicing radios, Ben Glass carried a line of records and, when certain ones sold poorly, he would take them home and play them for his three children, trying to discover why they didn't appeal to customers. These happened to be recordings of the great chamber works, and the future composer rapidly became familiar with Beethoven quartets, Schubert sonatas, Shostakovich symphonies and other music then considered "offbeat." It was not until he was in his upper teens did Glass begin to encounter more "standard" classics.
Glass began the violin at six and became serious about music when he took up the flute at eight. But by the time he was 15, he had become frustrated with the limited flute repertory as well as with musical life in post-war Baltimore. During his second year in high school, he applied for admission to the University of Chicago, passed and, with his parents' encouragement, moved to Chicago where he supported himself with part-time jobs waiting tables and loading airplanes at airports. He majored in mathematics and philosophy, and in off-hours practiced piano and concentrated on such composers as Ives and Webern.
At 19, Glass graduated from the University of Chicago and, determined to become a composer, moved to New York and the Juilliard School. By then he had abandoned the 12-tone techniques he had been using in Chicago and preferred American composers like Aaron Copland and William Schuman.
By the time he was 23, Glass had studied with Vincent Persichetti, Darius Milhaud and William Bergsma. He had rejected serialism and preferred such maverick composers as Harry Partch, Ives, Moondog, Henry Cowell, and Virgil Thomson, but he still had not found his own voice. Still searching, he moved to Paris and had two years of intensive study under Nadia Boulanger.
In Paris, he was hired by a filmmaker to transcribe the Indian music of Ravi Shankar into notation readable by French musicians and, in the process, discovered the techniques of Indian music. Glass promptly renounced his previous music and, after researching music in North Africa, India and the Himalayas, returned to New York and began applying eastern techniques to his own work.
By 1974, he had composed a large collection of new music, much of it for use by the theater company Mabou Mines (Glass was one of the co-founders of that company), and most of it composed for his own performing group, the Philip Glass Ensemble. This period culminated in Music in 12 Parts, a 4-hour summation of Glass' new music, and reached their apogee in 1976 with Philip Glass / Robert Wilson opera Einstein on the Beach, the 4 1/2-hour epic now seen as a landmark in 20th century music-theater.
Glass's output since Einstein has ranged from opera (Satyagraha, Akhnaten, The Making of the Representative for Planet 8, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Juniper Tree, Hydrogen Jukebox) to film scores (Koyaanisqatsi, Mishima, The Thin Blue Line, Powaqqatsi, A Brief History of Time, Candyman) to symphonic works (The Light, Itaipu, The Violin Concerto, "Low" Symphony) to string quartets (Nos. 2 - 5) recorded by the Kronos Quartet. He has created music for dance (A Descent into the Maelstrom for Molissa Fenley, In the Upper Room for Twyla Tharp) and such unclassifiable theater pieces as The Photographer, 1000 Airplanes on the Roof and The Mysteries And What's So Funny?.
Among his recently completed works are The Witches of Venice, a ballet created by Beni Motressor and commissioned by Teatro alla Scala; The Voyage, commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera; Orphée, a chamber opera based on the film by Jean Cocteau, La Belle et la Bête based on a Jean Cocteau film of the same title and the third and final piece in his Cocteau trilogy, a dance/theater work, with choreographer Susan Marshall, based on the film Les Enfants Terribles; Symphony No. 2, commissioned by the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra; Symphony No. 3, premiered by the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra; The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five with author Doris Lessing; Songs of Milarepa for baritone and orchestra; "Heroes" Symphony, written for choreographer Twyla Tharp and based on the music of David Bowie and Brian Eno; and a film score for the movie Kundun, directed by Martin Scorsese, for which he received both a Golden Globe Nomination as well as an Academy Award Nomimation for Best Score. Current projects include two collaborations with Robert Wilson, Monsters of Grace and White Raven.
In February, 1999, Philip Glass won the Golden Globe Award for Best Score for the movie The Truman Show.
Philip Glass was made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 1995 and has been awarded honorary degrees from Brandeis University, The University of the Arts in Philadelphia and The State University of New York in Buffalo.
GlassPages - Philip Glass on the Web
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