Philip Glass: His life
Philip Glass was born in Baltimore, Mariland, in 1937, and began his musical studies at the age of eight. At fifteen, he entered the University of Chicago, where he majored in philosophy but continued what had become an obsessive study of music. After graduation, he went the route of many other young composers: four years at the Juilliard School in New York, and later work in Paris with the legendary pedagogue Nadia Boulanger. At the same time, Glass was exploring less conventional musical routes, working with Ravi Shankar with Allah Rakha. He acknowledges non-Western music as an important influence on his mature style.
In 1967, Glass returned to New York City, where he quickly established himself as an important figure in the blossoming downtown arts community. "When I first returned to the United States, my compositions met with great resistance," Glass recalled recently. "Foundation support was out of the question, and the established composers thought I was crazy. I had gone from writing in a gentle, neo-classical style that owed a lot to Milhaud into a whole new manner of music. The time was not right for my work."
So Glass worked as a plumber, drove a cab at night, and spent his spare time assembling an incubatory version of the Philip Glass Ensemble. The group, composed of seven musicians playing woodwinds and a variety of keyboards with amplified voices, began concertizing regularly in the early 70s, playing for free or asking for a small donation. "People would climb six flights of stairs for a concert," Glass recalls. "We'd be lucky if we attracted twenty-five people, luckier still if half of them stayed for the entire concert." Then, as now, audience response was mixed. Some listeners were all but transfigured by the whirl of hypnotic musical patterns the ensemble unleashed, while others were bored, hearing only what they perceived as mindless repetition.
But slowly, very slowly, the concerts gained a cult following, and then, this time suddenly, Einstein on the Beach, a collaboration with the austere theatrical visionary Robert Wilson, became the talk of the international musical community.
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Things were getting better. The ensemble played Carnegie Hall and sold it out, there were more engagements and more critical praise. Musical America chose Glass to be the "Musician of the Month" in April 1979. Glass collaborated with Lucinda Childs and Sol Lewitt on Dance, a multi-media event performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music later that year. He was invited to speak in establishment conservatories, such as the Manhatten School of Music. He had arrived.
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