Philip Glass Biography Quotes 3 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Philip Glass was born in 1937 in Baltimore, Maryland, and grew up in a household where listening to records was a serious activity. His father ran a small record shop and would bring home albums of all kinds, including a large amount of contemporary classical music, which gave Glass early access to sounds outside the standard repertoire. He entered the University of Chicago as a teenager, studying mathematics and philosophy while immersing himself in the city's cultural life. Drawn decisively to composition, he moved to New York to attend the Juilliard School, where teachers such as Vincent Persichetti influenced his technique and craft. Summers in Aspen brought him into contact with Darius Milhaud, whose encouragement and practical guidance were important. A Fulbright took him to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger, whose rigorous training in counterpoint, harmony, and musicianship helped form the technical backbone of his work.

Formative Encounters and Aesthetic
While in Paris, Glass worked closely with Ravi Shankar, transcribing and arranging Indian classical music for Western musicians. The encounter reshaped his sense of time and form, especially the idea of building larger spans through additive rhythmic processes. Glass often later described his own approach not as minimalism but as music with repetitive structures, a formulation shaped by what he learned from Shankar and from hearing non-Western traditions. Returning to the United States, he became part of the downtown New York avant-garde alongside peers such as Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and La Monte Young. These relationships, sometimes collaborative and sometimes competitive, were crucial to clarifying his own voice.

New York Years and the Philip Glass Ensemble
In the late 1960s Glass founded the Philip Glass Ensemble, a plugged-in group of winds and keyboards that brought his propulsive, amplified sound to lofts, galleries, and later to concert halls. Early collaborators included reed player Jon Gibson, saxophonist Richard Landry, and keyboardist Michael Riesman, who became the ensemble's longtime music director and a key interpreter. Producer and engineer Kurt Munkacsi helped shape the ensemble's distinct, brightly etched sonority in live performance and on recordings. During these years Glass supported himself with day jobs, famously driving a taxi and working as a plumber, while presenting long-form pieces such as Music in Twelve Parts. Glassworks, released in the early 1980s, introduced a broader audience to his style and demonstrated how his music could live both in concert halls and on record players at home.

Operas and Music Theater
Glass achieved international prominence with Einstein on the Beach, a groundbreaking collaboration with director Robert Wilson that premiered in 1976. Its length, structure, and hypnotic musical language challenged conventional opera and drew a new audience to experimental music theater. He followed it with Satyagraha, focused on Gandhi's South African years and set in Sanskrit, and Akhnaten, about the Egyptian pharaoh, whose vocal writing and choral tableaux cemented his reputation as a dramatic composer with a unique sense of time and ritual. Glass also co-founded the theater company Mabou Mines with JoAnne Akalaitis, Lee Breuer, Ruth Maleczech, and David Warrilow, contributing scores and creating a collaborative environment that opened further avenues for stage work. His later operatic projects broadened in subject and scale, including commissions from major opera houses and a trilogy of stage works inspired by Jean Cocteau.

Film, Theater, and Dance Collaborations
Film became another major arena. With director Godfrey Reggio, Glass created the Qatsi trilogy, beginning with Koyaanisqatsi, where image and music drive the narrative without spoken words. He worked with Paul Schrader on Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, with Errol Morris on The Thin Blue Line and A Brief History of Time, with Martin Scorsese on Kundun, and with Stephen Daldry on The Hours. He also wrote the score for Notes on a Scandal, further establishing himself as a leading voice in film music. Outside film, long relationships with choreographers such as Lucinda Childs and Twyla Tharp produced landmark dance works; Tharp's In the Upper Room, set to Glass's music, became a widely performed modern classic. His alliance with poet Allen Ginsberg led to Hydrogen Jukebox, a stage work that fused Beat texts with Glass's insistent musical pulse. Throughout these collaborations, Michael Riesman served as conductor and arranger, translating Glass's language across media, while Nonesuch Records president Bob Hurwitz and, later, Glass's own label Orange Mountain Music helped document an enormous catalog.

Concert Works and Chamber Music
Alongside theater and film, Glass steadily built a large portfolio of concert music. His symphonies and concertos were often championed by conductor Dennis Russell Davies, who commissioned and premiered numerous pieces and helped bring them into the orchestral mainstream. Symphonies drawing on the music of David Bowie and Brian Eno (the Low and Heroes symphonies) showed how Glass could bridge popular and classical idioms without diluting either. His string quartets, frequently performed by ensembles such as the Kronos Quartet, condensed his language into intimate, singing lines and pulsing accompaniments. As a pianist, Glass became an articulate advocate for his own work, touring widely and recording signature pieces such as the Etudes and Metamorphosis. Chamber works like Company and film-derived suites sustained an active recital presence for performers across instruments.

Working Method, Influence, and Legacy
Glass's method relies on clarity of materials, additive processes, and a finely calibrated sense of harmonic pacing. Rather than thematic development in the 19th-century mold, his music evolves through shifts in rhythm, register, and accent, creating large arcs from small, repeating cells. Earlier critics sometimes labeled this approach minimalist; Glass disputed the label, yet his music helped define a movement that also includes the work of Reich and Riley. Over decades he absorbed techniques from non-Western forms while remaining rooted in Western counterpoint absorbed from Boulanger. The result is a vocabulary instantly recognizable yet adaptable to theater, dance, film, and the concert hall. His impact on younger composers and on artists well beyond classical music has been substantial, heard in collaborations and in the way mainstream audiences have embraced once-marginal experimental ideas.

Personal Commitments and Later Recognition
Glass has long supported Tibetan cultural causes and has organized benefit concerts for Tibet House US, connecting his public presence to advocacy. He received widespread institutional recognition as his career matured, including multiple Academy Award nominations for film scores and, later, the Kennedy Center Honors, reflecting both popular reach and artistic achievement. Even as orchestras, opera companies, and dance troupes around the world programmed his music, he continued to tour, often in intimate settings, playing his piano works and speaking about his teachers, especially Nadia Boulanger and Ravi Shankar, whose influence he frequently acknowledges.

Continuity and Ongoing Work
Well into the 21st century, Glass remained active, revisiting earlier operas with new productions and issuing fresh recordings through Orange Mountain Music. Collaborators old and new continued to energize his projects: Michael Riesman in the studio and on the podium; stage director Robert Wilson and choreographer Lucinda Childs in ongoing revivals; conductors such as Dennis Russell Davies in the symphonic sphere; and ensembles like Kronos Quartet on the chamber side. Through these relationships, and through a lifelong habit of composing daily, Philip Glass built a body of work that is both personal and public, one that reshaped expectations about musical time and theatrical form while keeping listeners engaged by the directness of its sound. His memoir, Words Without Music, offers his own account of those relationships and the evolutions of a career that began in small New York spaces and grew to encompass opera houses, film studios, and concert stages around the world.

Our collection contains 3 quotes who is written by Philip, under the main topics: Music - Equality - Change.

Other people realated to Philip: Twyla Tharp (Dancer), Laurie Anderson (Musician), Christopher Hampton (Playwright), Gavin Bryars (Composer), Errol Morris (Director), Michael Nyman (Composer), Yo-Yo Ma (Musician), Donal Henahan (American), Chuck Close (Artist), Robert Ashley (Composer)