Glass, Philip

born Jan. 31, 1937, Baltimore, Md., U.S.

U.S. composer.

He studied mathematics and philosophy at the University of Chicago and then studied composition at the Juilliard School and with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. His later studies with the Indian sitarist Ravi Shankar in 1966 and the tabla player Alla Rakha produced a radical shift in his compositional style. He became the leading exponent of musical "minimalism," employing insistently repeated notes and chords, subtly shifting timbres, and blocklike harmonic progressions without contrapuntal voice leading. He achieved fame suddenly with the opera Einstein on the Beach (1975) and went on to write more than 20 operas, including Satyagraha (1980), Akhnaten (1984), and The Voyage (1992). His other works include many film scores, such as Koyaanisqatsi (1983) and The Thin Blue Line (1988), and the recordings Glassworks (1981) and Songs from Liquid Days (1986). He collaborated with a wide range of writers, artists, and musicians, including Robert Wilson, Allen Ginsberg, Doris Lessing, David Bowie, and Paul Simon. Glass's work appealed to fans of rock and popular music, and at the turn of the 21st century he was perhaps the world's most famous living composer.

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▪ American composer

born Jan. 31, 1937, Baltimore, Md., U.S.

 

 American composer of innovative instrumental, vocal, and operatic music.

      Glass studied flute as a boy and enrolled at age 15 at the University of Chicago, where he studied mathematics and philosophy and graduated in 1956. His interest in atonal music drew him on to study composition at the Juilliard School of Music (M.S., 1962) in New York City and then to Paris to study under Nadia Boulanger. His acquaintance there with the Indian sitarist Ravi Shankar (Shankar, Ravi) decisively affected Glass's compositional style, and he temporarily jettisoned such traditional formal qualities as harmony, tempo, and melody in his music. Instead he began creating ensemble pieces in a monotonous and repetitive style; these works consisted of a series of syncopated rhythms ingeniously contracted or extended within a stable diatonic structure. Such minimalist music, played by a small ensemble using electronically amplified keyboard and wind instruments, earned Glass a small but enthusiastic following in New York City by the late 1960s.

 Glass's opera Einstein on the Beach (1976), composed in collaboration with Robert Wilson, earned him broader acclaim; this work showed a renewed interest in classical Western harmonic elements, though his interest in startling rhythmic and melodic changes remained the work's most dramatic feature. Glass's opera Satyagraha (1980) was a more authentically “operatic” portrayal of incidents from the early life of Mohandas K. Gandhi. In this work, the dronelike repetition of symmetrical sequences of chords attained a haunting and hypnotic power well attuned to the religio-spiritual themes of the libretto, adapted from the Hindu scripture the Bhagavadgītā. The opera The Voyage (1992) had mixed reviews, but the fact that it had been commissioned by the New York Metropolitan Opera (to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus' arrival in the Americas) confirmed Glass's growing acceptance by the classical-music establishment.

 

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