GLASS, PHILIP

GLASS, PHILIP (1937– ), U.S. composer and performer. Born in Baltimore, Glass began to study violin at six and flute at eight. At 12, he started composing while working at his father's record shops after school. At 15, he entered the University of Chicago (where he received a B.A. in liberal arts, 1956). Later he studied composition at Juilliard with Bergsma and Persichetti (receiving a M.A. in composition, 1961). Awarded a Fulbright scholarship, he went to Paris to study for two years with Nadia Boulanger. There he made the acquaintance of Indian musician Ravi Shankar, whose music Glass adapted for the film score of Chappaqua. After leaving Paris, he traveled in North Africa and the Indian subcontinent. Non-European music became one of the sources of his own style, named repetitive music (or minimalism), which was founded by him in the 1960s together with Riley, reich , and La Monte Young. Minimalistic music is based on a short melodic formula and its numerous varied repetitions over time. In Glass's view, such music required a special type of reception: "When it becomes apparent that nothing 'happens' in the usual sense, but that, instead, the gradual accretion of musical material can and does serve as the basis of the listener's attention, then he can perhaps discover another mode of listening…. It is hoped that one would then be able to perceive the music as 'presence,' freed from dramatic structure, a pure medium of sound" (P. Glass, 1974). In the late 1960s and early 1970s Glass wrote a great number of chamber pieces and established his own Philip Glass Ensemble that had the exclusive right to perform his instrumental music. Performances at this time were held in New York lofts (Glass's in Greenwich Village, sculptor Donald Judd's in SoHo), private art galleries (those of Leo Castelli   and Paula Cooper), and museums (the Guggenheim and the Whitney). Occasionally, Glass had to work as a plumber or taxi driver in order to survive when not touring with his ensemble throughout the U.S., Canada, and Europe. However, the seminal work of this period, Music in Twelve Parts, was premiered in the traditional atmosphere of New York's Town Hall, hired by the composer himself. This opus includes 12 sections and lasts over four hours. Being the culmination of Glass's minimalism, it shows the transition to greater vertical complexity, up to traditional functional harmony in the conclusion of the piece. From the late 1970s the composer produced numerous scores for music theater, film, and dance. A great public success was Einstein on the Beach, the opera that was named a "theater of visions" because of its lack of narration. Instead of plot, there are series of dramatized icons (like Einstein's violin, or the trains symbolizing the theory of relativity). The following operas return little by little to narrative music theater (Satyagraha, 1980, on Gandhi, and Akhnaten, 1984, on the Egyptian pharaoh who introduced monotheism). Afterwards, in the second opera trilogy based on the films of Cocteau, Glass used his individual multimedia forms (for example, the film is accompanied by a new soundtrack composed by Glass). Glass also scored numerous films over the last two decades, from the wordless, visionary cinema of Godfrey Reggio, Paul Schrader's experimental Mishima, and Errol Morris's intense documentary The Thin Blue Line to Hollywood war films (Hamburger Hill) and horror films (Candyman and its sequel). His score for Kundun received an Oscar nomination, while The Truman Show won him a Golden Globe. Glass collaborated with pop singers paul simon , David Byrne, Suzanne Vega, and Laurie Anderson in the song-cycle Songs from Liquid Days. Other collaborations were with Allen Ginsberg in Hydrogen Jukebox, with Ravi Shankar in Passages, and with Doris Lessing on two science-fiction operas, The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 and The Marriages between Zones Three, Four and Five. His work influenced rock and film music as well as classical music. As an example of reciprocal influence, it is worth mentioning that Glass wrote symphonic versions of the art-rock albums Low and Heroes by David Bowie and Brian Eno, who, in turn, were influenced by Glass at the end of the 1970s. Glass became one of the best known and commercially successful composers of his generation. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: NG2; MGG2; E. Strickland, Minimalism: Origins (1993); R. Kostelanetz (ed.), Writings on Glass: Essays, Interviews, Criticism (1996, incl. writings by Glass); K.R. Schwarz, Minimalists (1996); K. Potter: Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass (2000). (Yulia Kreinin (2nd ed.)