Philip Glass, along with Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and La Monte Young, was born in Baltimore in 1937 and was a key figure in the 1960s minimalism movement. At the age of six, he began violin lessons and at the age of eight, he began flute lessons. His first compositions were written when he was 12 years old, and he enrolled at the University of Chicago at the age of 15, graduating in 1956 at the age of 19. He dabbled in 12-note composition, but by the time he graduated, he’d given up and gone to the Juilliard School to take extension courses.
After working as a crane operator for a steel company to pay for his tuition, he returned to Juilliard to study composition, receiving a diploma in 1959 and a master’s degree in 1961, studying with Bergsma and Perischetti and then attending Milhaud’s summer course in Aspen. He experimented with a wide range of musical genres, scored music for dance, and studied film scoring while at Juilliard, laying the groundwork for a wide range of his later work.
Glass received a Ford Foundation Grant and then a Fulbright, allowing him to spend two years in Paris studying with Nadia Boulanger. He was hired to describe some of sitar player Ravi Shankar’s music while in Paris, and Indian music became a major influence on him. Glass traveled in North Africa and India before returning to New York in 1967, and when he did, he and Reich began performing in each other’s ensembles and analyzing each other’s work.
Glass established the Philip Glass Ensemble, for whom he wrote most of his work and who were the sole performers of most of his work, as his musical style developed. In 1976, he debuted his later style, dubbed “maximalism,” with his opera Einstein on the Beach, which was primarily focused on music for dance, film, and theater, rather than concert performance.
Satyagraha, a 1980 opera about Gandhi, and Akhnaten, a 1984 opera about the monotheistic Egyptian pharaoh, followed. Glass continued to work with a variety of collaborators in other mediums, including film scores for Hamburger Hill and The Truman Show, as well as Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance, Godfrey Reggio’s first film in a trilogy that explores the relationships between and among nature, humans, and technology through the juxtaposition of music and images. Allen Ginsberg, Paul Simon, and Ravi Shankar are among the other collaborators.