Philip Glass
The Rioting Minimalist
Philip Glass was born January 31st in 1937, the sons of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania, Ida and Benjamin Charles Glass. His mother Ida was extremely active in helping Holocaust refugees find jobs, learn English and develop work skills. His sister, Sheppie, continued her mother’s work in her own career with the International Rescue Committee. Glass learned music appreciation from his father, who owned a record store and whose family included many musicians (incidentally, Ira Glass of the NPR show This American Life is his cousin.)
Benjamin Glass was well known in Baltimore as a dealer of new music, sometimes converting customers by letting them take records home to listen first, which they could return if they didn’t like. Piecing together his own record collection from his father’s unsold wares, Glass was heavily into Hindemith, Barktok, Schoenberg, Shostakovich and Schubert. In his early years he studied flute at Peabody Institute’s conservatory, mathematics and philosophy at University of Chicago and keyboard at Julliard. He won the BMI Foundation’s BMI Student Composer Award in 1959, and a Fulbright Scholarship in 1964 to go to Paris. He studied under conductor Nadia Boulanger, especially Bach and Mozart. Philip Glass, in an interview with Terry Gross, said this about Boulanger’s “Black Thursday Class” which would meet on the third Thursday of every month, “We were convinced she took three of her best students and three of her worst students and put them together in one class. And the trouble was we could never figure out who was who. We all thought we were the worst ones.”
Benjamin Glass was well known in Baltimore as a dealer of new music, sometimes converting customers by letting them take records home to listen first, which they could return if they didn’t like. Piecing together his own record collection from his father’s unsold wares, Glass was heavily into Hindemith, Barktok, Schoenberg, Shostakovich and Schubert. In his early years he studied flute at Peabody Institute’s conservatory, mathematics and philosophy at University of Chicago and keyboard at Julliard. He won the BMI Foundation’s BMI Student Composer Award in 1959, and a Fulbright Scholarship in 1964 to go to Paris. He studied under conductor Nadia Boulanger, especially Bach and Mozart. Philip Glass, in an interview with Terry Gross, said this about Boulanger’s “Black Thursday Class” which would meet on the third Thursday of every month, “We were convinced she took three of her best students and three of her worst students and put them together in one class. And the trouble was we could never figure out who was who. We all thought we were the worst ones.”
The composer was reportedly unimpressed with the new music scene in Paris, except for John Cage and Morton Feldman. He drew much of his inspiration from new films and theatre productions. It was also during his two years in Paris that he met and worked with and sitar musician Ravi Shankar. This started a lifelong love affair with Asian and Middle Eastern cultures. (Eventually, Glass went on to convert to Tibetan Buddhism).
Returning to New York in 1967, Glass worked as a cab driver and plumber to make ends meet. This was also the year he formed the avante-garde Philip Glass Ensemble. His work in the 70’s met with such mixed acclaim that he later told NPR in an interview that audience members threw things at him while he was performing. “If they threw an egg, that wasn't so bad, because the eggs would just break. There was no danger from egg throwing, unless they boiled the eggs first, which they sometimes did." In the same interview, he described punching an audience member, “This was in Amsterdam and I played a piece called "Two Pages." And I guess it could drive you crazy a little bit — it only had five notes in it, but it was five notes in a lot of different ways, and I thought it was interesting. This was about 1971 and the idea of music that was so, let's say, consciously or steadfastly repetitive was not so common then. And someone jumped on the stage and began banging on the piano and, without thinking about it, I stood up and I punched him on the jaw or something, just like the comic books, and he fell off the stage.”
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He wrote Einstein on the Beach with director Robert Wilson in 1976, to major acclaim. Later operas include Satyagraha (about Mahatma Gandhi) and Akhnaten (about the famously monotheistic Egyptian Pharaoh of the same name) Orphée and La Belle et la Bête (both based on films by Jean Cocteau), and the Fall of the House of Usher (based on the story by Edgar Allen Poe). His albums feature David Byrne (frontman for Talking Heads), Paul Simon, Linda Rhonstadt and the Kronos Quartet. Performance collaborators include Patti Smith, Alan Ginsberg, Twyla Tharp, and Doris Lessing. He’s written scores for many movies including Koyaanisqatsi (1982), The Truman Show (1998), Secret Window (2002), The Hours (2002), Notes on a Scandal (2006), The Illusionist (2006) and Fantastic Four (2015). However, Glass has written an impressive number of symphonic and chamber works, including nine symphonies, five string quartets, two violin concertos and two piano concertos.
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Philip Glass and Robert Wilson by Robert Mapplethorpe
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On September 2016, President Barack Obama presented Glass with a National Medal of Arts, describing him as “one of the most prolific, inventive, and influential artists of our time”. In an interview with Bryce Dressner for Interview magazine, Glass had this to say about his breadth of projects, “I think you'd be surprised to know how little I think about these things. I kind of do what's in front of me, and I try to keep what's in front of me interesting. And the other thing I do—and this is actually very conscious—is that I shift between mediums very frequently. Instead of taking a break from writing, I just write in a different medium or in a different way or for a different purpose, so that I don't actually stop writing—I just go to something else.” |
