Philip Glass

1937–1964: Beginnings, early education and influences

Glass was born in Baltimore, Maryland,^[10][11] on January 31, 1937,^[12] the son of Ida (née Gouline) and Benjamin Charles Glass.^[13] His family were Lithuanian-Jewish emigrants.^[14][15] His father owned a record store and his mother was a librarian.^[16] In his memoir, Glass recalls that at the end of World War II his mother aided Jewish Holocaust survivors, inviting recent arrivals to America to stay at their home until they could find a job and a place to live.^[17]: 14 She developed a plan to help them learn English and develop skills so they could find work.^[17]: 15 His sister, Sheppie, would later do similar work as an active member of the International Rescue Committee.^[17]: 15

Glass developed his appreciation of music from his father, discovering later his father's side of the family had many musicians. His cousin Cevia was a classical pianist, while others had been in vaudeville. He learned his family was also related to Al Jolson.^[17]: 16Glass's father often received promotional copies of new recordings at his music store. Glass spent many hours listening to them, developing his knowledge and taste in music. This openness to modern sounds affected Glass at an early age:

My father was self-taught, but he ended up having a very refined and rich knowledge of classical, chamber, and contemporary music. Typically he would come home and have dinner, and then sit in his armchair and listen to music until almost midnight. I caught on to this very early, and I would go and listen with him.^[17]: 17

The elder Glass promoted both new recordings and a wide selection of composers to his customers, sometimes convincing them to try something new by allowing them to return records they didn't like.^[17]: 17 His store soon developed a reputation as Baltimore's leading source of modern music.^[18] Glass built a sizable record collection from the unsold records in his father's store, including modern classical music such as Hindemith, Bartók, Schoenberg,^[19] Shostakovich and Western classical music including Beethoven's string quartets and Schubert's B♭ Piano Trio. Glass cites Schubert's work as a "big influence" growing up.^[20] In a 2011 interview, Glass stated that Franz Schubert—with whom he shares a birthday—is his favorite composer.^[21]

He studied the flute as a child at the Peabody Preparatory of the Peabody Institute of Music. At the age of 15, he entered an accelerated college program at the University of Chicago where he studied mathematics and philosophy.^[22] In Chicago, he discovered the serialism of Anton Webern and composed a twelve-tone string trio.^[23] In 1954, Glass traveled to Paris, where he encountered the films of Jean Cocteau, which made a lasting impression on him. He visited artists' studios and saw their work; Glass recalls, "the bohemian life you see in [Cocteau's] Orphée was the life I ... was attracted to, and those were the people I hung out with."^[24]

Glass studied at the Juilliard School of Music where the keyboard was his main instrument. His composition teachers included Vincent Persichetti and William Bergsma. Fellow students included Steve Reich and Peter Schickele. In 1959, he was a winner in the BMI Foundation's BMI Student Composer Awards, an international prize for young composers. In the summer of 1960, he studied with Darius Milhaud at the summer school of the Aspen Music Festival and composed a violin concerto for a fellow student, Dorothy Pixley-Rothschild.^[25] After leaving Juilliard in 1962, Glass moved to Pittsburgh and worked as a school-based composer-in-residence in the public school system, composing various choral, chamber, and orchestral music.^[26]

1964–1966: Paris

Glass studied with noted music pedagogue Nadia Boulanger in Paris

In 1964, Glass received a Fulbright Scholarship; his studies in Paris with the eminent composition teacher Nadia Boulanger, from autumn of 1964 to summer of 1966, influenced his work throughout his life, as the composer admitted in 1979: "The composers I studied with Boulanger are the people I still think about most—Bach and Mozart."^[27]

Glass later stated in his autobiography Music by Philip Glass (1987) that the new music performed at Pierre Boulez's Domaine Musical concerts in Paris lacked any excitement for him (with the notable exceptions of music by John Cage and Morton Feldman), but he was deeply impressed by new films and theatre performances. His move away from modernist composers such as Boulez and Stockhausen was nuanced, rather than outright rejection: "That generation wanted disciples and as we didn't join up it was taken to mean that we hated the music, which wasn't true. We'd studied them at Juilliard and knew their music. How on earth can you reject Berio? Those early works of Stockhausen are still beautiful. But there was just no point in attempting to do their music better than they did and so we started somewhere else."^[28]

During this time, he encountered revolutionary films of the French New Wave, such as those of Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, which upended the rules set by an older generation of artists,^[29] and Glass made friends with American visual artists (the sculptor Richard Serra and his wife Nancy Graves),^[30] actors and directors (JoAnne Akalaitis, Ruth Maleczech, David Warrilow, and Lee Breuer, with whom Glass later founded the experimental theatre group Mabou Mines). Together with Akalaitis (they married in 1965), Glass in turn attended performances by theatre groups including Jean-Louis Barrault's Odéon theatre, The Living Theatre and the Berliner Ensemble in 1964 to 1965.^[31] These significant encounters resulted in a collaboration with Breuer for which Glass contributed music for a 1965 staging of Samuel Beckett's Comédie (Play, 1963). The resulting piece (written for two soprano saxophones) was directly influenced by the play's open-ended, repetitive and almost musical structure and was the first one of a series of four early pieces in a minimalist, yet still dissonant, idiom.^[23] After Play, Glass also acted in 1966 as music director of a Breuer production of Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children, featuring the theatre score by Paul Dessau.

In parallel with his early excursions in experimental theatre, Glass worked in winter 1965 and spring 1966 as a music director and composer^[32] on a film score (Chappaqua, Conrad Rooks, 1966) with Ravi Shankar and Alla Rakha, which added another important influence on Glass's musical thinking. His distinctive style arose from his work with Shankar and Rakha and their perception of rhythm in Indian music as being entirely additive. He renounced all his compositions in a moderately modern style resembling Milhaud's, Aaron Copland's, and Samuel Barber's, and began writing pieces based on repetitive structures of Indian music and a sense of time influenced by Samuel Beckett: a piece for two actresses and chamber ensemble, a work for chamber ensemble and his first numbered string quartet (No. 1, 1966).^[33]

Glass then left Paris for northern India in 1966, where he came in contact with Tibetan refugees and began to gravitate towards Buddhism. He met Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, in 1972, and has been a strong supporter of the Tibetan independence ever since.

1967–1974: Minimalism: From Strung Out to Music in 12 Parts

Shortly after arriving in New York City in March 1967, Glass attended a performance of works by Steve Reich (including the ground-breaking minimalist piece Piano Phase), which left a deep impression on him; he simplified his style and turned to a radical "consonant vocabulary".^[23] Finding little sympathy from traditional performers and performance spaces, Glass eventually formed an ensemble with fellow ex-student Jon Gibson, and others, and began performing mainly in art galleries and studio lofts of SoHo. The visual artist Richard Serra provided Glass with Gallery contacts, while both collaborated on various sculptures, films and installations; from 1971 to 1974, he was Serra's regular studio assistant.^[30][34]

Between summer of 1967 and the end of 1968, Glass composed nine works, including Strung Out (for amplified solo violin, composed in summer of 1967), Gradus (for solo saxophone, 1968), Music in the Shape of a Square (for two flutes, composed in May 1968, an homage to Erik Satie), How Now (for solo piano, 1968) and 1+1 (for amplified tabletop, November 1968) which were "clearly designed to experiment more fully with his new-found minimalist approach".^[35] The first concert of Glass's new music was at Jonas Mekas's Film-Makers Cinemathèque (Anthology Film Archives) in September 1968. This concert included the first work of this series with Strung Out (performed by the violinist Pixley-Rothschild) and Music in the Shape of a Square (performed by Glass and Gibson). The musical scores were tacked on the wall, and the performers had to move while playing. Glass's new works met with a very enthusiastic response by the audience which consisted mainly of visual and performance artists who were highly sympathetic to Glass's reductive approach.

Chuck Close's portrait of Glass in a New York City subway station

Apart from his music career, Glass had a moving company with his cousin, the sculptor Jene Highstein, and also worked as a plumber and cab driver (during 1973 to 1978). He recounts installing a dishwasher and looking up from his work to see an astonished Robert Hughes, Time magazine's art critic, staring at him.^[36] During this time, he made friends with other New York-based artists such as Sol LeWitt, Nancy Graves, Michael Snow, Bruce Nauman, Laurie Anderson, and Chuck Close (who created a now-famous portrait of Glass).^[37] (Glass returned the compliment in 2005 with A Musical Portrait of Chuck Close for piano.)

With 1+1 and Two Pages (composed in February 1969), Glass turned to a more "rigorous approach" to his "most basic minimalist technique, additive process",^[38] pieces which were followed in the same year by Music in Contrary Motion and Music in Fifths (a kind of homage to his composition teacher Nadia Boulanger, who pointed out "hidden fifths" in his works but regarded them as cardinal sins). Eventually Glass's music grew less austere, becoming more complex and dramatic, with pieces such as Music in Similar Motion (1969), and Music with Changing Parts (1970). These pieces were performed by the Philip Glass Ensemble in the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1969 and in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1970, often encountering hostile reaction from critics,^[23] but Glass's music was also met with enthusiasm from younger artists such as Brian Eno and David Bowie (at the Royal College of Art ca. 1970).^[39] Eno described this encounter with Glass's music as one of the "most extraordinary musical experiences of [his] life", as a "viscous bath of pure, thick energy", concluding "this was actually the most detailed music I'd ever heard. It was all intricacy, exotic harmonics".^[40] In 1970, Glass returned to the theatre, composing music for the theatre group Mabou Mines, resulting in his first minimalist pieces employing voices: Red Horse Animation and Music for Voices (both 1970, and premiered at the Paula Cooper Gallery).^[41]

After differences of opinion with Steve Reich in 1971,^[23] Glass formed the Philip Glass Ensemble (while Reich formed Steve Reich and Musicians), an amplified ensemble including keyboards, wind instruments (saxophones, flutes), and soprano voices.

Glass's music for his ensemble culminated in the four-hour-long Music in Twelve Parts (1971–1974), which began as a single piece with twelve instrumental parts but developed into a cycle that summed up Glass's musical achievement since 1967, and even transcended it—the last part features a twelve-tone theme, sung by the soprano voice of the ensemble. "I had broken the rules of modernism and so I thought it was time to break some of my own rules", according to Glass.^[42] Though he finds the term minimalist inaccurate to describe his later work, Glass does accept this term for pieces up to and including Music in 12 Parts, excepting this last part which "was the end of minimalism" for Glass. As he pointed out: "I had worked for eight or nine years inventing a system, and now I'd written through it and come out the other end."^[42] He now prefers to describe himself as a composer of "music with repetitive structures".^[22]

1975–1979: Another Look at Harmony: The Portrait Trilogy

A scene from a 2017 rehearsal of Glass's opera Einstein on the Beach (1975) in Dortmund

Glass continued his work with a series of instrumental works, called Another Look at Harmony (1975–1977). For Glass, this series demonstrated a new start, hence the title: "What I was looking for was a way of combining harmonic progression with the rhythmic structure I had been developing, to produce a new overall structure. ... I'd taken everything out with my early works and it was now time to decide just what I wanted to put in—a process that would occupy me for several years to come."^[42]

Parts 1 and 2 of Another Look at Harmony were included in a collaboration with Robert Wilson, a piece of musical theater later designated by Glass as the first opera of his portrait opera trilogy: Einstein on the Beach. Composed in spring to fall of 1975 in close collaboration with Wilson, Glass's first opera was first premiered in summer 1976 at the Festival d'Avignon, and in November of the same year to a mixed and partly enthusiastic reaction from the audience at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. Scored for the Philip Glass Ensemble, solo violin, chorus, and featuring actors (reciting texts by Christopher Knowles, Lucinda Childs and Samuel M. Johnson), Glass's and Wilson's essentially plotless opera was conceived as a "metaphorical look at Albert Einstein: scientist, humanist, amateur musician—and the man whose theories ... led to the splitting of the atom", evoking nuclear holocaust in the climactic scene, as critic Tim Page pointed out.^[43] As with Another Look at Harmony, "Einstein added a new functional harmony that set it apart from the early conceptual works".^[43] Composer Tom Johnson came to the same conclusion, comparing the solo violin music to Johann Sebastian Bach, and the "organ figures ... to those Alberti basses Mozart loved so much".^[44] The piece was praised by The Washington Post as "one of the seminal artworks of the century".

Einstein on the Beach was followed by further music for projects by the theatre group Mabou Mines such as Dressed like an Egg (1975), and again music for plays and adaptations from prose by Samuel Beckett, such as The Lost Ones (1975), Cascando (1975), Mercier and Camier (1979). Glass also turned to other media; two multi-movement instrumental works for the Philip Glass Ensemble originated as music for film and TV: North Star (1977 score for the documentary North Star: Mark di Suvero by François de Menil and Barbara Rose) and four short cues for the children's TV series Sesame Street named Geometry of Circles (1979).

Another series, Fourth Series (1977–79), included music for chorus and organ ("Part One", 1977), organ and piano ("Part Two" and "Part Four", 1979), and music for a radio adaption of Constance DeJong's novel Modern Love ("Part Three", 1978). "Part Two" and "Part Four" were used (and hence renamed) in two dance productions by choreographer Lucinda Childs (who had already contributed to and performed in Einstein on the Beach). "Part Two" was included in Dance (a collaboration with visual artist Sol LeWitt, 1979), and "Part Four" was renamed as Mad Rush, and performed by Glass on several occasions such as the first public appearance of the 14th Dalai Lama in New York City in fall 1981. The piece demonstrates Glass's turn to more traditional models: the composer added a conclusion to an open-structured piece which "can be interpreted as a sign that he [had] abandoned the radical non-narrative, undramatic approaches of his early period", as the pianist Steffen Schleiermacher points out.^[45]

In spring 1978, Glass received a commission from the Netherlands Opera (as well as a Rockefeller Foundation grant) which "marked the end of his need to earn money from non-musical employment".^[46] With the commission Glass continued his work in music theater, composing his opera Satyagraha (composed in 1978–1979, premiered in 1980 at Rotterdam), based on the early life of Mahatma Gandhi in South Africa, Leo Tolstoy, Rabindranath Tagore, and Martin Luther King Jr. For Satyagraha, Glass worked in close collaboration with two "SoHo friends": the writer Constance deJong, who provided the libretto, and the set designer Robert Israel. This piece was in other ways a turning point for Glass, as it was his first work since 1963 scored for symphony orchestra, even if the most prominent parts were still reserved for solo voices and chorus. Shortly after completing the score in August 1979, Glass met the conductor Dennis Russell Davies, whom he helped prepare for performances in Germany (using a piano-four-hands version of the score); together they started to plan another opera, to be premiered at the Stuttgart State Opera.^[29]

1980–1986: Completing the Portrait Trilogy: Akhnaten and beyond

A scene from a 2017 performance of Glass's opera Satyagraha (1978–79) in Berlin

While planning a third part of his "Portrait Trilogy", Glass turned to smaller music theatre projects such as the non-narrative Madrigal Opera (for six voices and violin and viola, 1980), and The Photographer, a biographic study on the photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1982). Glass also continued to write for the orchestra with the score of Koyaanisqatsi (Godfrey Reggio, 1981–1982). Some pieces which were not used in the film (such as Façades) eventually appeared on the album Glassworks (1982, CBS Records), which brought Glass's music to a wider public.

The "Portrait Trilogy" was completed with Akhnaten (1982–1983, premiered in 1984), a vocal and orchestral composition sung in Akkadian, Biblical Hebrew, and Ancient Egyptian. In addition, this opera featured an actor reciting ancient Egyptian texts in the language of the audience. Akhnaten was commissioned by the Stuttgart Opera in a production designed by Achim Freyer. It premiered simultaneously at the Houston Opera in a production directed by David Freeman and designed by Peter Sellars. At the time of the commission, the Stuttgart Opera House was undergoing renovation, necessitating the use of a nearby playhouse with a smaller orchestra pit. Upon learning this, Glass and conductor Dennis Russell Davies visited the playhouse, placing music stands around the pit to determine how many players the pit could accommodate. The two found they could not fit a full orchestra in the pit. Glass decided to eliminate the violins, which had the effect of "giving the orchestra a low, dark sound that came to characterize the piece and suited the subject very well".^[29] As Glass remarked in 1992, Akhnaten is significant in his work since it represents a "first extension out of a triadic harmonic language", an experiment with the polytonality of his teachers Persichetti and Milhaud, a musical technique which Glass compares to "an optical illusion, such as in the paintings of Josef Albers".^[47]

Glass again collaborated with Robert Wilson on another opera, the CIVIL warS (1983, premiered in 1984), which also functioned as the final part (the Rome section) of Wilson's epic work by the same name, originally planned for an "international arts festival that would accompany the Olympic Games in Los Angeles".^[48] (Glass also composed a prestigious work for chorus and orchestra for the opening of the Games, The Olympian: Lighting of the Torch and Closing ). The premiere of The CIVIL warS in Los Angeles never materialized and the opera was in the end premiered at the Opera of Rome. Glass's and Wilson's opera includes musical settings of Latin texts by the 1st-century-Roman playwright Seneca and allusions to the music of Giuseppe Verdi and from the American Civil War, featuring the 19th century figures Giuseppe Garibaldi and Robert E. Lee as characters.

In the mid-1980s, Glass produced "works in different media at an extraordinarily rapid pace".^[49] Projects from that period include music for dance (Glass Pieces choreographed for New York City Ballet by Jerome Robbins in 1983 to a score drawn from existing Glass compositions created for other media including an excerpt from Akhnaten; and In the Upper Room, Twyla Tharp, 1986), music for theatre productions Endgame (1984) and Company (1983). Beckett vehemently disapproved of the production of Endgame at the American Repertory Theater (Cambridge, Massachusetts), which featured JoAnne Akalaitis's direction and Glass's Prelude for timpani and double bass, but in the end, he authorized the music for Company, four short, intimate pieces for string quartet that were played in the intervals of the dramatization. This composition was initially regarded by the composer as a piece of Gebrauchsmusik ('music for use')—"like salt and pepper ... just something for the table", as he noted.^[50] Eventually Company was published as Glass's String Quartet No. 2 and in a version for string orchestra, being performed by ensembles ranging from student orchestras to renowned formations such as the Kronos Quartet and the Kremerata Baltica.

This interest in writing for the string quartet and the string orchestra led to a chamber and orchestral film score for Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (Paul Schrader, 1984–85), which Glass recently described as his "musical turning point" that developed his "technique of film scoring in a very special way".^[51]

Glass also dedicated himself to vocal works with two sets of songs, Three Songs for chorus (1984, settings of poems by Leonard Cohen, Octavio Paz and Raymond Lévesque), and a song cycle initiated by CBS Masterworks Records: Songs from Liquid Days (1985), with texts by songwriters such as David Byrne, Paul Simon, in which the Kronos Quartet is featured (as it is in Mishima) in a prominent role. Glass also continued his series of operas with adaptations from literary texts such as The Juniper Tree (an opera collaboration with composer Robert Moran, 1984), Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher (1987), and also worked with novelist Doris Lessing on the opera The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (1985–86, and performed by the Houston Grand Opera and English National Opera in 1988).

1987–1991: Operas and the turn to symphonic music

Compositions such as Company, Facades and String Quartet No. 3 (the last two extracted from the scores to Koyaanisqatsi and Mishima) gave way to a series of works more accessible to ensembles such as the string quartet and symphony orchestra, in this returning to the structural roots of his student days. In taking this direction his chamber and orchestral works were also written in a more and more traditional and lyrical style. In these works, Glass often employs old musical forms such as the chaconne and the passacaglia—for instance in Satyagraha,^[23] the Violin Concerto No. 1 (1987), Symphony No. 3 (1995), Echorus (1995) and also recent works such as Symphony No. 8 (2005),^[52] and Songs and Poems for Solo Cello (2006).

A series of orchestral works originally composed for the concert hall commenced with the three-movement Violin Concerto No. 1 (1987). This work was commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra and written for and in close collaboration with the violinist Paul Zukofsky and the conductor Dennis Russel Davies, who since then has encouraged the composer to write numerous orchestral pieces. The Concerto is dedicated to the memory of Glass's father: "His favorite form was the violin concerto, and so I grew up listening to the Mendelssohn, the Paganini, the Brahms concertos. ... So when I decided to write a violin concerto, I wanted to write one that my father would have liked."^[53] Among its multiple recordings, in 1992, the Concerto was performed and recorded by Gidon Kremer and the Vienna Philharmonic. This turn to orchestral music was continued with a symphonic trilogy of "portraits of nature", commissioned by the Cleveland Orchestra, the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra: The Light (1987), The Canyon (1988), and Itaipu (1989).

While composing for symphonic ensembles, Glass also composed music for piano, with the cycle of five movements titled Metamorphosis (adapted from music for a theatrical adaptation of Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis), and for the Errol Morris film The Thin Blue Line, 1988. In the same year Glass met the poet Allen Ginsberg by chance in a book store in the East Village of New York City, and they immediately "decided on the spot to do something together, reached for one of Allen's books and chose Wichita Vortex Sutra",^[54] a piece for reciter and piano which in turn developed into a music theatre piece for singers and ensemble, Hydrogen Jukebox (1990).

Glass also returned to chamber music; he composed two String Quartets (No. 4 Buczak in 1989 and No. 5 in 1991), and chamber works which originated as incidental music for plays, such as Music from "The Screens" (1989/1990). This work originated in one of many theater music collaborations with the director JoAnne Akalaitis, who originally asked the Gambian musician Foday Musa Suso "to do the score [for Jean Genet's The Screens] in collaboration with a western composer".^[55] Glass had already collaborated with Suso in the film score to Powaqqatsi (Godfrey Reggio, 1988). Music from "The Screens" is on occasion a touring piece for Glass and Suso (one set of tours also included percussionist Yousif Sheronick ), and individual pieces found their way into the repertoire of Glass and the cellist Wendy Sutter. Another collaboration was a collaborative recording project with Ravi Shankar, initiated by Peter Baumann (a member of the band Tangerine Dream), which resulted in the album Passages (1990).

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Glass's projects also included two highly prestigious opera commissions based on the life of explorers: The Voyage (1992), with a libretto by David Henry Hwang, was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera for the 500th anniversary of the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus; and White Raven (1991), about Vasco da Gama, a collaboration with Robert Wilson and composed for the closure of the 1998 World Fair in Lisbon. Especially in The Voyage, the composer "explore[d] new territory", with its "newly arching lyricism", "Sibelian starkness and sweep", and "dark, brooding tone ... a reflection of its increasingly chromatic (and dissonant) palette", as one commentator put it.^[23]

Glass remixed the S'Express song "Hey Music Lover", for the b-side of its 1989 release as a single.^[56]

1991–1996: Cocteau trilogy and symphonies

After these operas, Glass began working on a symphonic cycle, commissioned by the conductor Dennis Russell Davies, who told Glass at the time: "I'm not going to let you ... be one of those opera composers who never write a symphony".^[57] Glass responded with a pair of three-movement symphonies ("Low" [1992], and Symphony No. 2 [1994]); his first in an ongoing series of symphonies is a combination of the composer's own musical material with themes featured in prominent tracks of the David Bowie/Brian Eno album Low (1977),^[58] whereas Symphony No. 2 is described by Glass as a study in polytonality. He referred to the music of Honegger, Milhaud, and Villa-Lobos as possible models for his symphony.^[59] With the Concerto Grosso (1992), Symphony No. 3 (1995), a Concerto for Saxophone Quartet and Orchestra (1995), written for the Rascher Quartet (all commissioned by conductor Dennis Russel Davies), and Echorus (1994/95), a more transparent, refined, and intimate chamber-orchestral style paralleled the excursions of his large-scale symphonic pieces. In the four movements of his Third Symphony, Glass treats a 19-piece string orchestra as an extended chamber ensemble. In the third movement, Glass re-uses the chaconne as a formal device; one commentator characterized Glass's symphony as one of the composer's "most tautly unified works".^[60][61] The third Symphony was closely followed by a fourth, subtitled Heroes (1996), commissioned the American Composers Orchestra. Its six movements are symphonic reworkings of themes by Glass, David Bowie, and Brian Eno (from their album "Heroes", 1977); as in other works by the composer, it is also a hybrid work and exists in two versions: one for the concert hall, and another, shorter one for dance, choreographed by Twyla Tharp.

Glass performing in Florence in 1993

Another commission by Dennis Russell Davies was a second series for piano, the Etudes for Piano (dedicated to Davies as well as the production designer Achim Freyer); the complete first set of ten Etudes has been recorded and performed by Glass himself. Bruce Brubaker and Dennis Russell Davies have each recorded the original set of six. Most of the Etudes are composed in the post-minimalist and increasingly lyrical style of the times: "Within the framework of a concise form, Glass explores possible sonorities ranging from typically Baroque passagework to Romantically tinged moods".^[62] Some of the pieces also appeared in different versions such as in the theatre music to Robert Wilson's Persephone (1994, commissioned by the Relache Ensemble) or Echorus (a version of Etude No. 2 for two violins and string orchestra, written for Edna Mitchell and Yehudi Menuhin 1995).

Glass's prolific output in the 1990s continued to include operas with an opera triptych (1991–1996), which the composer described as an "homage" to writer and film director Jean Cocteau, based on his prose and cinematic work: Orphée (1950), La Belle et la Bête (1946), and the novel Les Enfants terribles (1929, later made into a film by Cocteau and Jean-Pierre Melville, 1950). In the same way the triptych is also a musical homage to the work of the group of French composers associated with Cocteau, Les Six (and especially to Glass's teacher Darius Milhaud), as well as to various 18th-century composers such as Gluck and Bach whose music featured as an essential part of the films by Cocteau.

The inspiration of the first part of the trilogy, Orphée (composed in 1991, and premiered in 1993 at the American Repertory Theatre) can be conceptually and musically traced to Gluck's opera Orfeo ed Euridice (Orphée et Euridyce, 1762/1774),^[23] which had a prominent part in Cocteau's 1949 film Orphee.^[63] One theme of the opera, the death of Eurydice, has some similarity to the composer's personal life: the opera was composed after the unexpected death in 1991 of Glass's wife, artist Candy Jernigan: "... One can only suspect that Orpheus' grief must have resembled the composer's own", K. Robert Schwartz suggests.^[23] The opera's "transparency of texture, a subtlety of instrumental color, ... a newly expressive and unfettered vocal writing"^[23] was praised, and The Guardian's critic remarked "Glass has a real affinity for the French text and sets the words eloquently, underpinning them with delicately patterned instrumental textures".^[64]

For the second opera, La Belle et la Bête (1994, scored for either the Philip Glass Ensemble or a more conventional chamber orchestra), Glass replaced the soundtrack (including Georges Auric's film music) of Cocteau's film, wrote "a new fully operatic score and synchronize[d] it with the film".^[24] The final part of the triptych returned again to a more traditional setting with the "Dance Opera" Les Enfants terribles (1996), scored for voices, three pianos and dancers, with choreography by Susan Marshall. The characters are depicted by both singers and dancers. The scoring of the opera evokes Bach's Concerto for Four Harpsichords, but in another way also "the snow, which falls relentlessly throughout the opera ... bearing witness to the unfolding events. Here time stands still. There is only music, and the movement of children through space" (Glass).^[65][66]

1997–2004: Symphonies, opera, and concertos

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Glass's lyrical and romantic styles peaked with a variety of projects: operas, theatre and film scores (Martin Scorsese's Kundun, 1997, Godfrey Reggio's Naqoyqatsi, 2002, and Stephen Daldry's The Hours, 2002), a series of five concerts, and three symphonies centered on orchestra-singer and orchestra-chorus interplay. Two symphonies, Symphony No. 5 "Choral" (1999) and Symphony No. 7 "Toltec" (2004), and the song cycle Songs of Milarepa (1997) have a meditative theme. The operatic Symphony No. 6 Plutonian Ode (2002) for soprano and orchestra was commissioned by the Brucknerhaus, Linz, and Carnegie Hall in celebration of Glass's sixty-fifth birthday, and developed from Glass's collaboration with Allen Ginsberg (poet, piano—Ginsberg, Glass), based on his poem of the same name.

Besides writing for the concert hall, Glass continued his ongoing operatic series with adaptions from literary texts: The Marriages of Zones 3, 4 and 5 ([1997] story-libretto by Doris Lessing), In the Penal Colony (2000, after the story by Franz Kafka), and the chamber opera The Sound of a Voice (2003, with David Henry Hwang), which features the Pipa, performed by Wu Man at its premiere. Glass also collaborated again with the co-author of Einstein on the Beach, Robert Wilson, on Monsters of Grace (1998), and created a biographic opera on the life of astronomer Galileo Galilei (2001).

In the early 2000s, Glass started a series of five concerti with the Tirol Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (2000, premiered by Dennis Russell Davies as conductor and soloist), and the Concerto Fantasy for Two Timpanists and Orchestra (2000, for the timpanist Jonathan Haas). The Concerto for Cello and Orchestra (2001) had its premiere performance in Beijing, featuring cellist Julian Lloyd Webber; it was composed in celebration of his fiftieth birthday.^[67] These concertos were followed by the concise and rigorously neo-Baroque Concerto for Harpsichord and Orchestra (2002), demonstrating in its transparent, chamber orchestral textures Glass's classical technique, evocative in the "improvisatory chords" of its beginning a toccata of Froberger or Frescobaldi, and 18th century music.^[68] Two years later, the concerti series continued with Piano Concerto No. 2: After Lewis and Clark (2004), composed for the pianist Paul Barnes. The concerto celebrates the pioneers' trek across North America, and the second movement features a duet for piano and Native American flute. With the chamber opera The Sound of a Voice, Glass's Piano Concerto No. 2 might be regarded as bridging his traditional compositions and his more popular excursions to World Music, also found in Orion (also composed in 2004).

2005–2007: Songs and Poems

Glass in December 2007

Waiting for the Barbarians, an opera from J. M. Coetzee's novel (with the libretto by Christopher Hampton), had its premiere performance in September 2005. Glass defined the work as a "social/political opera", as a critique on the Bush administration's war in Iraq, a "dialogue about political crisis", and an illustration of the "power of art to turn our attention toward the human dimension of history".^[69] While the opera's themes are Imperialism, apartheid, and torture, the composer chose an understated approach by using "very simple means, and the orchestration is very clear and very traditional; it's almost classical in sound", as the conductor Dennis Russell Davies notes.^[70][71]

Two months after the premiere of this opera, in November 2005, Glass's Symphony No. 8, commissioned by the Bruckner Orchestra Linz, was premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York City. After three symphonies for voices and orchestra, this piece was a return to purely orchestral and abstract composition; like previous works written for the conductor Dennis Russell Davies (the 1992 Concerto Grosso and the 1995 Symphony No. 3), it features extended solo writing. Critic Allan Kozinn described the symphony's chromaticism as more extreme, more fluid, and its themes and textures as continually changing, morphing without repetition, and praised the symphony's "unpredictable orchestration", pointing out the "beautiful flute and harp variation in the melancholy second movement".^[72] Alex Ross, remarked that "against all odds, this work succeeds in adding something certifiably new to the overstuffed annals of the classical symphony. ... The musical material is cut from familiar fabric, but it's striking that the composer forgoes the expected bustling conclusion and instead delves into a mood of deepening twilight and unending night."^[73]

The Passion of Ramakrishna (2006), was composed for the Pacific Symphony orchestra, the Pacific Chorale and the conductor Carl St. Clair. The 45 minutes choral work is based on the writings of Indian spiritual leader Ramakrishna, which seem "to have genuinely inspired and revived the composer out of his old formulas to write something fresh", as one critic remarked, whereas another noted "The musical style breaks little new ground for Glass, except for the glorious Handelian ending ... the composer's style ideally fits the devotional text".^[74][75]

A cello suite, composed for the cellist Wendy Sutter, Songs and Poems for Solo Cello (2005–2007), was equally lauded by critics. It was described by Lisa Hirsch as "a major work, ... a major addition to the cello repertory" and "deeply Romantic in spirit, and at the same time deeply Baroque".^[76] Another critic, Anne Midgette of The Washington Post, noted the suite "maintains an unusual degree of directness and warmth"; she also noted a kinship to a major work by Johann Sebastian Bach: "Digging into the lower registers of the instrument, it takes flight in handfuls of notes, now gentle, now impassioned, variously evoking the minor-mode keening of klezmer music and the interior meditations of Bach's cello suites".^[77] Glass himself pointed out "in many ways it owes more to Schubert than to Bach".^[78]

In 2007, Glass also worked alongside Leonard Cohen on an adaptation of Cohen's poetry collection Book of Longing. The work, which premiered in June 2007 in Toronto, is a piece for seven instruments and a vocal quartet, and contains recorded spoken word performances by Cohen and imagery from his collection.

Appomattox, an opera surrounding the events at the end of the American Civil War, was commissioned by the San Francisco Opera and premiered on October 5, 2007. As in Waiting for the Barbarians, Glass collaborated with the writer Christopher Hampton, and as with the preceding opera and Symphony No. 8, the piece was conducted by Glass's long-time collaborator Dennis Russell Davies, who noted "in his recent operas the bass line has taken on an increasing prominence,... (an) increasing use of melodic elements in the deep register, in the contrabass, the contrabassoon—he's increasingly using these sounds and these textures can be derived from using these instruments in different combinations. ... He's definitely developed more skill as an orchestrator, in his ability to conceive melodies and harmonic structures for specific instrumental groups. ... what he gives them to play is very organic and idiomatic."^[71]

Apart from this large-scale opera, Glass added a work to his catalogue of theater music in 2007, and continuing—after a gap of twenty years—to write music for the dramatic work of Samuel Beckett. He provided a "hypnotic" original score for a compilation of Beckett's short plays Act Without Words I, Act Without Words II, Rough for Theatre I and Eh Joe, directed by JoAnne Akalaitis and premiered in December 2007. Glass's work for this production was described by The New York Times as "icy, repetitive music that comes closest to piercing the heart".^[79]

2008–present: Chamber music, concertos, and symphonies

2008 to 2010 Glass continued to work on a series of chamber music pieces which started with Songs and Poems: the Four Movements for Two Pianos (2008, premiered by Dennis Davies and Maki Namekawa in July 2008), a Sonata for Violin and Piano composed in "the Brahms tradition" (completed in 2008, premiered by violinist Maria Bachman and pianist Jon Klibonoff in February 2009); a String sextet (an adaption of the Symphony No. 3 of 1995 made by Glass's musical director Michael Riesman) followed in 2009. Pendulum (2010, a one-movement piece for violin and piano), a second Suite of cello pieces for Wendy Sutter (2011), and Partita for solo violin for violinist Tim Fain (2010, first performance of the complete work 2011), are recent entries in the series.^[80]

Glass performing Book of Longing in Milan, September 2008

Other works for the theater were a score for Euripides' The Bacchae (2009, directed by JoAnne Akalaitis), and Kepler (2009), yet another operatic biography of a scientist or explorer. The opera is based on the life of 17th century astronomer Johannes Kepler, against the background of the Thirty Years' War, with a libretto compiled from Kepler's texts and poems by his contemporary Andreas Gryphius. It is Glass's first opera in German, and was premiered by the Bruckner Orchestra Linz and Dennis Russell Davies in September 2009. LA Times critic Mark Swed and others described the work as "oratorio-like"; Swed pointed out the work is Glass's "most chromatic, complex, psychological score" and "the orchestra dominates ... I was struck by the muted, glowing colors, the character of many orchestral solos and the poignant emphasis on bass instruments".^[81]

In 2009 and 2010, Glass returned to the concerto genre. Violin Concerto No. 2 in four movements was commissioned by violinist Robert McDuffie, and subtitled "The American Four Seasons" (2009), as an homage to Vivaldi's set of concertos The Four Seasons. It premiered in December 2009 by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, and was subsequently performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra in April 2010.^[82] The Double Concerto for Violin and Cello and Orchestra (2010) was composed for soloists Maria Bachmann and Wendy Sutter and also as a ballet score for the Nederlands Dans Theater.^[83][84] Other orchestral projects of 2010 are short orchestral scores for films; to a multimedia presentation based on the novel Icarus at the Edge of Time by theoretical physicist Brian Greene, which premiered on June 6, 2010, and the score for the Brazilian film Nosso Lar (released in Brazil on September 3, 2010). Glass also donated a short work, Brazil, to the video game Chime, which was released on February 3, 2010.

In January 2011, Glass performed at the MONA FOMA festival in Hobart, Tasmania. The festival promotes a broad range of art forms, including experimental sound, noise, dance, theatre, visual art, performance and new media.^[85]

In August 2011, Glass presented a series of music, dance, and theater performances as part of the Days and Nights Festival.^[86] Along with the Philip Glass Ensemble, scheduled performers include Molissa Fenley and Dancers, John Moran with Saori Tsukada, as well as a screening of Dracula with Glass's score.^[87] Glass hopes to present this festival annually, with a focus on art, science, and conservation.^[88]

Philip Glass by Luis Alvarez Roure. 2016. Oil on board. Collection of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.

Other works completed since 2010 include Symphony No. 9 (2010–2011), Symphony No. 10 (2012), Cello Concerto No. 2 (2012, based on the film score to Naqoyqatsi) as well as String Quartet No. 6 and No. 7. Glass's Ninth Symphony was co-commissioned by the Bruckner Orchestra Linz, the American Composers Orchestra and the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. The symphony's first performance took place on January 1, 2012, at the Brucknerhaus in Linz, Austria (Dennis Russell Davies conducting the Bruckner Orchestra Linz); the American premiere was on January 31, 2012, (Glass's 75th birthday), at Carnegie Hall (Dennis Russell Davies conducting the American Composers Orchestra), and the West Coast premiere with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under the baton of John Adams on April 5.^[89] Glass's Tenth Symphony, written in five movements, was commissioned by the Orchestre français des jeunes for its 30th anniversary. The symphony's first performance took place on August 9, 2012, at the Grand Théâtre de Provence in Aix-en-Provence under Dennis Russell Davies.^{[90][91][92][93]}

The opera The Perfect American was composed in 2011 to a commission from Teatro Real Madrid.^[94] The libretto is based on a book of the same name by Peter Stephan Jungk and covers the final months of the life of Walt Disney.^[95] The world premiere was at the Teatro Real, Madrid, on January 22, 2013, with British baritone Christopher Purves taking the role of Disney.^[95] The UK premiere took place on June 1, 2013, in a production by the English National Opera at the London Coliseum.^[96] The US premiere took place on March 12, 2017, in a production by Long Beach Opera.^[97]

His opera The Lost [fr], based on a play by Austrian playwright and novelist Peter Handke, Die Spuren der Verirrten (2007), premiered at the Musiktheater Linz [de] in April 2013, conducted by Dennis Russell Davies and directed by David Pountney.

On June 28, 2013, Glass's piano piece Two Movements for Four Pianos was premiered at the Museum Kunstpalast, performed by Katia and Marielle Labèque, Maki Namekawa [de] and Dennis Russell Davies.^[98]

On January 17, 2014, Glass's collaboration with Angélique Kidjo Ifé: Three Yorùbá Songs for Orchestra premiered at the Philharmonie Luxembourg.^[99]

In May 2015, Glass's Double Concerto for Two Pianos was premiered by Katia and Marielle Labèque, Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Glass published his memoir, Words Without Music, in 2015.^[100]

Glass at the world premiere of his Passacaglia for Piano (2017) at the Musikhuset Aarhus, Denmark

His 11th symphony, commissioned by the Bruckner Orchestra Linz, the Istanbul International Music Festival, and the Queensland Symphony Orchestra, premiered on January 31, 2017, Glass's 80th birthday, at Carnegie Hall, Dennis Russell Davies conducting the Bruckner Orchestra.^[101][102] On September 22, 2017, his Piano Concerto No. 3 was premiered by pianist Simone Dinnerstein with the strings of the chamber orchestra A Far Cry at Jordan Hall at the New England Conservatory of Music, Boston, Massachusetts.^[103]

Glass's 12th symphony was premiered by the Los Angeles Philharmonic under John Adams at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles on January 10, 2019. Commissioned by the orchestra, the work is based on David Bowie's 1979 album Lodger, it completes Glass's trilogy of symphonies based on Bowie's Berlin Trilogy of albums.^[104]

In collaboration with stage auteur, performer and co-director (with Kirsty Housley) Phelim McDermott, he composed the score for the new work Tao of Glass, which premiered at the 2019 Manchester International Festival^[105] before touring to the 2020 Perth Festival.

Discover more about Life and work related topics

Lithuanian Jews

Lithuanian Jews

Lithuanian Jews or Litvaks are Jews with roots in the territory of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The term is sometimes used to cover all Haredi Jews who follow an Ashkenazi, non-Hasidic style of life and learning, whatever their ethnic background. The area where Lithuanian Jews lived is referred to in Yiddish as ליטע Lite, hence the Hebrew term Lita'im (לִיטָאִים).

Holocaust survivors

Holocaust survivors

Holocaust survivors are people who survived the Holocaust, defined as the persecution and attempted annihilation of the Jews by Nazi Germany and its allies before and during World War II in Europe and North Africa. There is no universally accepted definition of the term, and it has been applied variously to Jews who survived the war in German-occupied Europe or other Axis territories, as well as to those who fled to Allied and neutral countries before or during the war. In some cases, non-Jews who also experienced collective persecution under the Nazi regime are also considered Holocaust survivors. The definition has evolved over time.

International Rescue Committee

International Rescue Committee

The International Rescue Committee (IRC) is a global humanitarian aid, relief, and development nongovernmental organization. Founded in 1933 as the International Relief Association, at the request of Albert Einstein, and changing its name in 1942 after amalgamating with the similar Emergency Rescue Committee, the IRC provides emergency aid and long-term assistance to refugees and those displaced by war, persecution, or natural disaster. The IRC is currently working in about 40 countries and 26 U.S. cities where it resettles refugees and helps them become self-sufficient. It focuses mainly on health, education, economic wellbeing, power, and safety.

Al Jolson

Al Jolson

Al Jolson was a Lithuanian-American Jewish singer, comedian, actor, and vaudevillian. He was one of the United States' most famous and highest-paid stars of the 1920s, and was self-billed as "The World's Greatest Entertainer." Jolson was known for his "shamelessly sentimental, melodramatic approach" towards performing, as well as for popularizing many of the songs he sang. Jolson has been referred to by modern critics as "the king of blackface performers."

Paul Hindemith

Paul Hindemith

Paul Hindemith was a German composer, music theorist, teacher, violist and conductor. He founded the Amar Quartet in 1921, touring extensively in Europe. As a composer, he became a major advocate of the Neue Sachlichkeit style of music in the 1920s, with compositions such as Kammermusik, including works with viola and viola d'amore as solo instruments in a neo-Bachian spirit. Other notable compositions include his song cycle Das Marienleben (1923), Der Schwanendreher for viola and orchestra (1935), the opera Mathis der Maler (1938), the Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber (1943), and the oratorio When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd, a requiem based on Walt Whitman's poem (1946).

Béla Bartók

Béla Bartók

Béla Viktor János Bartók was a Hungarian composer, pianist, and ethnomusicologist. He is considered one of the most important composers of the 20th century; he and Franz Liszt are regarded as Hungary's greatest composers. Through his collection and analytical study of folk music, he was one of the founders of comparative musicology, which later became ethnomusicology.

Arnold Schoenberg

Arnold Schoenberg

Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg was an Austrian-American composer, music theorist, teacher, writer, and painter. He is widely considered one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. He was associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School. As a Jewish composer, Schoenberg was targeted by the Nazi Party, which labeled his works as degenerate music and forbade them from being published. He emigrated to the United States in 1933, becoming an American citizen in 1941.

Dmitri Shostakovich

Dmitri Shostakovich

Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich was a Soviet-era Russian composer and pianist who became internationally known after the premiere of his First Symphony in 1926 and was regarded throughout his life as a major composer.

Ludwig van Beethoven

Ludwig van Beethoven

Ludwig van Beethoven was a German composer and pianist. Beethoven remains one of the most admired composers in the history of Western music; his works rank amongst the most performed of the classical music repertoire and span the transition from the Classical period to the Romantic era in classical music. His career has conventionally been divided into early, middle, and late periods. His early period, during which he forged his craft, is typically considered to have lasted until 1802. From 1802 to around 1812, his middle period showed an individual development from the styles of Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and is sometimes characterized as heroic. During this time, he began to grow increasingly deaf. In his late period, from 1812 to 1827, he extended his innovations in musical form and expression.

Franz Schubert

Franz Schubert

Franz Peter Schubert was an Austrian composer of the late Classical and early Romantic eras. Despite his short lifetime, Schubert left behind a vast oeuvre, including more than 600 secular vocal works, seven complete symphonies, sacred music, operas, incidental music, and a large body of piano and chamber music. His major works include "Erlkönig", the Piano Quintet in A major, D. 667 , the Symphony No. 8 in B minor, D. 759 , the "Great" Symphony No. 9 in C major, D. 944, the String Quintet, the three last piano sonatas, the opera Fierrabras, the incidental music to the play Rosamunde, and the song cycles Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise.

Piano Trio No. 1 (Schubert)

Piano Trio No. 1 (Schubert)

The Trio No. 1 in B-flat major for piano, violin, and cello, D. 898, was written by Franz Schubert in 1827. The composer finished the work in 1828, in the last year of his life. It was published in 1836 as Opus 99, eight years after the composer's death. Like the E-flat major trio, it is an unusually large scale work for piano trio, taking around 40 minutes in total to perform.

Anton Webern

Anton Webern

Anton Friedrich Wilhelm von Webern, better known as Anton Webern, was an Austrian composer and conductor whose music was among the most radical of its milieu in its sheer concision, even aphorism, and steadfast embrace of then novel atonal and twelve-tone techniques. With his mentor Arnold Schoenberg and his colleague Alban Berg, Webern was at the core of those within the broader circle of the Second Viennese School.

Glass describes himself as a "classicist", pointing out he is trained in harmony and counterpoint and studied such composers as Franz Schubert, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart with Nadia Boulanger.^[106] Aside from composing in the Western classical tradition, his music has ties to rock, ambient music, electronic music, and world music. Early admirers of his minimalism include musicians Brian Eno and David Bowie.^[107] In the 1990s, Glass composed the aforementioned symphonies Low (1992) and Heroes (1996), thematically derived from the Bowie-Eno collaboration albums Low and "Heroes" composed in late 1970s Berlin.

Glass has collaborated with recording artists such as Paul Simon, Suzanne Vega,^[108] Mick Jagger,^[109] Leonard Cohen, David Byrne, Uakti, Natalie Merchant,^[110] S'Express (Glass remixed their track Hey Music Lover in 1989)^[111] and Aphex Twin (yielding an orchestration of Icct Hedral in 1995 on the Donkey Rhubarb EP). Glass's compositional influence extends to musicians such as Mike Oldfield (who included parts from Glass's North Star in Platinum), and bands such as Tangerine Dream and Talking Heads. Glass and his sound designer Kurt Munkacsi produced the American post-punk/new wave band Polyrock (1978 to the mid-1980s), as well as the recording of John Moran's The Manson Family (An Opera) in 1991, which featured punk legend Iggy Pop, and a second (unreleased) recording of Moran's work featuring poet Allen Ginsberg.

Glass counts many artists among his friends and collaborators, including visual artists (Richard Serra, Chuck Close, Fredericka Foster),^[112][113] writers (Doris Lessing, David Henry Hwang, Allen Ginsberg), film and theatre directors (including Errol Morris, Robert Wilson, JoAnne Akalaitis, Godfrey Reggio, Paul Schrader, Martin Scorsese, Christopher Hampton, Bernard Rose, and many others), choreographers (Lucinda Childs, Jerome Robbins, Twyla Tharp), and musicians and composers (Ravi Shankar, David Byrne, the conductor Dennis Russell Davies, Foday Musa Suso, Laurie Anderson, Linda Ronstadt, Paul Simon, Pierce Turner, Joan La Barbara, Arthur Russell, David Bowie, Brian Eno, Roberto Carnevale, Patti Smith, Aphex Twin, Lisa Bielawa, Andrew Shapiro, John Moran, Bryce Dessner and Nico Muhly). Among recent collaborators are Glass's fellow New Yorker Woody Allen and Stephen Colbert.^[114]

Glass had begun using the Farfisa portable organ out of convenience,^[115] and he has used it in concert.^[116] It is featured on several recordings including North Star^[117] and Dance Nos. 1–5.^[118][119]

Recording work

Logo of Orange Mountain Music

In 1970, Glass and Klaus Kertess (owner of the Bykert Gallery) formed a record label named Chatham Square Productions (named after the location of the studio of a Philip Glass Ensemble member Dick Landry).^[29] In 1993 Glass formed another record label, Point Music; in 1997, Point Music released Music for Airports, a live, instrumental version of Eno's composition of the same name, by Bang on a Can All-Stars. In 2002, Glass and his producer Kurt Munkacsi and artist Don Christensen founded the Orange Mountain Music company, dedicated to "establishing the recording legacy of Philip Glass" and, to date, have released sixty albums of Glass's music.

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Harmony

Harmony

In music, harmony is the process by which individual sounds are joined together or composed into whole units or compositions. Often, the term harmony refers to simultaneously occurring frequencies, pitches, or chords. However, harmony is generally understood to involve both vertical harmony (chords) and horizontal harmony (melody).

Counterpoint

Counterpoint

In music, counterpoint is the relationship between two or more musical lines which are harmonically interdependent yet independent in rhythm and melodic contour. It has been most commonly identified in the European classical tradition, strongly developing during the Renaissance and in much of the common practice period, especially in the Baroque period. The term originates from the Latin punctus contra punctum meaning "point against point", i.e. "note against note".

Franz Schubert

Franz Schubert

Franz Peter Schubert was an Austrian composer of the late Classical and early Romantic eras. Despite his short lifetime, Schubert left behind a vast oeuvre, including more than 600 secular vocal works, seven complete symphonies, sacred music, operas, incidental music, and a large body of piano and chamber music. His major works include "Erlkönig", the Piano Quintet in A major, D. 667 , the Symphony No. 8 in B minor, D. 759 , the "Great" Symphony No. 9 in C major, D. 944, the String Quintet, the three last piano sonatas, the opera Fierrabras, the incidental music to the play Rosamunde, and the song cycles Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise.

Johann Sebastian Bach

Johann Sebastian Bach

Johann Sebastian Bach was a German composer and musician of the late Baroque period. He is known for his orchestral music such as the Brandenburg Concertos; instrumental compositions such as the Cello Suites; keyboard works such as the Goldberg Variations and The Well-Tempered Clavier; organ works such as the Schubler Chorales and the Toccata and Fugue in D minor; and vocal music such as the St Matthew Passion and the Mass in B minor. Since the 19th-century Bach revival he has been generally regarded as one of the greatest composers in the history of Western music.

Ambient music

Ambient music

Ambient music is a genre of music that emphasizes tone and atmosphere over traditional musical structure or rhythm. It may lack net composition, beat, or structured melody. It uses textural layers of sound that can reward both passive and active listening and encourage a sense of calm or contemplation. The genre is said to evoke an "atmospheric", "visual", or "unobtrusive" quality. Nature soundscapes may be included, and the sounds of acoustic instruments such as the piano, strings and flute may be emulated through a synthesizer.

Electronic music

Electronic music

Electronic music is a genre of music that employs electronic musical instruments, digital instruments, or circuitry-based music technology in its creation. It includes both music made using electronic and electromechanical means. Pure electronic instruments depended entirely on circuitry-based sound generation, for instance using devices such as an electronic oscillator, theremin, or synthesizer. Electromechanical instruments can have mechanical parts such as strings, hammers, and electric elements including magnetic pickups, power amplifiers and loudspeakers. Such electromechanical devices include the telharmonium, Hammond organ, electric piano and the electric guitar.

Brian Eno

Brian Eno

Brian Peter George St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno is a British musician, composer, record producer and visual artist best known for his contributions to ambient music and work in rock, pop and electronica. A self-described "non-musician", Eno has helped introduce unconventional concepts and approaches to contemporary music. He has been described as one of popular music's most influential and innovative figures.

David Bowie

David Bowie

David Robert Jones, known professionally as David Bowie, was an English singer-songwriter and actor. A leading figure in the music industry, he is regarded as one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century. Bowie was acclaimed by critics and musicians, particularly for his innovative work during the 1970s. His career was marked by reinvention and visual presentation, and his music and stagecraft had a significant impact on popular music.

Low (David Bowie album)

Low (David Bowie album)

Low is the eleventh studio album by the English musician David Bowie, released on 14 January 1977 through RCA Records. After years of drug addiction when living in Los Angeles, Bowie moved to France in 1976 with his friend Iggy Pop to sober up. There, Bowie produced and co-wrote Pop's debut studio album, The Idiot, featuring sounds Bowie would explore on his next record. After completing The Idiot, Bowie began recording the first of three collaborations that became known as the Berlin Trilogy with American producer Tony Visconti and English musician Brian Eno. Sessions began at Hérouville's Château d'Hérouville in September 1976 and ended in October at Hansa Studios in West Berlin, where Bowie and Pop had relocated.

"Heroes" (David Bowie album)

"Heroes" (David Bowie album)

"Heroes" is the 12th studio album by English musician David Bowie, released on 14 October 1977 through RCA Records. After releasing Low earlier that year, Bowie toured as the keyboardist of his friend and singer Iggy Pop. At the conclusion of the tour, they recorded Pop's second solo album Lust for Life at Hansa Tonstudio in West Berlin before Bowie regrouped there with collaborator Brian Eno and producer Tony Visconti to record "Heroes". It was the second release of his Berlin Trilogy, following Low and preceding Lodger (1979), and the only one wholly recorded in Berlin. Much of the same personnel from Low returned for the sessions, augmented by King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp.

Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen

Leonard Norman Cohen was a Canadian singer-songwriter, poet, and novelist. Themes commonly explored throughout his work include faith and mortality, isolation and depression, betrayal and redemption, social and political conflict, and sexual and romantic love, desire, regret, and loss. He was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He was invested as a Companion of the Order of Canada, the nation's highest civilian honour. In 2011, he received one of the Prince of Asturias Awards for literature and the ninth Glenn Gould Prize.

David Byrne

David Byrne

David Byrne is a Scottish-American singer, songwriter, musician, record producer, actor, writer, music theorist, visual artist, and filmmaker. He was a founding member, principal songwriter, lead singer, and guitarist of the American new wave band Talking Heads.

Glass has composed many film scores, starting with the orchestral score for Koyaanisqatsi (1982), and continuing with two biopics, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985, resulting in the String Quartet No. 3) and Kundun (1997) about the Dalai Lama, for which he received his first Academy Award nomination. In 1968 he composed and conducted the score for director Harrison Engle's minimalist comedy short, Railroaded, played by the Philip Glass Ensemble. This was one of his earliest film efforts.

The year after scoring Hamburger Hill (1987), Glass began a long collaboration with the filmmaker Errol Morris with his music for Morris's celebrated documentaries, including The Thin Blue Line (1988) and A Brief History of Time (1991).^[120] He continued composing for the Qatsi trilogy with the scores for Powaqqatsi (1988) and Naqoyqatsi (2002). In 1995, he composed the theme for Reggio's short independent film Evidence. He made a cameo appearance—briefly visible performing at the piano—in Peter Weir's The Truman Show (1998), which uses music from Powaqqatsi, Anima Mundi and Mishima, as well as three original tracks by Glass. In the 1990s, he also composed scores for Bent (1997) and the supernatural horror film Candyman (1992) and its sequel, Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh (1995), plus a film adaptation of Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent (1996).

In 1999, he finished a new soundtrack for the 1931 film Dracula. The Hours (2002) earned him a second Academy Award nomination. The circular, recurring nature of Glass' music has been praised for providing stability and contrast to frequent jumps across time and geography in the film's narrative. In this way, the soundtrack has a distinctive personality, so much so that director Stephen Daldry believes Glass's music serves as "another stream of consciousness, another character"^[121] in the film. The Hours was followed by another Morris documentary, The Fog of War (2003). In the mid-2000s Glass provided the scores to films such as Secret Window (2004), Neverwas (2005), The Illusionist and Notes on a Scandal, garnering his third Academy Award nomination for the latter. Glass's most recent film scores include No Reservations (Glass makes a brief cameo in the film sitting at an outdoor café), Cassandra's Dream (2007), Les Regrets (2009), Mr Nice (2010), the Brazilian film Nosso Lar (2010) and Fantastic Four (2015, in collaboration with Marco Beltrami). In 2009, Glass composed original theme music for Transcendent Man, about the life and ideas of Ray Kurzweil by filmmaker Barry Ptolemy.

In the 2000s, Glass's work from the 1980s again became known to wider public through various media. In 2005, his Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (1987) was featured in the surreal French thriller, La Moustache, providing a tone intentionally incongruous to the banality of the movie's plot.^[122] Metamorphosis: Metamorphosis One from Solo Piano (1989) was featured in the reimagined Battlestar Galactica in the episode "Valley of Darkness"^[123] and also in the final episode ("return 0") of Person of Interest. In 2008, Rockstar Games released Grand Theft Auto IV featuring Glass's "Pruit Igoe" (from Koyaanisqatsi). "Pruit Igoe" and "Prophecies" (also from Koyaanisqatsi) were used both in a trailer for Watchmen and in the film itself. Watchmen also included two other Glass pieces in the score: "Something She Has To Do" from The Hours and "Protest" from Satyagraha, act 2, scene 3. In 2013, Glass contributed a piano piece "Duet" to the Park Chan-wook film Stoker which is performed diegetically in the film.^[124][125] In 2017, Glass scored the National Geographic Films documentary Jane (a documentary on the life of renowned British primatologist Jane Goodall).

Glass's music was featured in two award-winning films by Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev, Elena (2011) and Leviathan (2014).

For television, Glass composed the theme for Night Stalker (2005) and the soundtrack for Tales from the Loop (2020). Glass's "Confrontation and Rescue" (from Satyagraha) was used in the ending of Season 3 Chapter 6 of Stranger Things (2019), whilst "Window of Appearances", "Akhnaten and Nefertiti" (from Akhnaten) and "Prophecies" (from Koyaanisqatsi) were used in the finale of Season 4 Volume 1 (2022).

Discover more about Music for film related topics

Koyaanisqatsi

Koyaanisqatsi

Koyaanisqatsi, also known as Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance, is a 1982 American experimental non-narrative film directed and produced by Godfrey Reggio with music composed by Philip Glass and cinematography by Ron Fricke.

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters is a 1985 American biographical drama film based on the life and work of Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, directed by Paul Schrader from a screenplay co-written with his brother Leonard and Leonard's wife Chieko Schrader. The film interweaves episodes from Mishima's life with dramatizations of segments from his books The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Kyoko's House, and Runaway Horses. Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas were executive producers of the film, which has a musical score composed by Philip Glass and production design by Eiko Ishioka.

Kundun

Kundun

Kundun is a 1997 American epic biographical film written by Melissa Mathison and directed by Martin Scorsese. It is based on the life and writings of Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, the exiled political and spiritual leader of Tibet. Tenzin Thuthob Tsarong, a grandnephew of the Dalai Lama, stars as the adult Dalai Lama, while Tencho Gyalpo, a niece of the Dalai Lama, appears as the Dalai Lama's mother.

Dalai Lama

Dalai Lama

Dalai Lama is a title given by the Tibetan people to the foremost spiritual leader of the Gelug or "Yellow Hat" school of Tibetan Buddhism, the newest and most dominant of the four major schools of Tibetan Buddhism. The 14th and current Dalai Lama is Tenzin Gyatso, who lives as a refugee in India. The Dalai Lama is also considered to be the successor in a line of tulkus who are believed to be incarnations of Avalokiteśvara, the Bodhisattva of Compassion.

Hamburger Hill

Hamburger Hill

Hamburger Hill is a 1987 American war film set during the Battle of Hamburger Hill, a May 1969 assault during the Vietnam War by the U.S. Army's 3rd Battalion, 187th Infantry, 101st Airborne Division (Airmobile) "Screaming Eagles" on a ridge of Dong Ap Bia near the Laotian border in central Vietnam. The ridge was a well-fortified position, including trenchworks and bunkers, of the North Vietnamese Army. U.S. military records of the battle refer to the mountain as "Hill 937," its map designation having been derived from the high elevation of the hill at 937 meters (3,074 ft).

Errol Morris

Errol Morris

Errol Mark Morris is an American film director known for documentaries that interrogate the epistemology of its subjects. In 2003, his documentary film The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. His film The Thin Blue Line placed fifth on a Sight & Sound poll of the greatest documentaries ever made. Morris is known for making films about unusual subjects; Fast, Cheap & Out of Control interweaves the stories of a wild animal trainer, a topiary gardener, a robot scientist and a naked mole rat specialist.

A Brief History of Time (film)

A Brief History of Time (film)

A Brief History of Time is a 1991 biographical documentary film about the physicist Stephen Hawking, directed by Errol Morris. The title derives from Hawking's bestselling 1988 book A Brief History of Time, but, whereas the book is solely an explanation of cosmology, the film is also a biography of Hawking, featuring interviews with some of his family members and colleagues. The music is by frequent Morris collaborator Philip Glass.

Godfrey Reggio

Godfrey Reggio

Godfrey Reggio is an American director of experimental documentary films.

Bent (1997 film)

Bent (1997 film)

Bent is a 1997 British-Japanese drama film directed by Sean Mathias, based on the 1979 play of the same name by Martin Sherman, who also wrote the screenplay. It revolves around the persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany after the murder of SA leader Ernst Röhm on the Night of the Long Knives.

Candyman (1992 film)

Candyman (1992 film)

Candyman is a 1992 American gothic supernatural horror film, written and directed by Bernard Rose and starring Virginia Madsen, Tony Todd, Xander Berkeley, Kasi Lemmons, and Vanessa E. Williams. Based on Clive Barker's short story "The Forbidden", the film follows a Chicago graduate student completing a thesis on urban legends and folklore, which leads her to the legend of the "Candyman", the ghost of an African-American artist and the son of a slave who was murdered in the late 19th century for his relationship with the daughter of a wealthy white man.

Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh

Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh

Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh is a 1995 American supernatural slasher film directed by Bill Condon and starring Tony Todd, Kelly Rowan, William O'Leary, Bill Nunn, Matt Clark and Veronica Cartwright. Written by Rand Ravich and Mark Kruger, it is a sequel to the 1992 film Candyman, which was an adaptation of Clive Barker's short story, "The Forbidden". Its plot follows a New Orleans schoolteacher who finds herself targeted by the Candyman, the powerful spirit of the murdered son of a slave who kills those who invoked him.

Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad was a Polish-British novelist and short story writer. He is regarded as one of the greatest writers in the English language; though he did not speak English fluently until his twenties, he came to be regarded a master prose stylist who brought a non-English sensibility into English literature. He wrote novels and stories, many in nautical settings, that depict crises of human individuality in the midst of what he saw as an indifferent, inscrutable and amoral world.

Wordmark of Philip Glass

Glass lives in New York and in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. He has described himself as "a Jewish-Taoist-Hindu-Toltec-Buddhist"^[19] and is a supporter of the Tibetan independence movement. In 1987, he co-founded the Tibet House US with Columbia University professor Robert Thurman and the actor Richard Gere at the request of the 14th Dalai Lama.^[126] Glass is a vegetarian.^[127]

Glass has been married four times; he has four children and one granddaughter.

• His first marriage was to theater director JoAnne Akalaitis (m. 1965, div. 1980), with whom he has two children: Juliet (b. 1968) and Zachary (b. 1971).
• His second marriage was to Luba Burtyk (m. 1980), a physician.^[128][129]
• His third wife, the artist Candy Jernigan, died of liver cancer in 1991, aged 39.
• Glass's fourth marriage was to restaurant manager, Holly Critchlow (m. in 2001), whom he later divorced.^[14] They had two sons, Cameron (b. 2002) and Marlowe (b. 2003).

He was romantically involved with cellist Wendy Sutter for approximately five years.^[130][131] As of December 2018^[update], his partner was Japanese-born dancer Saori Tsukada.^[132][133]

Glass is the first cousin once removed of Ira Glass, host of the radio show This American Life.^[134] Ira interviewed Glass onstage at Chicago's Field Museum; this interview was broadcast on NPR's Fresh Air. Ira interviewed Glass a second time at a fundraiser for St. Ann's Warehouse; this interview was given away to public-radio listeners as a pledge-drive thank-you gift in 2010. Ira and Glass recorded a version of the composition Glass wrote to accompany his friend Allen Ginsberg's poem "Wichita Vortex Sutra". In 2014, This American Life broadcast a live performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music that included the world premier of the opera Help, a short monodrama that Philip Glass wrote for the occasion.^[135]

Discover more about Personal life related topics

Cape Breton Island

Cape Breton Island

Cape Breton Island is an island on the Atlantic coast of North America and part of the province of Nova Scotia, Canada.

Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University is a private Ivy League research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhattan, it is the oldest institution of higher education in New York, the fifth-oldest in the United States, and one of nine colonial colleges founded prior to the Declaration of Independence.

Robert Thurman

Robert Thurman

Robert Alexander Farrar Thurman is an American Buddhist author and academic who has written, edited, and translated several books on Tibetan Buddhism. He was the Je Tsongkhapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University, before retiring in June 2019. He was the first endowed chair in Buddhist Studies in the West. He also is the co-founder and president of the Tibet House US New York. He translated the Vimalakirti Sutra from the Tibetan Kanjur into English. He is the father of actress Uma Thurman.

Richard Gere

Richard Gere

Richard Tiffany Gere is an American actor. He began in films in the 1970s, playing a supporting role in Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977) and a starring role in Days of Heaven (1978). He came to prominence with his role in the film American Gigolo (1980), which established him as a leading man and a sex symbol. His other films include An Officer and a Gentleman (1982), The Cotton Club (1984), Pretty Woman (1990), Sommersby (1993), Primal Fear (1996), Runaway Bride (1999), I'm Not There (2007), Arbitrage (2012) and Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer (2016). For portraying Billy Flynn in the musical Chicago (2002), he won a Golden Globe Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award as part of the cast.

14th Dalai Lama

14th Dalai Lama

The 14th Dalai Lama, known to the Tibetan people as Gyalwa Rinpoche, is the current Dalai Lama, also the highest spiritual leader and head of the country of Tibet since 1940. He is considered a living Bodhisattva, specifically, an emanation of Avalokiteśvara in Sanskrit and Chenrezig in Tibetan. He is also the leader and a monk of the Gelug school, the newest school of Tibetan Buddhism, formally headed by the Ganden Tripa. The central government of Tibet, the Ganden Phodrang, invested the Dalai Lama with temporal duties until his exile in 1959.

JoAnne Akalaitis

JoAnne Akalaitis

JoAnne Akalaitis is an avant-garde Lithuanian-American theatre director and writer. She won five Obie Awards for direction and was founder in 1970 of the critically acclaimed Mabou Mines in New York City.

Candy Jernigan

Candy Jernigan

Candy P. Jernigan was an American multimedia artist, graphic designer, and set designer, instrumental in the avant-garde art scenes of Provincetown and New York City in the late 1970s and 1980s. She is best known for her vivid collages of found objects she described as "rejectamenta", presented in diagrams to absurd effect. Jernigan is also known for having designed the covers and jackets of dozens of music albums and books as a colleague of Paul Bacon.

Ira Glass

Ira Glass

Ira Jeffrey Glass is an American public radio personality. He is the host and producer of the radio and television series This American Life and has participated in other NPR programs, including Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Talk of the Nation. His work in radio and television has won him awards, such as the Edward R. Murrow Award for Outstanding Contributions to Public Radio and the George Polk Award in Radio Reporting.

This American Life

This American Life

This American Life (TAL) is an American monthly hour-long radio program produced in collaboration with Chicago Public Media and hosted by Ira Glass. It is broadcast on numerous public radio stations in the United States and internationally, and is also available as a free weekly podcast. Primarily a journalistic non-fiction program, it has also featured essays, memoirs, field recordings, short fiction, and found footage. The first episode aired on November 17, 1995, under the show's original title, Your Radio Playhouse. The series was distributed by Public Radio International until June 2014, when the program became self-distributed with Public Radio Exchange delivering new episodes to public radio stations.

Field Museum of Natural History

Field Museum of Natural History

The Field Museum of Natural History (FMNH), also known as The Field Museum, is a natural history museum in Chicago, Illinois, and is one of the largest such museums in the world. The museum is popular for the size and quality of its educational and scientific programs, and its extensive scientific-specimen and artifact collections. The permanent exhibitions, which attract up to two million visitors annually, include fossils, current cultures from around the world, and interactive programming demonstrating today's urgent conservation needs. The museum is named in honor of its first major benefactor, Marshall Field, the department-store magnate. The museum and its collections originated from the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition and the artifacts displayed at the fair.

NPR

NPR

National Public Radio is an American nonprofit media organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., with its NPR West headquarters in Culver City, California. It serves as a national syndicator to a network of over 1,000 public radio stations in the United States. It differs from other non-profit membership media organizations such as the Associated Press, in that it was established by an act of Congress.

Fresh Air

Fresh Air

Fresh Air is an American radio talk show broadcast on National Public Radio stations across the United States since 1985. It is produced by WHYY-FM in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The show's host is Terry Gross. As of 2017, the show was syndicated to 624 stations and claimed nearly 5 million listeners. The show is fed live weekdays at 12:00 noon ET. In addition, some stations carry Fresh Air Weekend, a re-programming of highlights of the week's interviews. In 2016, Fresh Air was the most-downloaded podcast on iTunes.

Glass playing at Palacio de Bellas Artes, 2018

Musical Opinion said, "Philip Glass must be one of the most influential living composers."^[136] The National Endowment for the Arts, while noting that many of his operas have been produced by the world's leading opera houses said, "He is the first composer to win a wide, multigenerational audience in the opera house, the concert hall, the dance world, in film, and in popular music."^[137] Classical Music Review called his opera Akhnaten "a musically sophisticated and imposing work".^[138] The New York Metropolitan Opera's production of Akhnaten won the Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording in 2022. ^[139]

Justin Davidson of New York magazine has criticized Glass, saying, "Glass never had a good idea he didn't flog to death: He repeats the haunting scale 30 mind-numbing times, until it's long past time to go home."^[140] Richard Schickel of Time criticized Glass's score for The Hours, saying, "This ultimately proves insufficient to lend meaning to their lives or profundity to a grim and uninvolving film, for which Philip Glass unwittingly provides the perfect score—tuneless, oppressive, droning, painfully self-important."^[141]

Michael White of The Daily Telegraph described Glass's Violin Concerto No. 2 as being

as rewarding as chewing gum that's lost its flavour, and they're not dissimilar activities. This new concerto is unmitigated trash: the usual strung out sequences of arpeggiated banality, driven by the rise and fall of fast-moving but still leaden triplets, and vacuously formulaic. Philip Glass is no Vivaldi, a composer who even at his most wallpaper baroque still has something to say. Glass has nothing—though he presumably deludes himself into thinking he does: hence the preponderance of slow, reflective solo writing in the piece which assumes there's something to reflect on.^[142]

Discover more about Critical reception related topics

Musical Opinion

Musical Opinion

Musical Opinion, often abbreviated to MO, is a European classical music journal edited and produced in the UK. It is currently among the oldest such journals to be still publishing in the UK, having been continuously in publication since 1877.

National Endowment for the Arts

National Endowment for the Arts

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government by an act of the U.S. Congress, signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson on September 29, 1965. It is a sub-agency of the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities, along with the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Akhnaten (opera)

Akhnaten (opera)

Akhnaten is an opera in three acts based on the life and religious convictions of the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten, written by the American composer Philip Glass in 1983. The libretto is by Philip Glass in association with Shalom Goldman, Robert Israel, Richard Riddell, and Jerome Robbins. According to the composer, this work is the culmination of his two other biographical operas, Einstein on the Beach and Satyagraha. These three people were all driven by an inner vision which altered the age in which they lived: Akhenaten in religion, Einstein in science, and Gandhi in politics.

Metropolitan Opera

Metropolitan Opera

The Metropolitan Opera is an American opera company based in New York City, currently resident at the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center, situated on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The company is operated by the non-profit Metropolitan Opera Association, with Peter Gelb as general manager. As of 2018, the company's current music director is Yannick Nézet-Séguin.

Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording

Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording

The Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording has been awarded since 1961. The award was originally titled Best Classical Opera Production. The current title has been used since 1962.

Justin Davidson

Justin Davidson

Justin Davidson is a classical music and architecture critic.

New York (magazine)

New York (magazine)

New York is an American biweekly magazine concerned with life, culture, politics, and style generally, and with a particular emphasis on New York City. Founded by Milton Glaser and Clay Felker in 1968 as a competitor to The New Yorker, it was brasher and less polite, and established itself as a cradle of New Journalism. Over time, it became more national in scope, publishing many noteworthy articles on American culture by writers such as Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Nora Ephron, John Heilemann, Frank Rich, and Rebecca Traister.

Richard Schickel

Richard Schickel

Richard Warren Schickel was an American film historian, journalist, author, documentarian, and film and literary critic. He was a film critic for Time magazine from 1965–2010, and also wrote for Life magazine and the Los Angeles Times Book Review. His last writings about film were for Truthdig.

Time (magazine)

Time (magazine)

Time is an American news magazine based in New York City. For nearly a century, it was published weekly, but starting in March 2020 it transitioned to every other week. It was first published in New York City on March 3, 1923, and for many years it was run by its influential co-founder, Henry Luce. A European edition is published in London and also covers the Middle East, Africa, and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong. The South Pacific edition, which covers Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands, is based in Sydney.

The Hours (film)

The Hours (film)

The Hours is a 2002 American psychological drama film directed by Stephen Daldry and starring Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, and Nicole Kidman. Supporting roles are played by Ed Harris, John C. Reilly, Stephen Dillane, Jeff Daniels, Miranda Richardson, Allison Janney, Toni Collette, Claire Danes, and Eileen Atkins. The screenplay by David Hare is based on Michael Cunningham's 1999 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name.

The Daily Telegraph

The Daily Telegraph

The Daily Telegraph, known online and elsewhere as The Telegraph, is a national British daily broadsheet newspaper published in London by Telegraph Media Group and distributed across the United Kingdom and internationally. It was founded by Arthur B. Sleigh in 1855 as The Daily Telegraph & Courier. Considered a newspaper of record over The Times in the UK in the years up to 1997, The Telegraph has been described as being "one of the world's great titles".

Antonio Vivaldi

Antonio Vivaldi

Antonio Lucio Vivaldi was a Venetian composer, virtuoso violinist and impresario of Baroque music. Along with Johann Sebastian Bach and Georg Frideric Handel, Vivaldi is regarded as one of the greatest Baroque composers and his influence during his lifetime was widespread across Europe, giving origin to many imitators and admirers. He pioneered many developments in orchestration, violin technique and programmatic music. He consolidated the emerging concerto form into a widely accepted and followed idiom, which was paramount in the development of Johann Sebastian Bach's instrumental music.

• Music with Roots in the Aether: Opera for Television (1976). Tape 2: Philip Glass. Produced and directed by Robert Ashley
• Philip Glass, from Four American Composers (1983); directed by Peter Greenaway
• A Composer's Notes: Philip Glass and the Making of an Opera (1985); directed by Michael Blackwood
• Einstein on the Beach: The Changing Image of Opera (1986); directed by Mark Obenhaus
• Looking Glass (2005); directed by Éric Darmon
• Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts (2007); directed by Scott Hicks

Discover more about Documentaries about Glass related topics

Robert Ashley

Robert Ashley

Robert Reynolds Ashley was an American composer, who was best known for his television operas and other theatrical works, many of which incorporate electronics and extended techniques. His works often involve intertwining narratives and take a surreal multidisciplinary approach to sound, theatrics and writing, and have been continuously performed by various interpreters during and after his life, including Automatic Writing (1979) and Perfect Lives (1983).

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway, is a Welsh film director, screenwriter and artist. His films are noted for the distinct influence of Renaissance and Baroque painting, and Flemish painting in particular. Common traits in his films are the scenic composition and illumination and the contrasts of costume and nudity, nature and architecture, furniture and people, sexual pleasure and painful death.

Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts

Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts

Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts is a 2007 documentary on the life of American composer Philip Glass directed by Scott Hicks. The film was nominated for Emmy Awards and AFI Award

Scott Hicks (director)

Scott Hicks (director)

Robert Scott Hicks, known as Scott, is an Australian film director, producer and screenwriter. He is best known as the screenwriter and director of Shine, the biopic of pianist David Helfgott. For this, Hicks was nominated for two Academy Awards. Other movies he has directed include the film adaptations of Stephen King's Hearts in Atlantis and Nicholas Sparks' The Lucky One.

Golden Globe Awards

Best Original Score

• Nominated: Kundun (1997)
• Won: The Truman Show (1998)
• Nominated: The Hours (2002)

BAFTA Awards

Anthony Asquith Award for Film Music

• Won: The Hours (2002) ^[137]

Academy Awards

Best Original Score

• Nominated: Kundun (1997)
• Nominated: The Hours (2002)
• Nominated: Notes on a Scandal (2006)

Other

• Musical America Musician of the Year (1985)^[143]
• Member of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France) – Chevalier (1995)^[144]
• Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Department of Music (2003)^[145]
• Classic Brit Award for Contemporary Composer of the Year (The Hours) (2004)^[146]
• Critics' Choice Award for Best Composer – The Illusionist (2007)^[147]
• 18th International Palm Springs Film Festival Award (2007)^[148]
• Fulbright Lifetime Achievement Award Laureate (2009)^[149]
• Member of the American Philosophical Society (2009)^[150]
• American Classical Music Hall of Fame (2010)^[151]
• NEA Opera Honors Award (2010)^[152]
• Praemium Imperiale (2012)^[153]
• Dance Magazine Award (2013)^[154]
• Honorary Doctor of Music, Juilliard School (2014)^[155]
• Louis Auchincloss Prize presented by the Museum of the City of New York (2014)^[156]
• Eleventh Glenn Gould Prize Laureate (2015)^[157]
• National Medal of Arts (2015)^[158]
• Chicago Tribune Literary Award (for memoir Words Without Music) (2016)^[159]
• Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Music in a Play – The Crucible (2016)^[160]
• Carnegie Hall (New York) 2017–2018 Richard and Barbara Debs Composer's Chair (2017)^[161]
• Hollywood Music in Media Awards Best Original Documentary Score – Jane (2017)^[162]
• The Society of Composers & Lyricists (SCL) Lifetime Achievement Award (2017)^[163]
• 11th Annual Cinema Eye Honors Outstanding Achievement in Original Music Score – Jane (2018)^[164]
• Grand Prix France Music Muses Award (for memoir Words Without Music) (2018)
• Kennedy Center Honors (2018)^[165]
• Recording Academy Trustees Award (2020)^[166]
• ASCAP Television Theme of the Year, Tales from the Loop, co-composer Paul Leonard-Morgan (2021)^[167]
• BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award 14th Edition (2022)^[168]
• University of Chicago Alumni Award (2023)^[169]

Discover more about Awards and nominations related topics

Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score

Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score

The Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score is a Golden Globe Award presented by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), an organization of journalists who cover the United States film industry, but are affiliated with publications outside North America, since its institution in 1947.

Kundun

Kundun

Kundun is a 1997 American epic biographical film written by Melissa Mathison and directed by Martin Scorsese. It is based on the life and writings of Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, the exiled political and spiritual leader of Tibet. Tenzin Thuthob Tsarong, a grandnephew of the Dalai Lama, stars as the adult Dalai Lama, while Tencho Gyalpo, a niece of the Dalai Lama, appears as the Dalai Lama's mother.

Academy Award for Best Original Score

Academy Award for Best Original Score

The Academy Award for Best Original Score is an award presented annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) to the best substantial body of music in the form of dramatic underscoring written specifically for the film by the submitting composer. Some pre-existing music is allowed, though, but a contending film must include a minimum of original music. This minimum since 2021 is established in 35% of the music, which is raised to 80% for sequels and franchise films. Fifteen scores are shortlisted before nominations are announced.

Notes on a Scandal (film)

Notes on a Scandal (film)

Notes on a Scandal is a 2006 British psychological thriller-drama film directed by Richard Eyre and produced by Robert Fox and Scott Rudin. Adapted from the 2003 novel of the same name by Zoë Heller, the screenplay was written by Patrick Marber. The film stars Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett and centres on a lonely veteran teacher who uncovers a fellow teacher's illicit affair with an underage student.

American Philosophical Society

American Philosophical Society

The American Philosophical Society (APS), founded in 1743 in Philadelphia, is a scholarly organization that promotes knowledge in the sciences and humanities through research, professional meetings, publications, library resources, and community outreach. Considered the first learned society in the United States, it has about 1,000 elected members, and by April 2020 had inducted only 5,710 members since its creation. Through research grants, published journals, the American Philosophical Society Museum, an extensive library, and regular meetings, the society supports a variety of disciplines in the humanities and the sciences.

Praemium Imperiale

Praemium Imperiale

The Praemium Imperiale is an international art prize inaugurated in 1988 and awarded since 1989 by the Imperial family of Japan on behalf of the Japan Art Association in the fields of painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and theatre/film.

Dance Magazine

Dance Magazine

Dance Magazine is an American trade publication for dance published by the Macfadden Communications Group. It was first published in June 1927 as The American Dancer. Dance Magazine has multiple sister publications, including Pointe, Dance Spirit, Dance Teacher, Dance 212, and DanceU101. Dance Magazine was owned by Macfadden Communications Group from 2001 to 2016 when it was sold to Frederic M. Seegal, an investment banker with the Peter J. Solomon Company.

Museum of the City of New York

Museum of the City of New York

The Museum of the City of New York (MCNY) is a history and art museum in Manhattan, New York City, New York. It was founded by Henry Collins Brown, in 1923 to preserve and present the history of New York City, and its people. It is located at 1220–1227 Fifth Avenue between East 103rd to 104th Streets, across from Central Park on Manhattan's Upper East Side, at the northern end of the Museum Mile section of Fifth Avenue.

National Medal of Arts

National Medal of Arts

The National Medal of Arts is an award and title created by the United States Congress in 1984, for the purpose of honoring artists and patrons of the arts. A prestigious American honor, it is the highest honor given to artists and arts patrons by the United States government. Nominations are submitted to the National Council on the Arts, the advisory committee of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), who then submits its recommendations to the White House for the President of the United States to award. The medal was designed for the NEA by sculptor Robert Graham.

Chicago Tribune

Chicago Tribune

The Chicago Tribune is a daily newspaper based in Chicago, Illinois, United States, owned by Tribune Publishing. Founded in 1847, and formerly self-styled as the "World's Greatest Newspaper", it remains the most-read daily newspaper in the Chicago metropolitan area and the Great Lakes region. In 2017, it had the sixth-highest circulation of any American newspaper.

The Crucible

The Crucible

The Crucible is a 1953 play by American playwright Arthur Miller. It is a dramatized and partially fictionalized story of the Salem witch trials that took place in the Massachusetts Bay Colony during 1692–93. Miller wrote the play as an allegory for McCarthyism, when the United States government persecuted people accused of being communists. Miller was questioned by the House of Representatives' Committee on Un-American Activities in 1956 and convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to identify others present at meetings he had attended.

Kennedy Center Honors

Kennedy Center Honors

The Kennedy Center Honors are annual honors given to those in the performing arts for their lifetime of contributions to American culture. They have been presented annually since 1978, culminating each December in a gala celebrating five honorees in the Kennedy Center Opera House in Washington, D.C. While the awards are primarily given to individuals, they have occasionally been given to couples or musical groups, as well as to one Broadway musical and one television show.