Philip Glass first developed wide-open ears as a child in his father’s record store in Baltimore. “I listened to everything,” says Glass, “what we called ‘hillbilly’ and Buddy Holly and R&B, as well as Beethoven quartets and things that were quite modern then—Shostakovich and Bartók.” His fascination with a wide variety of music and sound prompted him to forge an inventive and in some ways unprecedented career.
He began the Great Books curriculum at the University of Chicago at age 15 and then pivoted to the Juilliard School before making a crucial move to Europe, where he studied with two giants of disparate musical traditions: Nadia Boulanger and Ravi Shankar. Boulanger presided over his increasing sophistication with Western classical forms while Shankar further opened Glass’s ears to music from India and around the world.
I have written so much music, much more than I intended to write, that the pieces often don’t have much to do with each other. It’s like going into a used clothing store and everything looks interesting, but you don’t know why.
After returning to the US, Glass associated with the downtown New York music scene, working with artists across media who in various ways took up the mantle from earlier “experimentalist” figures such as John Cage. He has been recognized as an innovator in electronic music composition and is regarded as one of the founders of the highly influential 1970s musical style known as minimalism—though he dislikes having the term applied to his entire output.
Glass’s “music with repetitive structures,” as he prefers to say, has become familiar to an unusually broad array of listeners, having appeared in many celebrated film soundtracks and television placements as well as dozens of operas, symphonies, concerti, and string quartets. He has collaborated with many genre-defying artists, including Allen Ginsberg, Linda Ronstadt, and Yo-Yo Ma, while his influence has been cited not only by composers who write concert music, but also by musicians such as David Bowie, Patti Smith, and Brian Eno.
“I’m taking a huge body of music and boiling it down to a few ideas,” says Glass. “Not only my own music, but the music I’ve been hearing all my life. I’m … putting [all that music] together and making a language out of it.”