Philip Glass – Composer
Philip Glass is an American composer and pianist who is widely regarded as one of the most influential composers of the late 20th and 21st Century.
Through his operas, symphonies, compositions for his own ensemble, and his wide-ranging collaborations, Philip Glass has had an extraordinary and unprecedented impact on the musical and intellectual life of his times.
Background
He was born in 1937 and grew up in Baltimore. He studied at the University of Chicago, the Juilliard School and in Aspen with Darius Milhaud. Finding himself dissatisfied with much of what then passed for modern music, he moved to Europe, where he studied with the legendary pedagogue Nadia Boulanger (who also taught Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson and Quincy Jones) and worked closely with the sitar virtuoso and composer Ravi Shankar. He returned to New York in 1967 and formed the Philip Glass Ensemble – seven musicians playing keyboards and a variety of woodwinds, amplified and fed through a mixer.
Impact
Through his operas, symphonies, compositions for his own ensemble, and his wide-ranging collaborations, Philip Glass has had an extraordinary and unprecedented impact upon the musical and intellectual life of his times.
Artistic Scope & Recognition
Glass founded the Philip Glass Ensemble in 1968. He has written 15 operas, numerous chamber operas and musical theatre works, 14 symphonies, 12 concertos, nine string quartets, various other chamber music pieces, and many film scores.
- Received four Grammy Award nominations, including two for Best Contemporary Classical Composition for Satyagraha (1987) and String Quartet No. 2 (1988).
- Received three Academy Award for Best Original Score nominations for Martin Scorsese‘s Kundun (1997), Stephen Daldry‘s The Hours (2002), and Richard Eyre‘s Notes on a Scandal (2006).
- Composed film scores for Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters(1985), Hamburger Hill (1987), The Thin Blue Line (1988), Candyman (1992), The Truman Show (1998), and The Illusionist (2006).
- Wrote Broadway scores for the revivals of The Elephant Man (2002), The Crucible (2016), and King Lear (2019); winning the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Music in a Play.
- Composed the operas Einstein on the Beach (1976), Satyagraha (1980), Akhnaten (1983), The Voyage (1992), and The Perfect American (2013).
Einstein on the Beach
One of the most iconic stage pieces of the 20th century, Einstein on the Beach is widely credited as one of the greatest artistic achievements of that century.
This rarely performed work launched its director Robert Wilson and composer Philip Glass to international success. It premiered on July 25, 1976, at the Théâtre Municipal in Avignon, France, as part of the Avignon Festival. It was performed by the Philip Glass Ensemble and presented by the Byrd Hoffmann Foundation. It subsequently toured to Venice, Paris (where it received rave reviews and international acclaim), Hamburg, Belgrade, Brussels and Rotterdam.
At the request of New York’s Metropolitan Opera, the production traveled to New York, where, in November 1976, it received two, command, sold-out performances, making it the Met’s first presentation of a “contemporary opera” It remains one of their greatest masterpieces.
Composition and Performance History
Philip Glass and Robert Wilson first met to discuss the prospects of a collaborative work, and decided on an opera of between four and five hours in length based around a historical persona. Wilson initially suggested Charlie Chaplin or Adolf Hitler, whom Glass outright rejected, while Glass proposed Mahatma Gandhi (later the central figure of his 1979 opera Satyagraha). Albert Einstein was the eventual compromise. The title appears to reference the apocalyptic novel On the Beach by Nevil Shute. The opera was originally to be titled Einstein on the Beach on Wall Street but was later shortened; neither Glass nor Wilson remember when or why.