Glass founded his ensemble in 1968 and never stopped counting
Baltimore-born Philip Glass (b. 1937) is often named among late-twentieth-century music's most influential composers. Additive pulses power operas from Einstein on the Beach (1976) to Akhnaten (1983), plus fifteen symphonies and a busy film-score life.
American composer and pianist Philip Morris Glass grew up in a Latvian- and Russian-Jewish Baltimore household, absorbing records from his father's shop. In 1968 he created the Philip Glass Ensemble to perform his own music. Output spans fifteen operas, chamber and theatre pieces, fifteen symphonies, twelve concertos, and nine string quartets, alongside celebrated screen scores.
Stage landmarks include the 1976 Einstein portrait opera, the 1980 Satyagraha, Akhnaten three years later, then The Voyage in 1992 and The Perfect American in 2013. Awards include a BAFTA, a Drama Desk, and a Golden Globe, with multiple Oscar and Grammy nominations. Listeners hear relentless arpeggios and slow harmonic change more than Romantic climax—an aesthetic critics once dismissed and later canonized as minimalism's public face.
His father's Baltimore record shop let customers return records they disliked, which helped make it the city's leading source of modern music, and the boy built a collection from the unsold stock. He studied flute at the Peabody Preparatory, entered the University of Chicago at 15 for mathematics and philosophy, then trained at Juilliard alongside Steve Reich. A Fulbright took him to Nadia Boulanger in Paris from 1964 to 1966, and scoring the film Chappaqua with Ravi Shankar and Alla Rakha reshaped his thinking about rhythm. Back in New York from March 1967, he supported himself as a mover, plumber and cab driver between 1973 and 1978; the Time critic Robert Hughes once found him installing a dishwasher.
Source: Philip Glass
