Background
Glass was born in 1937 in Baltimore, Maryland. His interest in music developed from an early age, thanks to the eclectic tastes of his father who owned a radio repair shop/record store.
Glass was born in 1937 in Baltimore, Maryland. His interest in music developed from an early age, thanks to the eclectic tastes of his father who owned a radio repair shop/record store.
Philip Morris Glass studied musicology on his own, concentrating on Charles Ives, Webern, and William Schuman. He also began studying piano with Marcus Raskin. After receiving a bachelor of arts degree in 1956 at the age of 19, he entered the Juilliard School of Music in New York City in 1958 and pursued composition studies with William Bergsma and Vincent Persichetti for five years.
Philip Morris Glass graduated from the University of Chicago, 1956 and graduated from the Juilliard School of Music. He graduated from the University of Chicago, 1956; graduated from Juilliard School of Music in New York City; continued composition studies with Steve Reich, Darius Milhaud, Nadia Boulanger; began creating music for theatre while studying in Paris.
Despite numerous achievements, Glass increasingly felt that his compositional style, based on 12-tone compositional theory and advanced rhythmic and harmonic forms, was no longer a meaningful.
To better realize the music he wanted to created, he went Paris in 1964 to study composition with Nadia Boulanger on a Fulbright Fellowship. His studies were focused on counterpoint, solfege, and composition analysis. Lessons with this famous teacher had less of an impact on Glass than did his exposure to non-Western music.
In some respects, Glass notes, it was as if he had discarded everything she taught him.
Outside the theatre, his music was ignored and even reviled. Shortly thereafter he completely rejected his earlier compositional style and began to rely solely on the Eastern principle of cyclic rhythm to organize his pieces.
Harmony and modulation were added later, but these typically consisted only of a few static chords.
It was also through watching Shankar, that Glass realized he could indeed make a career as a composer-performer. Before 1966 Glass had composed 80 pieces. Other notable pieces include the operas Einstein on the Beach, 1976, Satyagraha, 1980.
Various other works include the operas Monsters of Grace, 1999, and Galileo Galilei, 2002; plus scores for the films The Hours, Naqoyqatsi, and The Fog of War, 2003.
Entered Uncharted Musical Territory
Glass's reputation as a serious composer suffered during this period, in part because he was not an academic composer.
Foundations supporting new music compositions snubbed him.
Slowly, Glass was creating a name for himself. The appearance of the ensemble at the Royal College of Art in London in 1970 drew support for his work.
It marked the beginning of his collaboration with filmmaker Godfrey Reggio.
This was the first in a trilogy of films.
The music from this film is an integral part of the ensemble repertoire and continues to frequently be performed by the group live.
That same year, he released Glassworks, his first and one of the first ever digital recordings.
It consisted of short pieces and was mixed specifically to take advantage of a new consumer electronic device called The Walkman.
He composed three operas based on films by the late Jean Cocteau, French author and movie director.
Orphee, composed by Glass in 1993, followed the soundtrack of the film closely.
In La Belle et la Bête (1994), Glass went one step further, stripping the film of its soundtrack and creating a live and carefully synchronized operatic accompaniment that took its place among his finest and most exciting works.
He would later add two Academy Award nominations to his long list of accomplishments.
In 1997 Glass composed and recorded a symphony based on the David Bowie album Heroes. Glass released Aguas de Amazonia in 1999 that relied heavily on a Brazilian influence, and he also produced his Symphony No. 2 (Nonesuch) which received much critical praise.
He continued creating many new works and made a short solo tour of Europe.
Also in 1999, Glass created a soundtrack for the film Dracula, directed by Bela Lugosi. Glass continued to find interesting collaborative efforts as the year 2000 approached.
He and Wilson worked together again with Kleiser-Walczak Construction Company on a unique digital film-performance project.
"Monsters of Grace" combined ancient poetry with modern ideas and technologies.
"Monsters of Grace combines technology, poetry, animation and music into a meditative 3-D opera, " explained a contributor to Computor Edge magazine in 1999.
He contributed the score to The Fog of War (2003), a documentary film by Errol Morris about Robert McNamara, former United States Secretary of Defense and was releasing various recordings of his works, including that film's soundtrack, on his Orange Mountain Music label. Still, there continued to be detractors.
Rockwell contends that since about 1984, Glass lost faith or interest in compositional devices such as repetition and periodization, becoming "too restless, too willing to accommodate conventional taste. "
Glass has described himself as a Jewish-Taoist-Hindu-Toltec-Buddhist, and he is a supporter of the Tibetan independence movement.
Philip Morris Glass was married to JoAnne Akalaitas but they divorced later. They had two children, Juliet, and Zachary. He was married to Luba Burtyk, they divorced too. His third marriage was to Married Candy Jernigan
who deceased in 1991. He is married to Holly Critchlow. They have one child, Cameron.