7 The 100 Most Influential Musicians of All Time 7

Philip Glass

(b. Jan. 31, 1937, Baltimore, Md., U.S.)

P

hilip Glass is an American composer of innovative

instrumental, vocal, and operatic music, who variously

has employed minimalist, atonal, and non-Western elements

in his work.

Glass studied flute as a boy and enrolled at age 15 at the

University of Chicago, where he studied mathematics and

philosophy and graduated in 1956. His interest in atonal

music drew him on to study composition at the Juilliard

School of Music (M.S., 1962) in New York City and then to

Paris to study under Nadia Boulanger. His acquaintance

there with the Indian sitarist Ravi Shankar decisively

affected Glass’s compositional style, and he temporarily

jettisoned such traditional formal qualities as harmony,

tempo, and melody in his music. Instead he began creating

ensemble pieces in a monotonous and repetitive style;

these works consisted of a series of syncopated rhythms

ingeniously contracted or extended within a stable diatonic

structure. Such minimalist music, played by a small ensemble

using electronically amplified keyboard and wind instru-

ments, earned Glass a small but enthusiastic following in

New York City by the late 1960s.

Glass’s opera Einstein on the Beach (1976), composed in

collaboration with Robert Wilson, earned him broader

acclaim; this work showed a renewed interest in classical

Western harmonic elements, though his interest in star-

tling rhythmic and melodic changes remained the work’s

most dramatic feature. Glass’s opera Satyagraha (1980) was

a more authentically “operatic” portrayal of incidents

from the early life of Mohandas K. Gandhi. In this work,

the dronelike repetition of symmetrical sequences of

chords attained a haunting and hypnotic power well

attuned to the religio-spiritual themes of the libretto,