Philip Glass biography

Philip Glass Biography

Philip Glass is certainly the world's finest identified living serious composer owing to vast amounts of American recording contracts. He has a readily exclusive, if ever controversial, style that is both imitated and parodied the world over. He is familiar to pop audiences, crossover audiences, new music audiences, opera audiences and increasingly to chamber music audiences and symphony goers. He is in regular performance around the world performing with his ensemble; an output that generates around sixty concerts a year. Although he has written a fair amount of concert music, Glass has arguably won the most recognition for his work in dance, film, music theatre and opera.

Biography

Born in Baltimore on January 31, 1937, Philip Glass discovered music in his father's radio repair shop. In addition to servicing radios, Ben Glass carried a line of records and, when certain ones sold feebly, he would take them home and play them for his three children, trying to discover why they did not appeal to customers. These happened to be recordings of the great chamber works, and the future composer rapidly became familiar with Beethoven quartets, Schubert sonatas, Shostakovitch symphonies and other music then considered "offbeat." It was not until he was in his upper teens did Glass begin to encounter more "standard" classics.

Glass began the violin at six and became serious about music when he took up the flute at eight. However, by the time he was 15, he had become frustrated with the limited flute repertoire as well as with musical life in post-war Baltimore. During his second year in high school, he applied for admission to the University of Chicago, passed and, with his parent's encouragement, moved to Chicago where he supported himself with part-time jobs waiting tables and loading airplanes at airports. During off-hours, he practiced piano and concentrated on such composers as Ives and Webern.

Glass's history was an entirely orthodox one. He initially studied flute at the Peabody Conservatoire, then piano, harmony and composition with Louis Cheslock. He graduated in mathematics and philosophy at the age of nineteen from the university of Chicago. After attending at the Julliard Music School, he studied with Darius Milhaud (in 1960) and Nadia Boulanger (between 1964-1966) in France. Boulanger made Glass go back to the basics, as she did with all her students, and although Glass appreciated the experience in some ways, he bridled at the discipline. In addition to what he considered Boulanger's too excessive preoccupation with musical theory, nearly all the contemporary music to be heard in Paris. After that was at Pierre Boulez's Domain Musical Series - which Glass has since described as "a wasteland, dominated by these maniacs, these creeps, who were trying to make everyone write this crazy creepy music... what one looks for in a composer is that singular personality that comes out of the soul of the person - that creativity cannot be taught." This reflected later as clearly Glass felt the stress in his music as he was cornered and confined by rules and regulations; he was unable to do what he really wanted. On his own initiative, he finally decided to introduce harmonic modulation into his music because he resented the constraints of orthodox theory. "I decided to change the rules," he recalled. "I noticed I had been operating under a lot of rules that had been automatic, and that there were things that weren't possible in my music because I had made them forbidden. I said, 'Why can't I do it?' 'Well there is this rule.' 'Rule!! Who is making the rules? I'm making the rules.' Moreover, that was the end of the rule. You can learn all the rules and yet the personality of the composer was not in the rule book." A story that Philip talks about shows how his thought process developed. "I had been working with Boulanger for some years. I was in my mid-20's and I had a good grasp of harmony. I brought in a harmony exercise and she told me that it was wrong. I said 'Madame Boulanger, I know that it is correct.' I quoted all the rules, analyzed it, and proved to her that I had all the voicing correct, etc.; from the point-of-view of the rules, it was flawless! In addition, she said: 'No, no, it is still all wrong!' She grabbed a score from the piano - a Mozart piano sonata. 'This is what Mozart did.' She found an exact parallel to my passage and she said: 'look how he resolves it. The soprano resolves on the third, not the root!' I looked at her in admiration. Until then, she had never mentioned anything like this to me and I suddenly realized that beyond the rules there was something else that went on."

In Paris, he was hired by a filmmaker to transcribe the Indian music of Ravi Shankar into notation readable to French musicians. In the process, he discovered the techniques of Indian music. After researching music in North Africa, India and the Himalayas, he returned to New York, renouncing his previous music, and began to apply eastern techniques to his own work. www.glasspages.org/mrglass10.jpg"

During his stay in Paris, he worked on a film score and met Ravi Shankar and his tabla player, Alla Rakka. This was his first encounter with Indian music as he was employed to work with Ravi Shankar on a sixties hippy film by Conrad Rooks called Chappaqua. His job was to take Shankar's raga invention and notate them so that Western musicians could play them on the soundtrack. Glass set about this task without much prior knowledge of Indian music, and tried to figure out as he went along just how it "worked." His conclusions were inaccurate but this was the first step towards his own mature style. His work at this time was not liked in Paris.

In 1966-1967, Glass stayed in Tibet and India, where he became a Tibetan Buddhist and was inclined by Oriental meditation. During these trips, his interest in non-European music grew and he paid special attention to musical traditions based on additive structure principles. By the end of 1967, Glass had returned to the United States and settled in New York where he slowly began to find associates and set up his own performing group the Philip Glass Ensemble.

Having worked as a furniture remover, plumber and a taxi driver he was still working as a taxi driver while with the ensemble even after the Einstein premier in 1976. However, this non-musical work was always kept to least while touring with his collection. He followed the practice of not allowing his music to be published to ensure uniqueness and to maintain a high standard of performance by his ensemble. Glass is always attending rehearsals, working closely with the singers, whom he says play a central role in keeping the music vitally connected with the public, which he says, is "crucial if the music is to maintain a high degree of communicativeness."

Not much is known about the works Glass wrote before 1966 - some eighty compositions, of which around twenty were published, were written mainly in what Glass called "a more traditional style" and which he has disowned since 1968.

Glass's first recordings, which he made himself in the early seventies, were not intended as commercial products. "In 1969 and 1970, when I was touring, I wanted to get my music on the radio" he recalls, "but I discovered that radio stations at that time would only play LP's; they would not play cassettes. So what I did was to start a record company called Chatham Square."

By 1974, he had composed a large collection of new music, not only for use by the theater company Mabou Mines (Glass was one of the co-founders), but also mainly for his own performing group, the Philip Glass Ensemble. This period culminated in Music in Twelve Parts, a three-hour summation of Glass' new music; and reached its apogee in 1976 with the Philip Glass / Robert Wilson opera

Einstein on the Beach, the 4-1/2-hour epic now seen as a landmark in 20th century music-theater.

In addition to Einstein, Glass has collaborated with Robert Wilson on several other projects including:

the CIVIL warS - Act V (Rome Section) of the multi-composer epic was written for the 1984 Olympic Games, White Raven, an opera commissioned by Portugal to celebrate its history of discovery and premiered at EXPO '98 in Lisbon, and Monsters of Grace, a digital 3-D opera.

Glass's work and Style

On November 1998, it had been 30 years since the first music by Philip Glass was heard in a U.S. concert. The work was Strung Out, a solo for amplified violin. On the same all-Glass program, Glass personally played.

This spare, almost anorexic music puzzled some people, fascinated others. Most upsetting to traditionalists was the lack of a narrative progression in Glass' music. Using the classical concerto as an example, Glass once explained: "Most music begins with an introduction, then it develops and has all sorts of adventures, some happy, some sad, and then it finally comes out at the end."

There also was the curious effect Glass' music had on the listener's sense of time. The constant beat and subtly shirting rhythms over a static harmonic structure tended to hypnotize and make the listener lose track of time. However, Glass' music soon showed signs of becoming decidedly larger (some of it, like Music in Twelve Parts ran for hours), it remained structurally sparse, using few chord changes. Instead of long developmental sections, which had been normal with "serious" music, there were increasingly complex repetitions and overlapping of lines.

Because Glass' music repeated and varied a very small library of basic musical ideas, the term "minimalism" began to be applied to it.

A number of other composers were experimenting along the same lines, and the new music caught hold, rapidly developing a "cult" following. A movement, more or less, came into being. Suddenly musicians began arguing the merits and demerits of the new music. Along with its abilities to thrill and inspire, this music displayed the ability to annoy, even infuriate. A typical audience reaction to Glass' music during the late 1970s and 1980s included frantic bravos and violent boos, sometimes coming from the same people. Not since the days of the young Stravinsky had, music become visible that so engaged the emotions of the people who heard it. While many were hailing Glass as the man who had revitalized music and made opera a viable art form again, just as many were castigating him for "destroying" music. Like it or not, though, there was something haunting, even mystical-sounding in Glass' complex simplicity, and it began attracting large audiences. One interviewer, impressed with the mystic qualities of Glass' music, asked him about his own religious beliefs. Glass, ever ready with a quip, declined to discuss religion. Why? Pursued the interviewer. "Because my music is so odd already," explained Glass, "I see no reason to make myself sound any odder."

The great breakthrough came in Paris with Glass' discovery of Indian music. Forays into Northern Africa and the Himalayas followed, with Glass eagerly soaking up the principals (though hardly ever the actual sounds) of eastern music. The outcome of all this was his returning to New York and renouncing all his former music, then beginning again, virtually from scratch. Thus, the date of his music in this catalogue begins in 1965. (One can find his earlier works in various libraries, but they sound nothing like the Philip Glass the public has come to know.)

It is easy now to lose sight of one of Philip Glass' major accomplishments: the revitalizing of Opera. The half-century between Puccini's Turandot (1926) and Glass'

Einstein on the Beach (1976), were eminent by an increasing complexity in music, to the point where "new" music of any kind became identified in the public's mind with ugliness and mystique.

Occasionally an opera company would produce something new, but it consistently failed to attract a public, and the production of new operas became anathema to opera companies.

Satyagraha (1980) changed all that. As one theater piece after another emerged from Glass' studio, the opera world sat up and took notice. There have been highly unbeaten operas since then, and by composers other than Philip Glass, but without Glass paving the way, it seems unlikely that the others would have been conceived at all, much less produced.

Minimalism

The term minimalism was created by journalists when these composers were labeled with this controversial term. Indeed there are other names in circulation like rhythmic music, acoustical music, meditative music, system and processed music which attempt to pigeonhole this style.

The term minimal can only be applied to the limited initial material and the limited transformational techniques composers employ, and even this is only the case in the earlier works of Steve Reich and Philip Glass. The term is most suitable in Glass's Music in Twelve Parts, which lasts longer than four hours, and Terry Riley is well-known for his All- Night-Concerts. The techniques used in Minimalism are unique but repetition has always been used.

Minimalism contains certain techniques which display the unique sound that it has now become and through this minimal music has developed into solely repetition to the non- academic ear omitting what the music is actually all about. Apparently, the strong issue in minimalism is the repetition, but the most important feature is the procedure or procedures used to develop the music.

In order to define minimalism it is essential to understand to basic principles of minimum material combined with maximum repetition. In order to achieve the required effect composers employ such techniques as phasing, mass transposed layering, and mass accenting of isolated tunes. In mass layering, several players play the same motif at different transpositions and then each player would progress. Within this technique, certain players may emphasis a note from the repeating motif which when combined produce a tune, which would otherwise be isolated. An excellent example of this is in Steve Reich's Six Pianos, 1974. Apart from these basic systems, minimalism can also only contain the duplication itself with harmonic progressions.

Philip Glass's particular special interest was in additive progressions, which are based on repetition in which the musical figures are structures according to this method. Without doubt, the 'arpeggio' trademark is so characteristic and is the vehicle of this process. Its origin lies in Indian music, and it can be set in opposition to the Western principle of divisive time division, with longer units being subdivided into smaller units. The Indian musician, on the other hand, works with much larger units that are created by bringing smaller units together which have a structure different from that of larger units they finally form. "These larger units or periods are integrated in a cyclical process. Other cycles with different rhythms are added afterwards like a wheel-work: everything works simultaneously in a continuous transformation" Glass says.

The overlapping and interweaving of rhythmic structures, and the almost total lack of harmonic development, lend the music a slow, curiously hypnotic effect, but can also produce passages of great drama, a factor which Glass has put to use in film soundtrack music. Koyaanisqatsi and Mishima are his best works in that genre.

Whereas the basis of Glass's earlier works was additive structure, an evolution can be seen after 1970, when he leans towards a growing vertical differentiation - the use of harmony as a structural principle. The musical texture has become richer and more differentiated through the growth of Glass's ensemble and the notation of given lines in unison or parallel motion and the introduction of rudimentary counterpoint. The concern with rhythmic structure was no longer leading.

This interest in harmonic differentiation continues through to 1974 with Music in Twelve Parts. In addition to the application to formerly used techniques such as additive process, repetitive construction, continuous quaver movement, pulsation, a stable harmony per part and the introduction of sudden modulations with each transition to a new part, Glass introduces a number of new techniques.

In creating his own style, Glass illuminated still further the relation between simplicity and complexity. His music has been called 'mesmeric', 'uplifting', 'mystic', and full of 'religious serenity'. Traditional composers complain that his music is insultingly simplistic; of course, it is, if the principle is a complexity that only a peer can penetrate. Nevertheless, if the goal is music with structure, integrity, and conceptual fascination that excites and moves an audience, then music that fails to do that has fallen short. Glass's music has complexities its critics rarely consider. Rhythmic units fly by with such speed that it takes a player substantial concentration not to get lost. Lines sometimes overlap in ways that are difficult to perform or perceive.

Glass's comfortable harmonic language does certainly have its roots among the ground springs of musical romanticism; but when it comes to leveling 'harmonic balance' at Wagner, that is no more or less useful than observing 'minimalist' trends in Beethoven (the Pastoral Symphony's first movement development, for example) or Bach (the late canons). Glass's musical exposition is at least as presented 'Organ Works' - based largely on thematic repetition, subtle rhythmic and harmonic variation and fundamental conceptual simplicity. Glass's separate works recognize themselves by with two distinct features; we can categorize works with the current influence at the time of composing with Koyaanisqatsi, The Violin Concerto, and 100 Airplanes on the Roof, Solo Piano, The Photographer and Glass Pieces. Furthermore, it inhabits a world in suspension, where much is made out of very little, "minimalism."

He is often termed a minimalist composer, and while that may have been a fair description at the beginning of his composing career, this description clearly no longer fits.

Despite all this, Glass is not very popular with other contemporary composers or the so-called 'serious' music scene.

The best way to describe his music is that it contains rhythmic complexity overlaid on a steadily evolving pattern. Many people would describe his music as simplistic, or the sort of thing that would drill holes in your brain. However, I find that there is a hidden beauty and complexity beneath the seeming simplicity. Again, according to Christaki, Glass' style challenges the listener's perception of the relationship between simplicity and complexity. His music has been called 'mesmeric', 'uplifting', 'mystic', and full of 'religious serenity'. Traditional composers complain that his music is contemptuously simplistic; of course, it is, if the principle is a complexity that only a peer can penetrate. Nevertheless, if the goal is music with structure, integrity, and conceptual fascination that excites and moves an audience, then music that fails to do that has plunge short.

The principle of complexity within simplicity and indeed beauty within simplicity is not new to classical music, and one only needs to consider the work of Mozart. Glass' music has complexities its critics infrequently consider. Rhythmic units fly by with such speed that it takes a player considerable concentration not to get lost. Lines sometimes overlap in ways that are difficult to perform or perceive. In addition, when played at great speed and the high volume that Glass favours, alien acoustical phenomena emerge -beats and combination tones - to lend the music an unexpected textural richness. The highly amplified volume, which Glass prefers, is part of the connection Glass has with rock; where the non-rock listeners become literally uncomfortable.

Glass seems to have gone through three phases:

his early music can be classified as definitely minimalist,

The middle period was really a crossover period, in which his audience moved from being just a fringe element into a wide cross-section of musical tastes, and he released a number of concert pieces.

A later period performance and recording period, during which he has had a large number of new works performed live.

The Early Period

Philip Glass, the last of the four major Minimalists, began to form his early Minimal style after working in a studio recording assembly with the classical Indian sitar player Ravi Shankar while in Paris studying with Nadia Boulenger. Strickland writes that "the encounter with the Indian compositional techniques of additive process and cyclic rhythm as an alternative to Western subdivisions of the beat and regularized demarcation of measures came as a revelation" to Glass; these ideas were incorporated into his String Quartet No. 1 (1966).

The work consists of eight melodic units or "cells" which are repetitive in their entirety and ordered together to form a larger shape. For example: if each section is given a number, then the form of the work would be 123454321 67876 12345432.

Linking together the smaller units and then combining the resultant shapes in similar arrangement can spawn an entire piece spawned from minimal material. In his next works Glass uses not even eight units, but creates the entire work from only one; the 1967 work Two Pages is a "study of the elongation and subsequent contraction of a progresses by added notes or groups of notes. In other works, the lengthening of notes, as in Reich's Four Organs, also elongates the line.

Cyclic rhythm is the other important device Glass uses in his music. Like additive process, cyclic rhythm is an Indian technique that Glass brought into the Western musical vocabulary. It is created by interaction of two or more cells of different lengths being played and repeated at the same time. For example: pattern A consists of four eighth notes, whereas pattern B. contains only three. When the two are played and repeated at once, the two patterns starting eighth notes will sound at the same time every twelve eighths.

The effect is what Glass recalls someone terming "wheels within wheels." The result of both of these processes allows the music surprising complexity despite spare Original material. As would be expected, it often does not fit into the very regular Western conception meter; definitely, it is much more akin to Indian music. Just like Reich's music, rhythmic pulse is always present, which gives Glass's music life and vitality.

Some other smaller works include Music in the Shape of a Square (1967), Strung Out (1967), and an interesting work for building blocks and tabletop entitled 1-1 (1967). All these works employed one or two musicians, but around this time, Glass began to write for a bigger group of instruments. The Philip Glass ensemble was formed in 1968, and it employs augmented keyboards, voices, and winds. Works for the group include Glass's large-scale work, Music with Changing Parts (1973). In this piece, Glass uses both additive process and cyclic rhythms, as well as controlled improvisations.

As explained by Glass: "During rehearsal we noticed continuous sounds emerging from the repeated beats of the music. I stopped and asked who was singing. And nobody was singing; it was just a psycho acoustical effect of the music." Glass then added instruments to reinforce this effect by having them play whatever pitch they felt coming out the keyboard patterns for the length of a breath. Like Reich, the improvisation is very controlled; Glass determines movement between large divisions of the work during performance, and the improvisers are expectant not to create melodies.

The Middle Period

The middle period, as I have defined it, is characterized by the series of disks, which were perceived as 'commercial', plus the trilogy of major operas. The operas - Akhnaten, Gandhi and Einstein - are about three men who revolutionized the opinion and events of their times through the power of an inner vision. Einstein - the man of science; Gandhi - the man of politics; Akhnaten - the man of religion. These themes (science, politics, religion) are shared to some extent by all three and they inform our ideological and real worlds. His association with Robert Wilson on Einstein on the Beach has proved to be one of the seminal music theatre works of our time.

According to Glass's notes on Akhnaten, "Each of the three operas of this 'portrait' trilogy has its own distinctive sound world. Einstein on the Beach, an opera about a great mathematician who loved music, is for amplified group and small chorus singing a text compromised of numbers (actually the beats of the music) and solfege syllables. Satyagraha, a work about one man leading his people to freedom, is a large choral opera with text taken directly from Gandhi's philosophical guidebook (the Bhagavad-Gita) in the actual language (Sanskrit) in which he read it. In Akhnaten, my emphasis is orchestral, with choral and solo voices sharing common ground with the orchestra."

The so-called commercial disks - Glassworks, Solo Piano and Songs from Liquid Days - released during this time remain controversial with purist Glassophiles.

Later Period

Paradoxically, although the later period has corresponded with a substantial increase in the number of recorded works available, I regard this later period as one of presentation, which is consistent with Glass' own view of his work.

His works since Satyagraha have incorporated increasingly expansive harmonic and polyphonic techniques, while at the same time being inventive in terms of performance. There are two works which stand out as works that need to be seen to be valued and not just heard - La Belle et la B. te, and Monsters of Grace.

This quote from an interview with Philip Glass by Jonathan Cott illustrates Glass' innovative style and his preference for works that must be performed:

I'm going to take La Belle et la B. te, eliminate the sound track, write a new fully operatic score and synchronize it with the film. You know, someone has to synchronize the film with the music, and someone has to do the programming - in this production that someone is the musical director Michael Riesman. The sound designer Kurt Munkacsi (also the record producer) must translate that into a finished musical result, which must then be brought to the stage by Jedediah Wheeler."

People might think we're some kind of technicranks who are just fiddling interviews I have, talked about how I took the film and put a time code on it, timed every line in it, wrote down the libretto (which is not the same as the published one, since I wanted the words that were in the film), I timed every word, I placed it mathematically in the score... And then when I got done, Michael Riesman and I recorded it and put it up against the film and discovered it wasn't accurate enough. So we began using computers to move the vocal line around until it synched with the lips, and then I had to rewrite the music in order to achieve a better synchronization. Then Michael had to teach it all to the singers and they had to learn to do it live."

The other work that illustrates Glass' dual orientations of innovation and lives performance is Monsters of Grace - a new and continually evolving work by Glass and director/designer Robert Wilson, (with whom he created Einstein on the Beach). Using an up-to-the-minute 3D animation process (pioneered by filmmakers Jeff Kleiser and Diana Walczak) and realized in 70mm film, Monsters of Grace explores the unlimited possibilities of light, sound and objects creating a "millennium-crashing theater event" (!!!). The lyrics, sung in English, are gleaned from the religious poetry of the Thirteenth Century Persian mystic Jelaluddin Rumi and transformed into ecstatic love songs performed live by the Philip Glass Ensemble and voices. Even more so than with La Belle et la B. te, a mere recording of the music cannot do righteousness to the work

In addition to his works for music theater there exists a large body of concert music ranging from string quartets to the Low Symphony, inspired by the music of David Bowie and Brian Eno. The American Composers Orchestra commissioned and performed his Violin Concerto in 1987 and in the same year, his symphony The Light was commissioned for the Cleveland Orchestra.

Glass has composed film scores for much of his composing career, but in recent times two of his film scores have taken him very much into the mainstream. The score for the Martin Scorsese film Kundun on the life of the Dalai Lama, brought a much wider audience into contact with his music. An even wider audience still was achieved through the score for The Truman Show. Moreover, having had his music satirized on the depraved South Park means he must really have made it.

Glass sees himself as principally a composer who composes for live performance rather than recording (although we in the Southern hemisphere do not get many opportunities to value this). In his own words (from Claudio Chianura's conversation with Philip Glass) "I think of myself mainly as an artist that works for the theater, save for an occasional symphonic or piano piece. If you look at my music, you will see that for the most part it is for theater, for opera, for dance or for cinema, which is a form of theater."

Glass's works are continuously in the collection of dance companies around the world. Australian Dance Theatre's "A Descent into the Maelstrom," Twyla Tharp's "In the Upper Room," and New York City Ballet's "Glass Pieces," with choreography by Jerome Robbins, has all received substantial approbation.

Glass does try to perform as much of his own music as he can:

Relating to the piano has very personal implications. When I perform I try to create an intimate relationship with those who listen. This is essential for creating a bridge between the composer, his music and his audience. When there is nobody else on stage, when it is only you and the piano, what emerges is a direct, unmediated relationship between performer and public. I started performing when hold an average of twenty concerts per year. This of course does not mean that others can't perform my music: for example pianist Arturo Stalteri has taken some of my pieces and is working on them."