Philip Glass

Philip Glass (born 1937) is the composer who made minimalism a global phenomenon — through operas, film scores, and concert works that reached audiences far beyond the classical world and changed what "contemporary classical music" meant for millions of people. He grew up in Baltimore, studied at the University of Chicago and Juilliard, and then spent three years in Paris assisting Ravi Shankar — an encounter with Indian music’s approach to rhythm and structure that reshaped everything he thought about how music works.

He returned to New York, formed the Philip Glass Ensemble, and began performing his own music in art galleries and lofts because concert halls wouldn’t have him. Music in Twelve Parts (1971–74) and Two Pages (1969) are the foundational works of his mature minimalist style: repetitive rhythmic patterns, additive processes, gradual change. The opera Einstein on the Beach (1976), created with director Robert Wilson, was five hours of theatre with no intermission, no narrative in the conventional sense, and no tonal resolution. It was performed at the Metropolitan Opera. It sold out.

The Koyaanisqatsi film score (1982) brought him to a mass audience — ambient, drone-based, electronic-acoustic hybrid music attached to Godfrey Reggio’s images of technological civilization in crisis. The Violin Concerto No. 1 (1987) is a warmer, more lyrical piece than his early work, marking a turn toward accessibility that his early champions found suspicious. He has continued composing at extraordinary speed, across symphonies, operas, chamber music, and film scores.

StyleAdditive rhythmic processes, arpeggiated harmonies, gradual transformation, cyclical structure. The sound of time made visible.

Listen: Metamorphosis Two for solo piano (12 minutes; start here). Then the Violin Concerto No. 1. Then Koyaanisqatsi — film and score together.