Philip Glass

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Philip Glass

Biography

Philip Glass (b. 31 January 1937, Baltimore, Md.) is an American composer, known primarily for his work in minimalism.

Glass's family were Jewish immigrants from Lithuania. His father owned a record store and his mother was a librarian. Glass's father often received promotional copies of new recordings at his music store, and Phillip spent many hours listening to them, developing his knowledge and taste in music. He studied the flute as a child at the university-preparatory school of the Peabody Institute. At the age of 15, he entered an accelerated college program at the University of Chicago where he studied mathematics and philosophy. In Chicago he discovered the serialism of Anton Webern and composed a twelve-tone string trio.

Glass studied at the Juilliard School of Music where the keyboard was his main instrument. His composition teachers included Vincent Persichetti and William Bergsma. In 1959, he was a winner in the BMI Foundation's BMI Student Composer Awards, an international prize for young composers. In the summer of 1960, he studied with Darius Milhaud at the summer school of the Aspen Music Festival and composed a violin concerto for a fellow student, Dorothy Pixley-Rothschild.

After leaving Juilliard in 1962, Glass moved to Pittsburgh and worked as a school-based composer-in-residence in the public school system, composing various choral, chamber and orchestral music. In 1964, Glass received a Fulbright Scholarship; his studies in Paris with the eminent composition teacher Nadia Boulanger, from autumn of 1964 to summer of 1966, influenced his work throughout his life, as the composer admitted in 1979: "The composers I studied with Boulanger are the people I still think about most—Bach and Mozart."

Glass founded the Philip Glass Ensemble in 1971, with which he still performs on keyboards. He has written numerous operas and musical theatre works, eleven symphonies, eleven concertos, seven string quartets and various other chamber music, and film scores. Three of his film scores have been nominated for Academy Awards.


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