Philip Glass Now 75

by Richard Kostelanetz (July 2012)

During the summer of 1960, he worked with the distinguished composer Darius Milhaud. Thanks to a Fulbright Scholarship, Glass went to Paris in 1964 where he studied for two years with Nadia Boulanger, a legendary music pedagogue, who had also taught Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson, among many other prominent Americans. In sum, by the time he turned thirty, Glass had received as rich an education as any American composer ever had. Innovative though his compositions have been, they nonetheless reflect such sophisticated preparation.

Unable to get musicians to play his compositions, in the late-1960s Glass took the radical step of organizing an eponymous ensemble that still exists. He even self-published recordings of his music. Within only a few years, miraculously it now seems, he became a celebrity within this downtown esthetically fertile and yet discriminating community now remembered with the epithet SoHo.

Soon afterwards, Glass began to compose for theater and film music that was less innovative and thus more accessible. Musicians other than his ensemble would play some of it. While some recent compositions for small ensembles echo his earlier spare style, most of his later music, especially for film, is thinner and more popular. Like no one else in our time, yet much like Aaron Copland before him, Glass has succeeded as both an elite composer and a popular composer.

(Less than 200 words from this text appeared in the book celebrating the 150^th anniversary of the Brooklyn Academy of Music.)

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