Philip Glass

Philip Glass (Baltimore, Maryland, January 31, 1937) is an American minimalist classical music composer. He studied at the Juilliard School in New York. His international recognition has increased since the appearance of his opera Einstein on the Beach (1975).

A prolific composer, he has worked in various fields such as opera, orchestral music, chamber music and film. He regularly works with the Philip Glass Ensemble. He has collaborated with Paul Simon, Linda Ronstadt, Yo-Yo Ma, Doris Lessing, and Robert Wilson.

Biography

Childhood

Philip Glass is the grandson of immigrants from Lithuania. He was born and raised in Baltimore and as a child studied flute at Peabody Conservatory.

At the age of 15, he began a crash course at the University of Chicago where he studied mathematics and philosophy. At the age of 19 he obtained his diploma and entered the Juilliard School in New York where he was taught by Darius Milhaud and began to play almost exclusively the piano. Given his dissatisfaction, from 1963 to 1965 he went to study in Paris, with Nadia Boulanger, at the American Conservatory of Fontainebleau, the analysis of compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach (The well-tempered harpsichord), Mozart (piano concertos), Wagner and Beethoven. Glass also discovers the serialism of Pierre Boulez, but affirmed that he did not produce "any emotion" in her. This period in Paris helped him to discover the theater of Jean-Louis Barrault at the Odéon as well as the French Nouvelle Vague.

Meeting with Buddhism

After studying with Nadia Boulanger and working closely with Ravi Shankar in France, Glass traveled to northern India in 1966, mainly for religious reasons, where he came into contact with Tibetan refugees. She became a Buddhist and would meet the Dalai Lama in 1972 as well as the poet Allen Ginsberg, who is a great supporter of the Tibetan cause. It was her work with Ravi Shankar and his perception of additive rhythm in Indian music that led to her unique style. When he returned to New York in 1967, he gave up all his earlier compositions in the style of Darius Milhaud and Aaron Copland and began writing austere pieces based on additive rhythms and with a sense of tempo influenced by Samuel Beckett, whose work he discovered composing for works. experimental theater.

In search of my own style

The lack of appreciation he feels for traditional performers and spaces led him to form his own musical group, the Philip Glass Ensemble, with which he began to play mainly in art galleries and other underground culture environments. These tough times, which spanned almost the entire 1970s, forced him to work as a taxi driver and appliance repairman while he composed and performed.

The music of this early period is extremely repetitive, austere and complicated for the listener, which led to a great misunderstanding by critics and the public. Glass himself commented that when someone from the public stayed until the end, they invited him to dinner. He only began to be recognized after his collaboration with stage director and theater renovator, also a minimalist, Robert Wilson (director), with whom he made the experimental opera Einstein on the Beach, an anti-nuclear plea with a libretto written by a psychotic where every classical element of the operatic genre is consciously renewed and altered. Even so, despite the relative success of the work, he has to continue working as a repairman for a while before being able to dedicate himself fully to music.

Philip Glass usually refuses to frame his creations within the minimalist style, but he has defined himself as a composer of music that relies on repetitive structures.

Acknowledgment

The realization of new operas as well as a sweetening of his style in the early 80s, more accessible to the general public, advanced Glass's fame, as well as his relevance within alternative musical culture. Her early dalliances with pop musicians (such as Mike Oldfield on his Platinum LP, where he performs a piece by Glass) helped her become known in wider circles.

It is possible that world fame and a certain status of genius came to him through the experimental film Koyaanisqatsi, directed by Godfrey Reggio (1981-1982) and produced by Francis Ford Coppola. Some pieces not used in the film (such as Facades) eventually appeared on the album Glassworks (1982, CBS Records), which brought Glass's music to an audience wider.

The "portrait trilogy" it ended with Akhnaten (1982–1983, premiered 1984), a vocal and orchestral composition sung in Akkadian, Biblical Hebrew, and Ancient Egyptian. Furthermore, this opera featured an actor reciting ancient Egyptian texts in the audience's language. Glass collaborated again with Robert Wilson on another opera, the CIVIL warS (1983, premiered 1984), which also served as the final part ("the Rome section") of Wilson's epic work of the same name, originally planned for an "international arts festival to accompany the Olympic Games in Los Angeles". (Glass also composed a highly prestigious work for chorus and orchestra for the opening of the Games, The Olympian: Lighting of the Torch and Closing ). The Los Angeles premiere of The CIVIL warS never took place and the opera ultimately premiered at the Rome Opera. Glass and Wilson's opera includes music set to Latin texts by the century playwright I, Seneca and allusions to music by Giuseppe Verdi and the American Civil War, featuring 19th century lowercase figures Giuseppe Garibaldi and Robert E. Lee as characters.

Despite his fame, his recognition as a composer is not unanimous; some music lovers and even several contemporary composers of his, such as Ned Rorem or Milton Babbitt, question his work for lack of rigor and consider his music cloying and superficial.

Other vocal works of the 1980s included two sets of songs, Three Songs for chorus (1984, on poems by Leonard Cohen, Octavio Paz and Raymond Levesque), and a song cycle started by CBS Masterworks Records: Songs from Liquid Days (1985), with texts by lyricists such as David Byrne, Paul Simon, in which the Kronos Quartet appears with a prominent role (as in Mishima). Glass also continued his series of operas with adaptations of literary texts such as The Juniper Tree (an opera in collaboration with composer Robert Moran, 1984), Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher (1987), and also worked with the novelist Doris Lessing in the opera The Making Of The Representative For Planet 8 (1985–86, and performed by the Houston Grand Opera and the English National Opera in 1988).

During the rest of the 1980s, he continued to produce music alone and with his group, but he did not skimp on collaborations with other musicians, both pop and minority or from other cultures, and in the making of film music. From then until today Glass has orchestrated some instrumental parts of David Bowie's albums Low and Heroes (Low Symphony and Heroes Symphony) as well as many movies; the Errol Morris-directed biopic A Brief History of Time (based on Stephen Hawking's popular physics book); Mishima, by Paul Schrader or Kundun, by Martin Scorsese. In 2019, under the production of Danilo Álvarez, he publishes Venezuelan Elegy with James Strauss and the Venezuela Symphony Orchestra as a way to encourage youth in the midst of the political hostilities that Venezuela is facing at that time.

Consecration

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Glass's projects included two highly prestigious opera commissions, based on the lives of two explorers, Christopher Columbus (The Voyage [1990], commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera, to a libretto by David Henry Hwang), and Vasco da Gama (White Raven) [1991], a collaboration with Robert Wilson and composed for the opening of the Expo &# 39;98.

Already in the year 1990 Philip Glass acquired universal fame. His music throughout this period has moved further and further away from minimalism and his initial personal approaches to reach more commercial positions full of "Glassian" clichés, such as his characteristic arpeggios or tonal transitions. Already at the beginning of the XXI century his music has continued to be a reason for admiration and criticism. Among his main works are his Seventh Symphony (Toltec), inspired by the music of the original peoples of Mexico; his Eighth Symphony, full of melodic and harmonic variations; and the American Civil War opera Appomattox.

Controversy

In Brazil, Glass has been criticized by environmentalists for what they call his foolishness in writing the music Itaipu (1989) in which, using symphony orchestra and chorus, the composer praised the large hydroelectric project built by the Brazilian military during the dictatorship. At that time the military prohibited protests against the construction of the dam. The dam that was created forever destroyed vast areas of tropical flora and drowned the Saltos del Guairá, until then the largest waterfall in the world.

Works

Awards

Oscar

BAFTA Awards