A brief biography
American composer Philip Glass was born in Baltimore and studied at the Juilliard School, with Darius Milhaud at the Aspen Festival, and with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. He is one of the most prolific and influential compositional voices of the modern era, creating distinguished works for orchestra, chamber groups and solo instruments, as well as operas and film scores. Glass’s works for the opera house include Einstein on the Beach, Akhnaten, The Voyage, the CIVIL warS, The Making of The Representative for Planet 8, Waiting for the Barbarians, Appomattox, and Satyagraha, his meditation on the life of Mahatma Gandhi, which had its Met premiere in 2008.
Glass has collaborated with many popular artists including Paul Simon, Linda Ronstadt, Yo-Yo Ma, Doris Lessing, Ravi Shankar, Martin Scorsese, Allen Ginsberg, David Byrne, David Bowie, Brian Eno, Patti Smith, Woody Allen, and Leonard Cohen.
Glass wins OPERA NEWS Award
On November 19, Philip Glass will be among the five recipients of the fifth annual Opera News Awards. He is the only composer to be recognized this year and will be presented the award with fellow honorees, soprano Martina Arroyo, mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, bass-baritone Gerald Finley, and mezzo-soprano Shirley Verrett. The OPERA NEWS Awards were created in 2005 to mark the 70th anniversary of the Metropolitan Opera Guild. The awards recognize five individuals annually for distinguished achievement in the field of opera.
OPERA NEWS says: “Philip Glass’s artistic voice — mesmeric yet lucid — remains striking and singular in an era when contemporary music often attempts to encompass all styles at once. By composing operas that have celebrated the moral beacons of the twentieth century, Glass has welcomed modernity's heroes, as well as untold audiences, into the most ennobling of
art forms.”
Listen to Glass’s music
