Philip Glass was a pioneer in the development of minimalist music. He is considered to be one of the most innovative and influential composers of the 20th century and may well be the most famous living composer in the U.S. today.
Glass was born in 1937 in Baltimore, Maryland into a family of Jewish emigrants from Lithuania. His mother was a librarian, and his father owned a record store and had a deep interest in both classical and modern music. The extended family included a number of musicians on his father's side. As a child, Glass developed a great interest in music while working at the store and learned to play the flute.
He enrolled in the University of Chicago at the early age of 15, where he studied mathematics and philosophy. After graduation, he went on to study at Juilliard, and subsequently in Aspen, Colorado with Darius Milhaud. Dissatisfied with much of the modern music of those days, he then moved to Europe, where he studied with Nadia Boulanger and Ravi Shankar.
Philip Glass has been extremely prolific, composing more than 300 works, including 15 operas, ten string quartets, eleven symphonies, concerti for piano, violin, cello, and harpsichord, vocal works, dance music, and scores for film and television.
Despite his originality — or perhaps because of it — his work has received a particularly great deal of criticism. This is due to its very slow moving and extremely repetitive nature.
One of his best-known compositions is his 1976 opera Einstein On The Beach, which is widely regarded as one of the greatest artistic works of the twentieth century. This nearly five hour opera breaks all of the rules of conventional opera, including replacing the orchestra with synthesizers, woodwinds and voices, replacing the plot with a series of powerful recurrent images, eliminating the traditional intermissions, and letting the audience to freely wander in and out during the performance.
But Glass can be more traditional and more melodic, as illustrated by, for example, his music for the 2009 movie The Hours and his 2010 work The Poet Acts.