Philip Morris Glass (born January 31, 1937) is an American composer and pianist. He is widely considered one of the most important composers of the late 20th century. His music is often linked to minimalism, a style that uses repeated phrases and gradually changing layers. Glass described his work as "music with repetitive structures," a style he helped develop over time.

In 1968, Glass created the Philip Glass Ensemble. He has composed 15 operas, many chamber operas and musical theatre pieces, 15 symphonies, 12 concertos, nine string quartets, various chamber music works, and many film scores. He has been nominated for four Grammy Awards, including two for Best Contemporary Classical Composition for Satyagraha (1987) and String Quartet No. 2 (1988). He has also received three Academy Award nominations for Best Original Score for Kundun (1997), The Hours (2002), and Notes on a Scandal (2006). His film scores include Koyaanisqatsi (1982), Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), Hamburger Hill (1987), The Thin Blue Line (1988), Candyman (1992), The Truman Show (1998), and The Illusionist (2006).

Glass is known for composing operas such as Einstein on the Beach (1976), Satyagraha (1980), Akhnaten (1983), The Voyage (1992), and The Perfect American (2013). He also composed scores for Broadway productions, including revivals of The Elephant Man (2002), The Crucible (2016), and King Lear (2019). For King Lear, he won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Music in a Play.

Glass has received many honors, including a BAFTA Award, a Drama Desk Award, and a Golden Globe Award. He has also been nominated for three Academy Awards, four Grammy Awards, and a Primetime Emmy Award. Other awards include the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (1995), the National Medal of Arts (2010), the Kennedy Center Honors (2018), and the Grammy Trustees Award (2020). In 2025, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the World Soundtrack Academy.

Early life and education

Philip Glass was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on January 31, 1937, to Ida (née Gouline) and Benjamin Charles Glass. His family were Latvian-Jewish and Russian-Jewish immigrants. His father owned a record store, and his mother worked as a librarian. In his memoir, Glass described how his mother helped Jewish people who survived the Holocaust after World War II. She invited newly arrived immigrants to stay at their home until they could find jobs and housing. She also created a plan to teach them English and skills to help them find work. His sister, Sheppie, later helped others as a member of the International Rescue Committee. Sheppie died in April 2024 at the age of 88 and was married to Morton I. Abramowitz.

Glass developed an interest in music through his father, who later shared that his family had many musicians. His cousin, Cevia, was a classical pianist, and other relatives had worked in vaudeville. Glass also learned that his family was related to Al Jolson. His father’s record store received free copies of new recordings, which Glass listened to extensively. This experience helped him learn about and develop a taste for different types of music. His father’s store became known in Baltimore for offering modern music. Glass collected many records from his father’s store, including works by composers like Hindemith, Bartók, Schoenberg, Shostakovich, Beethoven, and Schubert. Glass said Schubert’s music had a major influence on him. In a 2011 interview, he stated that Schubert, who shares his birthday, is his favorite composer.

Glass studied the flute as a child at the Peabody Preparatory of the Peabody Institute of Music. At age 15, he joined an accelerated college program at the University of Chicago, where he studied mathematics and philosophy. In Chicago, he discovered the music of Anton Webern and composed a twelve-tone string trio. In 1954, Glass traveled to Paris, where he saw films by Jean Cocteau. These films deeply influenced him. He visited artists’ studios and saw their work. He later said the "bohemian life" shown in Cocteau’s film Orphée was the lifestyle he admired and the people he associated with.

Glass studied at the Juilliard School of Music, where he focused on the keyboard. His composition teachers included Vincent Persichetti and William Bergsma. His classmates included Steve Reich and Peter Schickele. In 1959, he won the BMI Student Composer Awards, an international prize for young composers. In 1960, he studied with Darius Milhaud at the Aspen Music Festival and composed a violin concerto for a fellow student, Dorothy Pixley-Rothschild. After graduating from Juilliard in 1962, Glass moved to Pittsburgh and worked as a school-based composer-in-residence in the public school system. There, he created choral, chamber, and orchestral music.

Career

In 1964, Glass received a Fulbright Scholarship. He studied in Paris with the renowned composition teacher Nadia Boulanger from autumn 1964 to summer 1966. This experience influenced his work throughout his life, as he said in 1979: "The composers I studied with Boulanger are the people I still think about most—Bach and Mozart."

Glass later wrote in his autobiography Music by Philip Glass (1987) that the new music performed at Pierre Boulez's Domaine Musical concerts in Paris lacked excitement for him, except for works by John Cage and Morton Feldman. However, he was deeply impressed by new films and theatre performances. His move away from modernist composers like Boulez and Stockhausen was not a complete rejection. He explained: "That generation wanted disciples, and because we did not join, it was thought we hated their music, which was not true. We had studied them at Juilliard and knew their work. How can you reject Berio? Early works by Stockhausen are still beautiful. But there was no point in trying to improve on their music, so we started somewhere else."

During this time, Glass encountered films from the French New Wave, such as those by Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, which changed the rules set by older artists. He made friends with American visual artists (like sculptor Richard Serra and his wife Nancy Graves), actors, and directors (including JoAnne Akalaitis, Ruth Maleczech, David Warrilow, and Lee Breuer, with whom he later founded the experimental theatre group Mabou Mines). With Akalaitis (they married in 1965), Glass attended performances by theatre groups such as Jean-Louis Barrault's Odéon theatre, The Living Theatre, and the Berliner Ensemble from 1964 to 1965. These experiences led to a collaboration with Breuer, for which Glass composed music for a 1965 staging of Samuel Beckett's Comédie (Play, 1963). The piece, written for two soprano saxophones, was directly influenced by the play's open-ended, repetitive, and almost musical structure. It was the first of four early works in a minimalist, yet still dissonant, style. In 1966, Glass also acted as music director for a Breuer production of Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children, featuring a theatre score by Paul Dessau.

At the same time, Glass worked as a music director and composer on the film Chappaqua (1966) with Ravi Shankar and Alla Rakha. This collaboration added another important influence on his musical thinking. His distinctive style developed from his work with Shankar and Rakha, who showed him how rhythm in Indian music is entirely additive. He abandoned compositions in a modern style similar to Milhaud's, Aaron Copland's, and Samuel Barber's, and began writing pieces based on repetitive structures from Indian music and a sense of time influenced by Samuel Beckett. These included a piece for two actresses and a chamber ensemble, and his first numbered string quartet (No. 1, 1966).

In 1966, Glass left Paris for northern India, where he met Tibetan refugees and began to learn about Buddhism. He met Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, in 1972 and has supported Tibetan independence since then.

Glass' musical style is instantly recognizable, with repeating rhythms, flowing musical patterns, and harmonic structures that change over time. This style has become a familiar part of modern culture and is widely available on platforms like YouTube.

Shortly after arriving in New York City in March 1967, Glass attended a performance of Steve Reich's works, including the groundbreaking minimalist piece Piano Phase, which deeply influenced him. He simplified his style and adopted a "consonant vocabulary" (using simple, harmonious sounds). Finding little support from traditional performers or venues, Glass formed an ensemble with fellow student Jon Gibson and others, performing mainly in art galleries and studio lofts in SoHo. Visual artist Richard Serra helped Glass connect with gallery spaces and collaborated on sculptures, films, and installations. From 1971 to 1974, Glass worked as Serra's regular studio assistant.

Between summer 1967 and the end of 1968, Glass composed nine works, including Strung Out (for amplified solo violin, 1967), Gradus (for solo saxophone, 1968), Music in the Shape of a Square (for two flutes, 1968, an homage to Erik Satie), How Now (for solo piano, 1968), and 1+1 (for amplified tabletop, 1968). These pieces were designed to explore his new minimalist approach. The first concert of his new music was at Jonas Mekas's Film-Makers Cinemathèque (Anthology Film Archives) in September 1968. This concert included Strung Out (performed by violinist Pixley-Rothschild) and Music in the Shape of a Square (performed by Glass and Gibson). The musical scores were pinned to the wall, and performers had to move while playing. The audience, mostly visual and performance artists, responded enthusiastically to his reductive style.

In addition to his music career, Glass ran a moving company with his cousin, sculptor Jene Highstein, and worked as a plumber and cab driver (1973–1978). He recalls installing a dishwasher and looking up to see Robert Hughes, Time magazine

Influences and collaborations

Philip Glass describes himself as a "classicist," meaning he values traditional music styles. He studied harmony and counterpoint, the way different musical parts work together, and learned from composers like Franz Schubert, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart under Nadia Boulanger. The influence of Jean Sibelius can be heard in the lyrical, sweeping, and stark qualities of Glass's music. In addition to composing in the Western classical tradition, his music connects to rock, ambient music, electronic music, and world music. Early supporters of his minimalist style include musicians Brian Eno and David Bowie. In the 1990s, Glass composed the symphonies Low (1992) and Heroes (1996), which were inspired by the Bowie-Eno collaboration albums Low and Heroes from the late 1970s.

Glass has worked with many recording artists, including Paul Simon, Suzanne Vega, Mick Jagger, Leonard Cohen, David Byrne, Uakti, Natalie Merchant, S'Express (Glass remixed their song Hey Music Lover in 1989), and Aphex Twin (Glass created an orchestral version of Icct Hedral in 1995 on the Donkey Rhubarb EP). His influence can be seen in the work of musicians like Mike Oldfield (who used parts from Glass's North Star in Platinum) and bands such as Tangerine Dream and Talking Heads. Glass and sound designer Kurt Munkacsi co-created the American post-punk/new wave band Polyrock (1978 to the mid-1980s). They also recorded The Manson Family (An Opera) in 1991, which featured punk musician Iggy Pop, and a second (unreleased) version of the work that included poet Allen Ginsberg.

Glass has collaborated with many artists, including visual artists (Richard Serra, Chuck Close, Fredericka Foster), writers (Doris Lessing, David Henry Hwang, Allen Ginsberg), film and theatre directors (Errol Morris, Robert Wilson, JoAnne Akalaitis, Godfrey Reggio, Paul Schrader, Martin Scorsese, Christopher Hampton, Bernard Rose, and others), choreographers (Lucinda Childs, Jerome Robbins, Twyla Tharp), and musicians and composers (Ravi Shankar, David Byrne, conductor Dennis Russell Davies, Foday Musa Suso, Laurie Anderson, Linda Ronstadt, Paul Simon, Pierce Turner, Joan La Barbara, Arthur Russell, David Bowie, Brian Eno, Roberto Carnevale, Patti Smith, Aphex Twin, Lisa Bielawa, Andrew Shapiro, John Moran, Bryce Dessner, and Nico Muhly). Recent collaborators include fellow New Yorker writer Woody Allen and Stephen Colbert.

Glass began using the Farfisa portable organ for convenience and has performed with it in concerts. It appears on recordings such as North Star and Dance Nos. 1–5.

Music for film

Philip Glass has written music for many films. His first film score was for Koyaanisqatsi (1982), an orchestral piece. He later composed scores for two biopics: Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), which inspired his String Quartet No. 3, and Kundun (1997), a film about the Dalai Lama, for which he received his first Academy Award nomination. In 1968, he composed and conducted the score for Railroaded, a minimalist comedy short directed by Harrison Engle, performed by the Philip Glass Ensemble. This was one of his earliest film projects.

After scoring Hamburger Hill (1987), Glass began working with filmmaker Errol Morris, creating music for documentaries such as The Thin Blue Line (1988) and A Brief History of Time (1991). He also continued composing for the Qatsi trilogy, including Powaqqatsi (1988) and Naqoyqatsi (2002). In 1995, he composed the theme for Evidence, a short film by Jonathan Demme. He made a brief appearance as a pianist in The Truman Show (1998), a film that uses music from Powaqqatsi, Anima Mundi, Mishima, and three original tracks by Glass. During the 1990s, he also composed scores for Bent (1997), Candyman (1992) and its sequel Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh (1995), and a film adaptation of The Secret Agent (1996).

In 1999, Glass created a new soundtrack for the 1931 film Dracula. His work on The Hours (2002) earned him a second Academy Award nomination. The repeating patterns in his music help provide stability and contrast to the film’s story, which moves across time and place. Director Stephen Daldry said Glass’s music acts like “another stream of consciousness, another character” in the film. He later composed music for another Morris documentary, The Fog of War (2003). In the mid-2000s, he scored films such as Secret Window (2004), Neverwas (2005), The Illusionist (2006), and Notes on a Scandal (2006), earning his third Academy Award nomination for the latter. Recent film scores include No Reservations (Glass appears briefly in the film), Cassandra’s Dream (2007), Les Regrets (2009), Mr. Nice (2010), the Brazilian film Nosso Lar (2010), and Fantastic Four (2015, with Marco Beltrami). In 2009, he composed the theme for Transcendent Man, a film about Ray Kurzweil.

In the 2000s, Glass’s 1980s work gained new attention. His Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (1987) appeared in the French film The Moustache (2005), and his Metamorphosis One from Solo Piano (1989) was used in Battlestar Galactica and Person of Interest. In 2008, Grand Theft Auto IV included his piece “Pruit Igoe” from Koyaanisqatsi. The film Watchmen (2009) used “Pruit Igoe,” “Prophecies” from Koyaanisqatsi, “Something She Has to Do” from The Hours, and “Protest” from Satyagraha. In 2013, Glass contributed a piano piece called “Duet” to Stoker, performed in the film. He also composed for the documentary The General & Me (2017) and scored Jane (2017), a film about primatologist Jane Goodall.

Glass’s music was used in two award-winning films by Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev: Elena (2011) and Leviathan (2014). For television, he composed the theme for Night Stalker (2005) and the soundtrack for Tales from the Loop (2020). His piece “Confrontation and Rescue” from Satyagraha was used in Stranger Things (2019), and other works from Akhnaten and Koyaanisqatsi appeared in the show.

Other business ventures

In 1977, Glass created a music publisher and management company called Dunvagen Music Publishers. This company continues to handle his publishing and management work today.

In 1970, Glass and Klaus Kertess, who owned the Bykert Gallery, started a record label named Chatham Square Productions. The name came from the location of a studio used by a member of the Philip Glass Ensemble, Dick Landry. In 1993, Glass founded another record label called Point Music. In 1997, Point Music released Music for Airports, a live, instrumental version of Brian Eno’s composition of the same name, performed by Bang on a Can All-Stars. In 2002, Glass, along with producer Kurt Munkacsi and artist Don Christensen, established Orange Mountain Music. This company focused on creating a recording legacy for Philip Glass. To date, it has released 60 albums of Glass’s music.

In 1992, Glass built his own recording studio in New York City and named it Looking Glass Studios. In addition to recording his own projects, the studio was used by other artists, including Beck, Bjork, Sheryl Crow, The Cure, Grace Jones, Lou Reed, and Roger Waters. The studio closed in February 2009.

Personal life

Philip Glass lives in New York City and in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. He has described himself as "a Jewish-Taoist-Hindu-Toltec-Buddhist" and supports the movement for Tibetan independence. In 1987, he helped start Tibet House US with Columbia University professor Robert Thurman and actor Richard Gere, at the request of the 14th Dalai Lama. He is also chairperson of the magazine Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Glass is a vegetarian.

Glass has been married four times and has four children and one granddaughter.

• His first marriage was to theater director JoAnne Akalaitis (married in 1965, divorced in 1980). They have two children: Juliet (born 1968) and Zachary (born 1971).
• His second marriage was to Luba Burtyk (married in 1980), who is a doctor.
• His third wife, artist Candy Jernigan, died from liver cancer in 1991 at the age of 39.
• His fourth marriage was to restaurant manager Holly Critchlow (married in 2001). They later divorced and had two sons: Cameron (born 2002) and Marlowe (born 2003).

Glass had a romantic relationship with cellist Wendy Sutter for about five years. As of December 2018, his partner was Japanese-born dancer Saori Tsukada.

Glass is the first cousin once removed of Ira Glass, the host of the radio show This American Life. Ira interviewed Glass onstage at Chicago's Field Museum, and this interview was broadcast on NPR's Fresh Air. Ira also interviewed Glass a second time at a fundraiser for St. Ann's Warehouse. This interview was given as a gift to public-radio listeners during a fundraising event in 2010. Ira and Glass recorded a version of a composition Glass wrote to accompany his friend Allen Ginsberg's poem "Wichita Vortex Sutra." In 2014, This American Life broadcast a live performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music that included the world premiere of the opera Help, a short monodrama that Philip Glass wrote for the occasion.

Critical reception

Musical Opinion stated, "Philip Glass must be one of the most influential living composers." The National Endowment for the Arts noted that many of his operas have been performed by the world's leading opera houses and said, "He is the first composer to attract a large audience across many age groups in opera houses, concert halls, dance performances, film, and popular music." Classical Music Review described his opera Akhnaten as "a musically complex and impressive work." The New York Metropolitan Opera's production of Akhnaten won the Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording in 2022.

Justin Davidson of New York magazine criticized Glass, writing, "Glass never had a good idea he didn't repeat too many times: He plays a memorable musical pattern 30 times, until it is time to leave." Richard Schickel of Time criticized Glass's score for The Hours, stating, "This fails to give meaning to the characters' lives or add depth to a serious and unengaging film, for which Philip Glass unknowingly provides the perfect score—lacking melody, feeling heavy, and being boring and overly self-important."

Works about Glass

• Music with Roots in the Aether: Opera for Television (1976). Tape 2: Philip Glass. Produced and directed by Robert Ashley
• Philip Glass, from Four American Composers (1983); directed by Peter Greenaway
• A Composer's Notes: Philip Glass and the Making of an Opera (1985); directed by Michael Blackwood
• Einstein on the Beach: The Changing Image of Opera (1986); directed by Mark Obenhaus
• Philip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread (1994); written by David Ives
• Looking Glass (2005); directed by Éric Darmon
• Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts (2007); directed by Scott Hicks