Philip Glass Biography
Philip Glass is certainly the world's finest identified living serious composer owing to vast amounts of American recording contracts. He has a readily exclusive, if ever controversial, style that is both imitated and parodied the world over. He is familiar to pop audiences, crossover audiences, new music audiences, opera audiences and increasingly to chamber music audiences and symphony goers. He is in regular performance around the world performing with his ensemble; an output that generates around sixty concerts a year. Although he has written a fair amount of concert music, Glass has arguably won the most recognition for his work in dance, film, music theatre and opera.
Biography
Born in Baltimore on January 31, 1937, Philip Glass discovered music in his father's radio repair shop. In addition to servicing radios, Ben Glass carried a line of records and, when certain ones sold feebly, he would take them home and play them for his three children, trying to discover why they did not appeal to customers. These happened to be recordings of the great chamber works, and the future composer rapidly became familiar with Beethoven quartets, Schubert sonatas, Shostakovitch symphonies and other music then considered "offbeat." It was not until he was in his upper teens did Glass begin to encounter more "standard" classics.
Glass began the violin at six and became serious about music when he took up the flute at eight. However, by the time he was 15, he had become frustrated with the limited flute repertoire as well as with musical life in post-war Baltimore. During his second year in high school, he applied for admission to the University of Chicago, passed and, with his parent's encouragement, moved to Chicago where he supported himself with part-time jobs waiting tables and loading airplanes at airports. During off-hours, he practiced piano and concentrated on such composers as Ives and Webern.
Glass's history was an entirely orthodox one. He initially studied flute at the Peabody Conservatoire, then piano, harmony and composition with Louis Cheslock. He graduated in mathematics and philosophy at the age of nineteen from the university of Chicago. After attending at the Julliard Music School, he studied with Darius Milhaud (in 1960) and Nadia Boulanger (between 1964-1966) in France. Boulanger made Glass go back to the basics, as she did with all her students, and although Glass appreciated the experience in some ways, he bridled at the discipline. In addition to what he considered Boulanger's too excessive preoccupation with musical theory, nearly all the contemporary music to be heard in Paris. After that was at Pierre Boulez's Domain Musical Series - which Glass has since described as "a wasteland, dominated by these maniacs, these creeps, who were trying to make everyone write this crazy creepy music... what one looks for in a composer is that singular personality that comes out of the soul of the person - that creativity cannot be taught." This reflected later as clearly Glass felt the stress in his music as he was cornered and confined by rules and regulations; he was unable to do what he really wanted. On his own initiative, he finally decided to introduce harmonic modulation into his music because he resented the constraints of orthodox theory. "I decided to change the rules," he recalled. "I noticed I had been operating under a lot of rules that had been automatic, and that there were things that weren't possible in my music because I had made them forbidden. I said, 'Why can't I do it?' 'Well there is this rule.' 'Rule!! Who is making the rules? I'm making the rules.' Moreover, that was the end of the rule. You can learn all the rules and yet the personality of the composer was not in the rule book." A story that Philip talks about shows how his thought process developed. "I had been working with Boulanger for some years. I was in my mid-20's and I had a good grasp of harmony. I brought in a harmony exercise and she told me that it was wrong. I said 'Madame Boulanger, I know that it is correct.' I quoted all the rules, analyzed it, and proved to her that I had all the voicing correct, etc.; from the point-of-view of the rules, it was flawless! In addition, she said: 'No, no, it is still all wrong!' She grabbed a score from the piano - a Mozart piano sonata. 'This is what Mozart did.' She found an exact parallel to my passage and she said: 'look how he resolves it. The soprano resolves on the third, not the root!'...
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