Philip Glass
Philip Glass ( born January 31, 1937 in Baltimore, Maryland) is an American musician and composer. Considered together with Steve Reich, Terry Riley and La Monte Young as a popularizer of minimal music and with John Adams as one of the most important American composers of today.
Life
Philip Glass grew up in a Jewish family with music: his father was a record dealer in Baltimore. The boy's own first instrument was the violin, which he learned at age six, it was followed by the flute. At eight, he became a student at the Peabody Conservatory, the age of ten he was already playing in local orchestras. From 1952 to 1956 he studied mathematics and philosophy at the University of Chicago and made the Bachelor of Arts. During this time he worked intensively with the twelve-tone technique.
From 1959 to 1962 he studied especially piano at the Juilliard School of Music in New York, where he obtained his Master of Science, and in Aspen with Darius Milhaud. Meanwhile, he had turned away from the music of Schoenberg 's successor and opened the temperate American modernism, such as those embodied Aaron Copland. Even then in Pittsburgh were new works (they were later declared by Glass insignificant ). In 1964 he went to Europe, where he could be two years students with Nadia Boulanger in Paris thanks to a Fulbright scholarship, an encounter that decisively shaped him as a composer.
In Paris 1965 Glass met the Indian composer and sitar player Ravi Shankar. Shankar took there music for the film Chappaqua and wanted that his works should be playable for musicians western tradition and training. For the transcriptions for the necessary Glass was selected. So he came for the first time with Indian music and tradition of thought into contact, especially with the Asian rhythm and understanding of time. The deeply impressed Glass in 1967, took the mediation of Shankar tabla lessons with Alla Rakha and traveled to India and other countries of Asia, to the Middle East and Africa. He was a Buddhist. In 1972 he met Tenzin Gyatsho, the fourteenth Dalai Lama; since this meeting Glass is considered an important supporter of the Tibetan aspirations for freedom.
1965 Glass began composing for the ensemble cast of his first wife, JoAnne Akalaitis. His first work was a composition for two saxophones to Samuel Beckett piece play. In the next decade Glass wrote repeatedly such theater music, then own stage works. Glass himself referred to primarily as " theater composer ." 1970 Glass set to music the artistic film work " Izy Boukir " by Nancy Graves, while mainly used natural and animal sounds. After his return to the U.S. Glass Philip Glass Ensemble founded 1970, so that his compositions have been performed since no orchestra inquired him. He became his own operator, booked concert halls and occasionally places where otherwise held no contemporary music. His music of the period was played on traditional instruments, but often electronically amplified and distorted. The most important work of these years is the four -hour-long Music in Twelve Parts composition, the glass began in 1971 and until 1974, changed again and again. This work began as a single work in instrumentation for twelve instruments, but then developed into a cycle that summed up Glass's musical development since 1967.
In 1976, Glass's most successful opera Einstein on the Beach, a result of his first collaboration with Robert Wilson, premiered in Avignon, and made the composer known worldwide. After this opera Glass composed a next work for the stage, dance, film and music unifying Dance - another collaboration with the American choreographer Lucinda Childs, previously also in Einstein on the Beach as a choreographer and dance soloist worked with him. During this time the composer was not yet financially secure by his only incipient success and practiced part-time jobs as taxi drivers, plumbers, movers and waiters. 1980 was followed by another success: the Mahatma Gandhi Satyagraha opera, premiered by the Nederlandse Opera in Amsterdam under the direction of his compatriot and fellow students from the Juilliard School, Bruce Ferden. In 1983, a next opera, Akhnaten, on Pharaoh Akhenaten. These three operas form a trilogy about men who changed the world without violence.
Especially through his music for the film Koyaanisqatsi (1983 ) rose Glass' popularity outside of the classical music community, he was now considered a composer of New Age Movement. Other film music achievements of the composers were, among others, a new score for the horror film classic Dracula, the music for the Martin Scorsese film Kundun ( first Oscar nomination ), the media satire The Truman Show ( The Truman Show, winning the Golden Globe ) and for The Hours (second Oscar nomination ). Glass is one of the most prolific composers of the present: in the last 25 years he has more than twenty operas composed nine symphonies, two piano concertos and concertos for violin and saxophone quartet. These soundtracks, string quartets and music come for solo piano. In 2007, he released the double album Book of Longing - A Song Cycle based on the Poetry and Images of Leonard Cohen.
Work
" Taboos - ie things that should actually be banned - are often the most interesting. In my case, the musical materials, which are found in everyday life. "This approach was new at the beginning of Glass' career since then in the field of new music still largely dominated the serial of composing. It was especially the encounter with Ravi Shankar and Indian music, which led Glass to a hypnotic repetitive style which was associated by critics of minimal music, a music that is usually based on simple chords and arpeggios, sometimes by solo instruments, but also played by major orchestras in circular patterns. Atonality Glass avoids doing most. Peter Sellars described the effect of this music as follows: " For Phil it's a bit like a train ride all the way across America: If you look out the window, seems to spend hours to change anything, but if you look closely, you notice that the landscape very well change - slowly, almost imperceptibly. "
Glass' music has greatly permeated the everyday world. Countless television soundtracks, advertising music and advertising jingles imitate his style. He even has his whole career showed long open for popular media. His collaboration with Robert Wilson, who is a pioneer of multimedia production of musical works, this is just like his frequent work as a film composer for mainstream movies such as Candyman ( Candyman ) and The Truman Show ( The Truman Show ). Literature, history and politics Glass provide numerous ideas for compositions: Operas act of historical figures such as Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi, Akhenaten, Christopher Columbus and deal with the political situation in Tibet; literary works of Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka and JM Coetzee provide templates for compositions; Pieces of music are for representative public occasions composed such as the opening of the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles; the music of David Bowie and Brian Eno is processed into two symphonies.
Awards
2012 the artist received from the Japanese imperial house the prestigious Nobel Prize for the Arts, the Praemium Imperiale.