A Humble Origin 

Philip Glass was born on January 31, 1937, into a home brimming with books, music, and the echoes of history. His mother, Ida, a librarian, nurtured in him a respect for culture and learning, taking him on weekly expeditions to the library. The family also housed Holocaust survivors—part of Ida’s commitment to offering refuge and English lessons. Growing up in a Latvian-Jewish and Russian-Jewish household during World War II, Glass learned early how fragile and corrupt power systems can be, an awareness that would later inform the spiritual and political undercurrents in works like Satyagraha and Akhnaten. 

Music had long been part of the Glasses’ DNA: a classical pianist cousin, vaudeville-performer relatives, and even a distant connection to Al Jolson. Benjamin Glass, Philip’s father, ran a record store and spent his nights exploring music from around the world until only sleep interrupted him. He offered his customers the same sense of discovery by allowing them to return records they didn’t enjoy. This drive for discovery continues in Glass’s work.  

But Glass didn’t begin as a composer. At just 15, he left Baltimore for Chicago to study mathematics and philosophy. In another world, Glass may have become a great academic, but an encounter with the music of Anton Webern—spare, concise, structurally radical—awakened something in him. Webern’s work felt like a portal to another world, sparking Glass’s desire to create music of his own. 

Still unsure how an artist’s life should look, he kept his music private until a 1954 trip to Paris changed everything. There, he encountered Jean Cocteau’s Orphée, a film whose dreamlike portrayal of bohemian life mirrored the feeling he got from Webern’s music. For the first time, the life of an artist didn’t just feel inspirational; it felt possible. 

He dove into his music studies at Juilliard in 1957, then worked as a school-based composer-in-residence in Pittsburgh to save enough money to return to Paris to study under the legendary Nadia Boulanger. Under her “iron hand in a velvet glove,” Glass transformed from a curious young musician into a disciplined, fiercely individual composer. 

A Visual Existence 

If you were a classical composer in the 1960s, modernism was your destiny. Giants like Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen dominated the field, and their successors were expected to extend the movement’s sharp-edged complexity. But Glass didn't see a need to do someone else’s style when they were already doing a fine job at it. 

Glass was more inspired by the French New Wave, a film movement that saw young directors breaking all the established rules. He was living the life he saw depicted in Cocteau’s film and fell in with a bohemian community, among them his future wife JoAnne Akalaitis, who inducted him into France’s experimental theater world. Through Akalaitis, he met director/playwright Lee Breuer, who hired Glass to write music for a production of Samuel Beckett’s Play. Its cyclical, ambiguous ending fascinated Glass and inspired him to explore a new musical language built on repetition, reduction, and gradual transformation, known as minimalism. 

Traditional concert halls saw minimalism as a step back from modernism, so they rejected showcasing Glass, but visual artists embraced him wholeheartedly. Experimental film director Jonas Mekas hosted performances at his cinematheque, Anthology Film Archives; American artist Richard Serra scheduled performances for Glass in art galleries. Glass later repaid him by serving as his studio assistant in New York, lugging steel and mixing concrete by day and composing by night. 

When he wasn’t Serra’s assistant, he was working as a plumber, a cab driver, or in a moving company with his cousin, sculptor Jene Highstein, to pay the bills. Throughout the ’70s, it didn’t matter that Glass was being rejected or had to work multiple day jobs—he had a vision, and people were starting to get it. 

The late ‘60s-’70s saw a new wave of pop innovators rise to prominence such as David Bowie, Brian Eno, Paul Simon, Linda Ronstadt, David Byrne, and Leonard Cohen. What these artists shared was a deep admiration for Glass’s work, citing his music as an influence and carrying his ideas into the popular soundscape. 

Glass’s work throughout the 1960s made him a fixture of the avant-garde music scene and began to bring him wider recognition. But as the ’70s rolled around and his popularity grew, he felt a familiar itch—the urge to transform once again. 

A Spiritual Existence 

The inklings of that transformation began in 1965 on the set of Conrad Rooks’ film Chappaqua, where Glass met Indian musicians Ravi Shankar and Alla Rakha. Their rhythmic language—intricate, cyclical, mathematically alive—reshaped his understanding of rhythm in music, starting a deep fascination with Eastern music theory. 

Glass briefly moved to northern India in 1966 to study Indian classical music. There he encountered Tibetan refugees, and by 1972, after meeting the 14th Dalai Lama, he formally converted to Buddhism and embraced spirituality in music. 

Glass’s music changed with him. Minimalism no longer felt like the right word for what he was doing. With Music in Twelve Parts (1971–74), he began breaking the very rules he helped establish and preferred to be known as a “composer of repetitive structures.” 

With his next series, Another Look at Harmony (1975–77), Glass caught the attention of experimental director Robert Wilson. Their collaboration resulted in Einstein on the Beach, a genre-defying, plotless opera that used repetition, imagery, and symbolism to explore Einstein as an idea rather than a biography. 

The trilogy continued with Satyagraha, inspired by Gandhi, and Akhnaten, inspired by the pharaoh whose spiritual revolution and belief in a single deity briefly upended ancient Egypt. Glass believed that attempting to portray these figures through conventional storytelling wouldn’t quite capture their inner minds and spirit. 

Einstein on the Beach initially divided critics, but for the first time in Glass’s career, the reception overall leaned positive. Today, the trilogy is a cornerstone of contemporary opera and has inspired works like John Adams’ Doctor Atomic and Nixon in China. 

Glass never abandoned the visual arts either, as he went on to score The Truman Show, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, Koyaanisqatsi, Candyman, and The Hours. His unmistakable sound has been well loved in the film world, with it being reused in hit television shows from The Simpsons to Stranger Things. 

Few composers achieve a style so distinct that it transcends art movements. Fewer still become equally at home in concert halls, theaters, art galleries, rock studios, and Hollywood soundstages. But Glass has always lived at the intersection of worlds—never settling, always transforming. 

As we prepare to present Akhnaten once more, we’re reminded that Glass’s work doesn’t simply tell a story—it guides audiences into a meditative, otherworldly state, much like the pharaoh at its center attempted in ancient Egypt. 

We invite you to get lost again in its spiritual, hypnotizing soundscape—and in the mind of a composer who has spent a lifetime refusing to be defined. 

To see Glass's work in person, click here  to get tickets for  Akhnaten.