Repetitive Structures: Who is Philip Glass?

Philip Glass, in his own words, is an American composer of "music with repetitive structures." Often referred to as a Minimalist, he first emerged from the Minimalism movement in the 1960s and remains as one of its most noteworthy American contributors, but Glass has never liked the term and disassociates from it. While his music still reveals some minimalist influences and structural attributes from those earlier times, it has long since flourished and evolved into his own brand of contemporary classical music. His compositional output is prolific, including music for chamber, choir, orchestra, opera, his own ensemble and, recently, even a video game; recordings and sheet music of his compositions, all indelibly unique in style, have attained more contemporary mainstream access than those of his fellow, co-founding pioneer minimalists who are still actively composing. His music receives radio play in both esoteric and traditional programming genres: the eclectic, experimental—and often dominated by electronic works—Ambient or "Space Music," and Classical. His music is featured in films, including documentaries and Hollywood features. Glass won a Golden Globe and has earned three Academy Awards nominations for his original film scores.

Whether or not one finds it appealing, once exposed to the music of Philip Glass, it's nearly impossible not to immediately recognize his signature reiterative style, often invoking a compelling desire to stick Glass with a brand of one kind or another. In such a case, "Minimalist" is an easy fallback or default, but it hardly does him justice.

Minimalism, as the idiom applies to music, was arguably first coined in 1968, in a music review by composer Michael Nyman, who later expanded on the term in his influential, 1974 book, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond. However, the term's origin was also claimed by composer Tom Johnson, writing as a music critic for the Village Voice, and who was one of the few composers to self-identify as a minimalist. As he described the term:

The idea of minimalism is much larger than most people realize. It includes, by definition, any music that works with limited or minimal materials: pieces that use only a few notes, pieces that use only a few words of text, or pieces written for very limited instruments, such as antique cymbals, bicycle wheels, or whiskey glasses. It includes pieces that sustain one basic electronic rumble for a long time. It includes pieces made exclusively from recordings of rivers and streams. It includes pieces that move in endless circles. It includes pieces that set up an unmoving wall of saxophone sound. It includes pieces that take a very long time to move gradually from one kind of music to another kind. It includes pieces that permit all possible pitches, as long as they fall between C and D. It includes pieces that slow the tempo down to two or three notes per minute.

Glass's pilot accomplishments along the way of forging his characteristic style do, on a piece by piece basis, frequently align with one or more or many of these minimalist attributes; for a classically trained musician navigating a musical career, intrepidly open to artistic experimentation, some minimalism of a natural sort (fewer notes, limited instruments, found objects and sounds, etc.) was often contingent and necessitated by opportunity, budgets, schedules and performance space.

But the overall body of Glass's work reveals a courageous determination to harmonically fuse those "minimalist" contraventions with the orchestrated richness and verve of the classical music he'd been weaned on. A portion of Tom Johnson's definition of musical minimalism still fairly describes the flavor of compositions by Glass: "pieces that take a very long time to move gradually from one kind of music to another kind." Nearly every Glass composition, regardless of its rhythmic tempo—which frequently is energetic, radiant, and counter-intuitive to the mood—tends to develop its phases and phrasing without haste, allowing each of the structural components to emerge and assertively establish their presence, gradually layering and building an aurally dense and robust sonic tapestry of repetitive rhythmic, melodic and harmonic structures.

Glass benefited from early classical influences and training.  Born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1937, Philip Morris Glass was the son of a record store owner.  As a young boy he collected classical music records that mainly comprised of his father's less popular, unsold stock.  He also gained an early appreciation of how the record industry works. 

While still a child he studied flute at Baltimore's Peabody Institute, a renown conservatory of John Hopkins University.  By age 15 he was enrolled in an accelerated program at the University of Chicago, studying Philosophy and Mathematics, and making his first forays into classical composition.  At age 18 he made his first journey to France, becoming enamored with the bohemian life, and intrigued by the films of Jean Cocteau and his paradoxical construct of the "classical avant-garde."  Glass returned to America and attended the Juilliard School of Music, switching from flute to keyboard as his primary instrument.  In 1959 he won the BMI Student Composer Award, a prestigious prize for young composers.  He left Juilliard in 1962 and moved to Pittsburgh, where he composed chamber, orchestral and choral music, working as a composer-in-residence for the public school system.  He was hardly ready to settle into classical, academic complacency.

Glass returned to France in 1964 after receiving a Fulbright Scholarship, initially focusing his compositional studies on Mozart and Bach, as well as the French modern classical music scene, but the latter ultimately left him unimpressed. He was more inspired by the French New Wave films that were blasting away at the establishment "rules" of filmmaking, and found equal inspiration from experimental theater performances. He eagerly engaged in the experimental theater scene (he later co-founded Mabou Mines, a New York based avant-garde theater group), and created what many consider his first minimalist composition, for a staged production of Samuel Beckett's one-act play, Play. Beckett's novels and plays were idiomatically regarded as works of minimalism, and Glass was inspired by the play's open-ended and repetitive structure.

During this same period, Glass worked as a musical director and composer on a soundtrack for the 1966 cult film, Chappaqua, where he co-wrote the score with Indian musician, Ravi Shankar. The exposure to Shankar and his frequent accompanist, Alla Rakha, was a key pivot point for Glass, further encouraging his deeper exploration of "repetitive structures," after embracing the repetitive and additive process (one-two, one-two-three...) of Indian music rhythms.

Glass soon-after renounced his earlier, classical compositional work in favor of a committed pursuit of repetitive, additive rhythms with aggressive tempos and dramatic phrasing derived from the influences of experimental theater.

Back in New York, in 1967, Glass formed an ensemble that included musician Steve Reich, also a pioneer composer of music minimalism. Reich's earliest forays into minimalism included a technique known as phasing, where two sound sources play identical, repetitive sequences at slightly different speeds, causing them to drift in and out of unison. The technique was first explored using looped taped sequences of non-musical sounds. Reich expanded its use to his compositions, creating repetitive musical phrases for performance on two or more pianos, and eventually further, writing for multiple performers and instruments.

Classical performers and traditional performance spaces for debuting radical new ideas in music were difficult to come by. Glass's new ensemble consisted of fellow pioneering minimalists and dauntless music students. They played smaller venues, mainly in SoHo district galleries and studio lofts, with limited attendance that mostly comprised of like-minded, sympathetic, avant-garde artists from both visual and performance disciplines. The first concert of Glass's new minimalist music was performed in 1968 at a small avant-garde film archive in Greenwich Village, and featured nine new compositions, including "Strung Out" (music for amplified solo violin), "Gradus" (for solo saxophone), "1+1" (for amplified tabletop) and Music in the Shape of a Square (for two flutes), performed while moving about the space, playing from sheet music that had been tacked up on the wall.

The debut performance of Glass's new music was greeted with enthusiasm, but as his music gained further exposure through the remaining decade of the '60s and into the early '70s, reactions became considerably more mixed. Though later venues were still not typical ones for music performances, they were increasingly prestigious, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim and the Royal College of Art. Glass continued to receive praise from younger artists and musicians, particularly those who were exploring their own territory, distancing themselves from even the newer popular music of the times, but reactions from establishment music critics was often unsympathetically hostile. Minimalism in music was often dismissed outright as repetitious, arhythmic, atonal and dissonant—dissonance being a valid technical term for an unstable harmonic mode that is a commonly acceptable and necessary component of musical tension, and a hallmark of modern classical music of the 20th century, but "dissonant," when used by critics, is typically uncharitable and derogatory—and, in a word, "annoying."

Glass and Reich split up in 1971, with Reich forming his own ensemble. The new Philip Glass Ensemble was comprised of keyboards, wind instruments and soprano voices, all amplified and mixed. While Glass continued his exploration of additive repetition as a primary minimalist technique, he applied a more studied and disciplined approach, more in line with his formal training, decidedly favoring a consonant (versus dissonant) harmonic approach. His compositions would become less severe, more dramatic and elaborate, resulting in his pinnacle, minimalist piece, Music in Twelve Parts, a four hour performance in its entirety. Glass accepts that "minimalism" accurately describes his work produced during the eight or nine year period leading up to and including 1974, but he considers Music in Twelve Parts to be his final minimalist work.

The following year, 1975, Glass reviewed and assessed the direction his music had taken since renouncing his earliest works. As he saw it, his minimalist work had focused on a calculated reduction of structure. Much like the filmmakers of the French New Wave, he'd been deconstructing the rules and structures of his classical influences. He resolved that it was time to understand what kind of structure, exactly, he wanted to create and build his work on. His conclusion was to apply his acquired sense of repetition and addition—previously applied primarily to rhythmic structuring and reiterative melodies—to his method of building harmonic progression, and eventually it became a foundational framework to every aspect of his overall compositional approach. Over time his music found its way back to a more traditional, dramatic and narrative approach, though still, always, with his unique application of "repetitive structures."

Working through his new approach he produced a series of instrumental works called, "Another Look at Harmony," parts of which were included in a collaborative production, with theater visionary Robert Wilson, that became Glass's first opera, Einstein on the Beach, scored for and performed by the Philip Glass Ensemble. The opera premiered in France in 1976, playing to packed houses in Avignon and Paris, and was performed later the same year at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. No doubt, Glass was still breaking rules. From the biography by Tim Page, at PhilipGlass.com:

It was five hours long, with no intermission; the audience was invited to wander in and out at liberty throughout the performance. Instead of a plot, Glass and Wilson presented a poetic look at the life and legacy of Albert Einstein: scientist, humanist, amateur musician -- and the man whose theories led to the splitting of the atom. Glass' text consisted of numbers, do-re-mi's and nonsense phrases. The stage was flooded with white light; a train moved slowly through space; a young boy threw a paper airplane, and Lucinda Childs paced back and forth, resolutely going nowhere and everywhere.

It received mixed reviews, but soon led to further projects, including more theatrical scores, documentary soundtracks and some brief tracks for the Sesame Street TV-series.

For making ends meet prior to 1978, Glass had relied mainly on his partial ownership of a moving company, and work as a part-time plumber and cab driver, but that changed for good after receiving a Rockefeller Foundation grant and a commission for new work for the Netherlands Opera. Since then Glass has composed prodigiously and collaborated with other musicians, poets and artists in all manner of contemporary media, including dance, theater and film. He's composed over 20 operas, large and small. For his first commissioned symphony he based his compositions on three tracks from the album, Low, by David Bowie, in collaboration with Brian Eno. To date, Glass has composed eight symphonies in addition to other orchestral works, concertos, solos and his major film scores. His entire body of work is tremendous. In addition he lectures and conducts workshops world-wide, remaining quite accessible to the public and apprentice musicians, and he still writes for and performs with the Philip Glass Ensemble.

Repetition, to one degree or another, of course, has long played a fundamental role in music composition. We as listeners each have our own innate and culturally developed sensibilities as to where the reasonable limits are and when that repetition becomes, for us, repetitious. By now, after over 50 years of composing, Glass has made it clear he's no longer experimenting with the minimalist limits of repetitive structure, but rather has embraced and augmented the technique as a signature, challenging style; he continually challenges himself to expand and evolve the territorial domain of structural repetition in contemporary classical music, and continually challenges us to come along for the ride.