Philip Glass

Amplified keyboards, winds and voice — the ensemble Philip Glass founded in New York in 1968 was assembled to play music no existing orchestra wanted, and for years it played it in lofts and galleries rather than concert halls. He had studied flute at the Peabody Preparatory, mathematics and philosophy at the University of Chicago, composition at Juilliard with Vincent Persichetti and William Bergsma, and then spent two years in Paris with Nadia Boulanger; the decisive lesson came from elsewhere, in the work of notating scores for Ravi Shankar, which sent him back to rhythm as the thing that organises musical time. Music in Similar Motion and Music with Changing Parts set out the method — small figures repeated and gradually altered until the alteration is the event. Einstein on the Beach, made with Robert Wilson in 1976, took it into the theatre with no story to carry it; Satyagraha in 1980 and Akhnaten in 1983 completed a trilogy of operas about men who changed the world by thought. The catalogue since runs to fifteen operas, fifteen symphonies, twelve concertos, nine string quartets and film scores including Koyaanisqatsi, Kundun and The Hours. He received the Kennedy Center Honors in 2018. His family were Jewish emigrants from Lithuania. He travelled in India and met the Dalai Lama in 1972, and in 1984 he was asked to write music for the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Los Angeles. In the Penal Colony, after Kafka, was finished in 2001.