Philip Glass. The Complete Etudes, Book 1. Anton Batagov, piano with sheet music download from our Library.

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Philip Glass

Philip Glass (Baltimore, Maryland, January 31, 1937) is an American composer of minimalist music.

As a child he studied the flute at the Peabody Conservatory and later went to the Julliard School of Music, where he began to play the piano almost exclusively.

After studying with Nadia Boulanger and working with Ravi Shankar in France, Glass traveled in 1966 to northern India, mainly for religious reasons, where he came into contact with Tibetan refugees.

He became a Buddhist and met the Dalai Lama in 1972. He is a great supporter of the Tibetan cause. It was his work with Ravi Shankar and his perception of additive rhythm in Indian music that led him to his unique style.

When he returned home, he renounced all his earlier compositions in the style of Copland and began to write austere pieces based on additive rhythms and with a sense of time influenced by Samuel Beckett, whose work he discovered component for experimental theater works.

The little esteem he feels for performers and traditional spaces lead him to form his own musical group, with which he begins to play mainly in art galleries, this being the only real connection between musical minimalism and minimalist visual art.

Over time, his works are less and less austere and more complex, ending up not being totally minimalist and culminating in Music in Twelve Parts. He then collaborated on the first opera of his Einstein on the Beach trilogy with Robert Wilson.

Glass orchestrated some instrumental parts of David Bowie’s albums Low and Heroes (Low Symphony and Heroes Symphony). A prolific musician, Philip Glass, he has orchestrated many films, including the experimental documentary Koyaanisqatsi, by Godfrey Reggio; the Errol Morris-directed biopic A Brief History of Time (based on Stephen Hawking’s popular physics book); Mishima, by Paul Schrader or Kundun, by Martin Scorsese.

Recently, Glass has composed the soundtrack for Stephen Daldry’s The Hours (2002) and Richard Eyre’s Notes on a Scandal (2006).

Philip Glass works.