Philip Glass

New York, early 1970s. Art critic Robert Hughes walks into his kitchen and discovers that the man mending his dishwasher is minimalist composer Philip Glass. Hughes is stunned: ‘But you are an artist’, he says. Glass replies that he is an artist, but also ‘sometimes a plumber as well’. He asks Hughes to ‘go away and let me finish’.

Another time, Glass was working as a cab driver when a woman tapped on his window and said that he shared his name with a ‘very famous composer’.

Glass worked a string of normal jobs in New York before he finally started making a living as a musician, aged 42. It’s not surprising that he struggled to make money: his music is odd, and not always accessible. During part of his opera Einstein on the Beach, the singers recite numbers at random. Einstein is five hours long, and has no interval. One of its pieces uses this repeated lyric:

“I was in this prematurely air conditioned supermarket and there were all these aisles and there were these bathing caps you could buy that had these kind of Fourth of July plumes on them that were red and yellow and blue and I wasn't tempted to buy one but I was reminded of the fact that I had been avoiding the beach.”

Another opera, Akhnaten has lyrics in Akkadian (an extinct Middle Eastern language) and Ancient Egyptian.

As well as art music, Glass has become well known for his film scores, including The Hours and Kundun. His best is probably Koyaanisqatsi, for Godfrey Reggio’s 90-minute slowmotion photography film.

Born in Baltimore in 1937, Glass was classically trained at the Julliard School of Music, but his style radically changed after he met Ravi Shankar and learned the techniques of Indian music.

Glass’ pieces are made mostly of patterns of repeated arpeggios evolving slowly over time. It’s extremely repetitive. Writing about Glass, his collaborator Robert Wilson wrote:

Phil is Philip is this is Phil is Phil is is this and this Phil is so so clear Glass clear is to b clear as a/b clear this is Phil and his is this is this and that is is Phil for me

That about sums it up. You’ll love it or hate it.

What to hear... Music in Twelve Parts, Einstein on the Beach, Glassworks, Koyaanisqatsi

Why... Glass is a founding father of minimalism; his music can be extremely hypnotic and beautiful. If you only listen to three-minute chart hits, this could come as a real shock