Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 41

Monsters of Grace

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unorthodox but engaging education in the classics. As his biography on the Mon
sters o f Grace website notes,
Glass discovered music in his father’s radio repair shop. In ad
dition to servicing radios, Ben Glass carried a line of records
and, when certain ones sold poorly, he would take them home
and play them for his three children, trying to discover why they
didn’t appeal to customers. These happened to be recordings of
the great chamber works, and the future composer rapidly be
came familiar with Beethoven quartets, Schubert sonatas,
Shostakovich symphonies and other music then considered ‘off
beat.’ It was not until he was in his upper teens did Glass begin
to encounter more ‘standard’ classics. {MOG website)
Glass practiced the flute and violin as a child and budding teenager, but soon grew
bored with the existing repertoire of material at his disposal, and the lack of oppor
tunities for advancement in Baltimore. Accepted at the University of Chicago,
Glass graduated at the precocious age of 19, and moved to New York City to
attend the Juilliard School. After study with such notables as composer Darius
Milhand and Nadia Boulanger, Glass garnered an assignment transcribing Ravi
Shankar’s music into western notation as part of a film project. Immediately over
whelmed by the impact of Shankar’s music. Glass embarked on an extended trip
through India, North Africa and the Himalayas, gathering additional knowledge
which he would later incorporate into his own works.
By 1974, Glass had written a large amount of music for the Mabou Mines
(a group he co-founded), and also started the Philip Glass Ensemble, which exists
to this day, to perform his new work. In 1976, Glass and Robert Wilson co-created
Einstein on the Beach, merging Wilson’s slow-motion theatrical spectacle with
Glass’s trance-like musical score, creating one of the key artifacts of performance
art in the process. Since that time, Philip Glass has engaged in a wide variety of
projects, including the operas The Fall o f the House o f Usher, Satyagraha and
Hydrogen Jukebox, as well as film scores for The Thin Blue Line, Kundun,
Koyaanisqatsi, Mishima, and/f Brief History o f Time. In addition. Glass has com
posed three operas based on the works of Jean Cocteau, and is working at this
writing on a new project. White Raven, which will be yet another collaboration
with Robert Wilson. This outline is the merest sketch of Glass’s work as a com
poser for opera, theatre and film; his prolificity is matched only by the high degree
of quality he brings to each new project (for more details, see the MOG website).
Robert Wilson, bom in Waco, TX, received his education at the Univer
sity of Texas, and the Pratt Institute in New York City, where he was granted a