Glassworlds Volume 3 Metamorphosis

Description

Born in 1937, Philip Glass discovered “modern” music in his teens, while working in his father’s record store in Baltimore. When he earned his master’s degree in composition at Juilliard in 1962, it capped several years of study with William Bergsma, Vincent Persichetti and Darius Milhaud among his teachers. His early works adhered to the twelve-tone system and other progressive techniques, but although he met with some success (which earned him a BMI award and a Ford Foundation grant), he became increasingly dissatisfied with what he was writing, leading him to say that he had reached a kind of dead end and no longer believed in music. In 1964, a Fulbright scholarship took him to Paris, where he studied with Nadia Boulanger and met Ravi Shankar, the Indian sitar virtuoso. In their own ways, these two figures transformed his work. He said that Nadia Boulanger had completely overturned his technique, and that Shankar had introduced him to a vast different musical tradition of which he knew nothing. He rejected his earlier ideas and developed a system in which the modular form and repetitive structure of Indian music were combined with traditional Western ideas of melody and simple triadic harmony.