Who

Glass is America's most famous contemporary composer.

Backstory

Glass grew up in Baltimore in the 1940s and spent his childhood immersed in music: His father operated a radio repair shop/record store and Philip started learning the violin at six. At the precocious age of 15, he was accepted to the University of Chicago; after graduating at 19, he went to Juilliard before moving to Paris on a Fulbright scholarship to study composition for another two years. Glass won his first commission in the early '60s, when he was given the task of transcribing Ravi Shankar's score for the film Chappaqua into Western musical notation (Shankar subsequently became a huge influence on Glass's work). Glass then traveled through North Africa, India, and the Himalayas before landing in New York, where in 1967 he formed the Philip Glass Ensemble, a seven-person group played minimalist experimental music using classical techniques. He worked a series of unglamorous part-time jobs to support himself—cab driver, plumber, crane operator, furniture mover, assistant to artist Richard Serra—before critical acclaim finally arrived with Einstein on the Beach, the five-hour long opera collaboration with Robert Wilson that was performed at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1976 and was the first in a trilogy that included Satygraha (1980) and Akhnaten (1984). Glass has been exceedingly prolific ever since, producing a steady stream of operas, abstract modern pieces, dances, and film scores, collaborating with countless artists across a variety of media, and maintaining his reputation as one of the most accomplished composers of the era.

Of note

While most people would be hard-pressed to actually name a piece written by Glass, he's probably the only avant-garde composer whose name is even recognizable to most Americans, with the possible exception of his minimalist rival Steve Reich. Glass, who's known for his extraordinarily long and intricate modern compositions typically performed by classical orchestras, has managed to stay in the limelight both by being absurdly prolific and by his willingness to experiment and adapt with the times. Over the course of his career, Glass has been responsible for over 20 operas, eight symphonies, and countless collaborations, with the likes of David Henry Hwang (on the opera The Sound of a Voice), Paul Simon, Leonard Cohen, Laurie Anderson, Suzanne Vega, Allen Ginsberg, and even Aphex Twin. He's also known in the mainstream for his work on dozens of film scores such as Koyaanisqatsi, Mishima, Hamburger Hill, Errol Morris's The Thin Blue Line and Fog of War, the 1992 slasher film Candyman, Martin Scorsese's Kundun, The Truman Show (even making a cameo as a piano player in the flick), Stephen Daldry's The Hours, and 2006's Notes on a Scandal. In recent years, the septuagenarian's been plenty busy with other pursuits as well. In 2001, Glass co-founded the record label Orange Mountain Music, "to serve the fans, aficionados, and academics studying the music of Philip Glass." And he hasn't given up on opera, having debuted his latest work, a Civil War-inspired epic called Appomattox, in 2007.

Pet cause

Glass spent a good deal of time traveling through India in the '60s and '70s, which is where he first met the Dalai Lama in 1972. He's led a Buddhist "lifestyle" since then, and his advocacy on behalf of the Tibetan people led him to co-found Tibet House in 1987 with Robert Thurman and Richard Gere.

Family ties

Yes, NPR host Ira Glass is related: He's his first cousin, once removed. Naturally, Ira has interviewed Philip on the air.

Personal

The vegetarian Glass divorced his first wife, theater director JoAnne Akalaitis, in 1980; the marriage produced two children, Zachary and Juliet. After a marriage to a physician named Luba Burtyk in the '80s, he was married to the artist Candy Jernigan until she died of liver cancer in 1991. Glass has been married to his fourth wife Holly Critchlow, who's 30 years his junior, since 2001. The couple has two kids, Marlowe and Cameron, and lives in a townhouse in the East Village. They have a vacation home/former fisherman's lodge on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, where sculptor Richard Serra—whom he once worked for—also owns a home.