Philip Glass, the composer who went back to driving a cab after selling out the Met

Philip Glass

Photo: WNYC New York Public Radio / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	January 31, 1937 Baltimore, Maryland, United States
Occupation	Composer, pianist
Known for	The Truman Show
Awards	Golden Globe (shared) · BAFTA · Drama Desk · National Medal of Arts · Kennedy Center Honors · Grammy

Most people know Philip Glass through a word he has never accepted. “Minimalist” followed him out of the lofts of downtown New York and into opera houses and film studios, and it stuck because his rolling arpeggios are among the most recognizable sounds in contemporary music. He prefers to say he writes “music with repetitive structures,” a phrase so dry it reads like a refusal to be turned into a myth. The stranger part of his story is practical: the man whose opera filled the Metropolitan Opera kept driving a New York taxi afterwards, because the opera had left him broke. Close to his ninetieth birthday, he is still premiering symphonies, and still deciding, sometimes pointedly, where they are heard first.

Glass grew up in Baltimore, where he was born in 1937 into a family of Jewish emigrants from Latvia and Russia. His father, Benjamin, ran a record shop that became the city’s main source of modern music, and the boy built his first collection out of the records that did not sell. He studied flute at the Peabody Institute’s preparatory school, entered the University of Chicago at 15 to read mathematics and philosophy, and moved on to the Juilliard School, where his teachers included Vincent Persichetti and William Bergsma.

Two apprenticeships abroad changed his direction. A Fulbright grant took him to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger from 1964 to 1966, a regime of harmony and counterpoint that explains why he still calls himself a classicist. In the same years he was hired to work on the score of Conrad Rooks’s film Chappaqua alongside Ravi Shankar and the tabla player Alla Rakha, and the Indian way of building music out of rhythmic cycles gave him a method for the next decade.

Back in New York he formed the Philip Glass Ensemble, a band of keyboards, winds and amplified voice that played galleries and lofts far more often than concert halls. The rent came from elsewhere. He worked for a moving company with his cousin, the sculptor Jene Highstein, took plumbing jobs and drove a cab from 1973 to 1978. He tells of a passenger who noticed his name and informed him he shared it with a very famous composer; he did not have the heart to tell her who was driving.

Einstein on the Beach, created with the director Robert Wilson, opened at the Festival d’Avignon in 1976. It ran close to five hours with no plot and no interval, and the audience was free to come and go. That November the two men rented the Metropolitan Opera to stage it in New York. The house sold out, the production still lost money, and Glass went back to the taxi.

Recognition arrived in pieces. Satyagraha, his opera about Gandhi’s years in South Africa, sung in Sanskrit from the Bhagavad Gita, premiered in Rotterdam in 1980. Akhnaten followed in 1984 and completed a trilogy, begun with Einstein, about men who changed their era through ideas rather than force. CBS released Glassworks in 1982, the same year Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi laid his music under time-lapse images of highways and cities and carried it to people who had never set foot in an opera house. In 1986 Songs from Liquid Days set lyrics by Paul Simon, David Byrne, Laurie Anderson and Suzanne Vega.

Film became the second career that paid for the first. He scored Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line, Candyman and Martin Scorsese‘s Kundun, which brought the first of his three Academy Award nominations. The second came for Stephen Daldry’s The Hours, which also won him BAFTA’s Anthony Asquith Award, and the third for Notes on a Scandal. He shared a Golden Globe for The Truman Show. In the concert hall he turned David Bowie and Brian Eno’s albums Low and “Heroes” into his first and fourth symphonies, and he orchestrated Aphex Twin’s Icct Hedral.

Success sharpened the case against him. Traditional listeners heard the early music as repetitive, static and simplistic, and some of the critics who had championed Einstein and Satyagraha decided by the late 1980s that he had not kept their promise; the newer stage works, they argued, sounded formulaic, close to self-caricature. The charge never fully went away, helped by the sheer volume: fifteen symphonies, more than a dozen operas and nine string quartets, on top of the film work. When The Boston Globe reviewed his newest symphony in July, its verdict was that it “sounds like a Glass symphony.” What the complaint skips is how much craft that sound conceals, and how steadily audiences, younger ones above all, kept buying tickets. Europe, where his stage works often found more recognition than at home, never needed persuading.

His private life has passed into the music more than once. He married the theater director JoAnne Akalaitis in 1965; they had two children, Juliet and Zachary, and divorced in 1980. The artist Candy Jernigan, his third wife, died of liver cancer in 1991 at 39, a loss closely tied to his Jean Cocteau opera Orphée. Two more sons, Cameron and Marlowe, came from his marriage to Holly Critchlow. A practicing Buddhist who met the Dalai Lama in 1972, he published a memoir, Words Without Music, in 2015.

His newest chapter began with a cancellation. Symphony No. 15, subtitled Lincoln, sets texts by Abraham Lincoln for baritone and orchestra, from the 1838 Lyceum Address to his last public speech, and was co-commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra and the Kennedy Center. In January 2026 Glass withdrew its June premiere there, saying that “the values of the Kennedy Center today are in direct conflict with the message of the Symphony.” The Boston Symphony Orchestra gave the first performance instead, at Tanglewood on July 5, with Karen Kamensek conducting and Zachary James as soloist. The Berkshire Eagle called the night “especially weighty and, dare we say, historic.”

The premiere opened a season built around his ninetieth birthday on January 31, 2027. Einstein on the Beach turns fifty with concert performances by the Philip Glass Ensemble at the Brooklyn Academy of Music from November 19 to 21, held in memory of Wilson, who died in July 2025, and a new staging directed by Phelim McDermott is due in Manchester in June 2027. Akhnaten returns at Berlin’s Komische Oper in January, and the Lincoln symphony reaches Carnegie Hall on the birthday itself, with Dennis Russell Davies conducting the Orchestra of St. Luke’s.

For a composer accused for half a century of saying the same thing over and over, Glass has a habit of leaving the last word open. On the night he turns ninety, the piece New York hears will be the newest one in his catalog, Lincoln saying goodbye, written by a man who shows no sign of doing the same.