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Glass, Philip

Entry updated 25 March 2024. Tagged: Music, People.

(1937-    ) US avant-garde classical composer; Glass has been a prolific, influential and varied maker of music since the 1960s, working in minimalist and popular idioms, utilizing both electronic and more conventional orchestral media. His most distinctive works share a focus on multiply-repeated rhythmic and melodic loops, to often incantatory though always precise and solid effect. The climax of his plotless but widely noted first opera, Einstein on the Beach (first performed Avignon Festival, Avignon, France, 25 July 1976), takes place on board a Spaceship, as does a significant part of the action of the much later The Voyage (first performed Metropolitan Opera, New York, 12 October 1992), also known as Christopher Columbus; both of these works are perhaps most impressive as audio events.

Several of his other operas go beyond the static use of sf-related venues, including his version of Edgar Allan Poe's Fall of the House of Usher (first performed American Repertory Theater/Opera of Kentucky, St Louis, Missouri, 18 May 1988); and a collaboration with Doris Lessing that resulted in an operatic version of her novel The Making of the Representative For Planet 8 (1985), with a libretto by Lessing herself (first performed Huston Grand Opera, 8 July 1988). Despite interesting moments, this is not generally considered one of Glass's major works. Undeterred, Glass and Lessing later collaborated on a second, shorter operatic piece, The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five (first performed Theatre der Stadt, Heidelberg, Germany, 10 May 1997). A melodrama accompanied by music, 1000 Airplanes on the Roof (first performed Vienna Airport, Vienna, Austria, 15 July 1988), features a solitary speaker who invokes Time Travel in describing his encounters with Aliens.

Of Glass's twenty-first century works, two operas were composed to the works of Franz Kafka: In the Penal Colony (first performed ACT Theatre, Seattle, Washington, 31 August 2000), based on In der Strafkolonie (written 1914; 1919 chap); and The Trial (first performed Royal Opera House, London, 10 October 2014), based on Der Prozeß (written 1914-1915; 1925). Waiting for the Barbarians (first performed Erfurt Theatre, Erfurt, Germany,10 September 2005), based on Waiting for the Barbarians (1988) by J M Coetzee, is set in an abstract Near Future frontier under threat. Kepler (first performed September 1909, Linz, Germany) is based on Johannes Kepler's own texts. The Perfect American (first performed Teatro Real, Madrid, Spain, 22 January 2013) follows the last days of a Cryonics-obsessed Walt Disney [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below].

Glass's non-opera sf includes the score for The Truman Show (1999), for which he won a Golden Globe; he has a cameo role in the film itself. He scored the whole of Godfrey Reggio's Qatsi trilogy of semi-documentaries about the brutal transformations of planet Earth, including the third, Naqoyqatsi (2002), which envisions humanity being taken over by homogenizing Technology, with an emphasis on Robots. Also of sf interest is Glass's adaptation into an orchestral suite of Brian Greene's novel Icarus at the Edge of Time (2008), about a character who runs away from his Space-Station home to explore a Black Hole. [AR/JC]

see also: SF Music; Theatre.

Philip Glass

born Baltimore, Maryland: 31 January 1937

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