Besides the two dozen operas, the symphonies, concertos and solo works, Philip Glass, who turns 75 today, has composed literally scores of scores for films, beginning most famously with Koyaanisqatsi  (1982), an essay film as dependent on its music as any other. Glass and Godfrey Reggio would complete the trilogy with Powaqqatsi (1988) and Naqoyqatsi (2002). Another crucial cinematic collaboration has been with Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line (1988), The Fog of War (2003)), and other notable scores would be, for example, those for Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985; sample it here) and Martin Scorsese’s Kundun (1997). And whatever you think of Stephen Daldry’s The Hours (2002) — and chances are, if you’re reading this, you may not think much of it at all — that soundtrack, aimed straight at the mainstream and nominated for an Oscar, holds up better than you might remember.

“Glass is the only living classical composer with anything approaching a household name in America,” writes Mark Stryker in the Detroit Free Press. “A seminal minimalist, he pioneered a radically distilled language of rippling arpeggios and scales, pulsating rhythm, repetition and glacial harmony.”Einstein on the Beach, the opera co-created with director Robert Wilson and first produced in Avignon, France in 1976, “completed a decade of experiments with process, repetition and additive forms (12, 123, 1234, 432, etc). The music is hypnotic, easy to understand, meticulously organized and deeply groove-oriented. Like Glass’s early work, it is more about process than marching toward a goal. Shifts in texture, rhythm or harmony carry the force of revelation, what critic Alex Ross once called the ‘Ah! Effect.’”

A little over a week ago, Ross caught a preview of the revival of Einstein in Ann Arbor: “I’ve waited half my life to see the piece, and I was decidedly undisappointed: what an ecstatically dumbfounding thing this is.” And he notes that the official premiere will take place in March in Montpellier, France before the show rolls on to Reggio Emilia, London in May, Toronto in June, Brooklyn in September and Berkeley in October.

Glass, to NPR’s Tom Vitale: “What this amount of music has done for me is taught me how to write music. Oh, I had great teachers. Boulanger was one. Another was Ravi Shankar. And I went through the Juilliard process, and that was good, too. But I really learned from writing, which is how painters learn to paint, and writers learn to write, and how even dancers learn to dance. In a way, that’s true. But what was the value of being so prolific? It’s how I learned my trade.”

(Source:Mubi)