Seven years ago, on his 41st birthday, Philip Glass was driving a New York City taxicab. From the age of 17 he had worked as a hotel night clerk, an airport baggage loader, a crane operator in a steel mill, a furniture mover and a plumber, all the while pursuing his real vocation: composer. Glass, however, was not hoping to make a big score with a pop song or a Broadway show. Rather, he was that least salable commodity, a revolutionary avant- gardist.
But there was a twist. Rather than inveighing against traditionalism, as radicals are supposed to do, Glass was in revolt against radicalism itself: the overintellectualized and emotionally arid music that had dominated contemporary composition for decades. By writing in a deceptively simple, joyously propulsive new style that came to be called minimalism, he hoped to restore the historic bond between composer and listener. Unlikely as it seemed, while bouncing along the potholed streets of Manhattan or dodging the drunks in his chosen neighborhood of New York City's Lower East Side, Glass was confidently engaged in the most stimulating musical revolution of the postwar years.
Little more than ten years ago, Glass's music was largely confined to SoHo galleries, where experimental music was welcomed, and other haunts of New York's proudly scruffy downtown arts scene. Now it seems that the world has become a Glass festival. Consider:
In three weeks his latest opera, Akhnaten, gets its British premiere at the English National Opera in London. Akhnaten received its first performance last year in Stuttgart, and has since played to packed houses in Houston and New York City. An earlier full-length opera, Satyagraha, which has had several productions in the U.S. and Europe, has been recorded by CBS Masterworks for release in July; Beverly Sills, a confirmed fan, has scheduled it for the New York City Opera next year. And last December the Brooklyn Academy of Music revived Einstein on the Beach, a 4 1/2-hour opera by Glass and American Theater Artist Robert Wilson that boldly proclaimed the triumph of minimalism to a mainstream audience with two sold-out performances at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1976.
In dance, Glass is composing a new work for Choreographer Twyla Tharp to be produced in 1986. His CBS album of chamber music, Glassworks, part of which was used by Jerome Robbins for a hit ballet called Glass Pieces, has sold 115,000 copies worldwide since its 1982 release. In Cannes recently, Glass and two others shared the prize for Best Artistic Contribution for their work on Director Paul Schrader's new film Mishima, about the Japanese novelist and warrior manque; Glass also scored Godfrey Reggio's 1982 vision of environmental apocalypse, Koyaanisqatsi. Currently the composer is finishing a new opera based on Novelist Doris Lessing's The Making of the Representative for Planet 8, to be premiered in Holland in the spring of 1986.
Heady stuff. But throughout the years of obscurity, Glass's strong self- confidence kept his spirits high. "There may be people out there who still don't like my music, but I don't think they can ignore it any longer," observes the composer.