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Glass learned to play the piano by listening to his older brother and sister taking their lessons and imitating them. The son of a Baltimore record store owner, he began studying the flute at the age of eight at the Peabody Conservatory of Music. Precocious academically as well as musically, Glass entered the University of Chicago at 15 and graduated with a degree in mathematics and philosophy. He studied music too, working his way through the Beethoven quartets and teaching himself the twelve-tone system.
He still lacked practical musical experience, so Glass set out for New York City and the Juilliard School, from which he graduated in 1962. Dissatisfied with his technique, he headed for Paris a couple of years later to study with Nadia Boulanger, the renowned pedagogue who had taught Aaron Copland and ; Virgil Thomson. "Boulanger believed that the training we got in America was simply not thorough enough," says Glass. "She was convinced that at age 27 I had to redo completely my musical education." As the oldest member of the Boulangerie, he studied counterpoint six to eight hours a day. To help make ends meet, he worked as an extra in films for a daily wage of 75 francs, or about $15.
His involvement in movies proved a watershed. Director Conrad Rooks, who was making Chappaqua, a counterculture movie with a score by Indian Sitarist Ravi Shankar, asked Glass to write down Shankar's complex, exotic melodies so that six bewildered Parisian studio musicians could play them. "Ravi and his tabla player, Alla Rahka, kept telling me I was getting it all wrong," Glass recalls. "No matter how I tried to notate the music, they kept shaking their heads. Out of sheer desperation, I just eliminated the bar lines altogether -- which, of course, revealed the fact that Indians don't divide music, the way Western theory says it must be done. Instead, they add to it. That was the closest I'll ever get to a moment when the creative light suddenly kicks on."
Glass began to apply some principles of Indian music to his own compositions. His colleagues, however, were skeptical. Recalls Glass: "A friend of mine said that my work wasn't real music. Well, I looked around Paris and concluded that to express myself I'd have to go some place else." In 1967 he went back to New York.
Glass returned at a time of remarkable artistic ferment (see box). In the late '60s Reich, a Juilliard classmate, had codified early minimalist theory in such works as It's Gonna Rain and Come Out. Wilson was staging The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud. Minimalist Sculptor Richard Serra (see ART), an acquaintance from Paris, was preparing a one-man exhibition in New York. Reich had already formed an ensemble, and he and Glass sometimes joined forces. A pair of 1969 concerts at the Whitney Museum of American Art attracted public and critical attention to the burgeoning phenomenon of minimalism. The beginnings of success, however, proved too much for the friendship, and the Philip Glass Ensemble split off and went its own way. Today the former friends are distant, even hostile.