[17] In his memoir, Glass recalls that at the end of World War II his mother aided Jewish Holocaust survivors, inviting recent arrivals to America to stay at their home until they could find a job and a place to live.

This openness to modern sounds affected Glass at an early age:My father was self-taught, but he ended up having a very refined and rich knowledge of classical, chamber, and contemporary music.

[26] After leaving Juilliard in 1962, Glass moved to Pittsburgh and worked as a school-based composer-in-residence in the public school system, composing various choral, chamber, and orchestral music.

"[29] During this time, he encountered revolutionary films of the French New Wave, such as those of Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, which upended the rules set by an older generation of artists,[30] and Glass made friends with American visual artists (the sculptor Richard Serra and his wife Nancy Graves),[31] actors and directors (JoAnne Akalaitis, Ruth Maleczech, David Warrilow, and Lee Breuer, with whom Glass later founded the experimental theatre group Mabou Mines).

[24] After Play, Glass also acted in 1966 as music director of a Breuer production of Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children, featuring the theatre score by Paul Dessau.

Glass' musical style is instantly recognizable, with its trademark churning ostinatos, undulating arpeggios and repeating rhythms that morph over various lengths of time atop broad fields of tonal harmony.

Shortly after arriving in New York City in March 1967, Glass attended a performance of works by Steve Reich (including the ground-breaking minimalist piece Piano Phase), which left a deep impression on him; he simplified his style and turned to a radical "consonant vocabulary".

[37] During this time, he made friends with other New York-based artists such as Sol LeWitt, Nancy Graves, Michael Snow, Bruce Nauman, Laurie Anderson, and Chuck Close (who created a now-famous portrait of Glass).

Scored for the Philip Glass Ensemble, solo violin, chorus, and featuring actors (reciting texts by Christopher Knowles, Lucinda Childs and Samuel M. Johnson), Glass's and Wilson's essentially plotless opera was conceived as a "metaphorical look at Albert Einstein: scientist, humanist, amateur musician—and the man whose theories ... led to the splitting of the atom", evoking nuclear holocaust in the climactic scene, as critic Tim Page pointed out.

[44] Composer Tom Johnson came to the same conclusion, comparing the solo violin music to Johann Sebastian Bach, and the "organ figures ... to those Alberti basses Mozart loved so much".

[46] In spring 1978, Glass received a commission from the Netherlands Opera (as well as a Rockefeller Foundation grant) which "marked the end of his need to earn money from non-musical employment".

[47] With the commission Glass continued his work in music theater, composing his opera Satyagraha (composed in 1978–1979, premiered in 1980 at Rotterdam), based on the early life of Mahatma Gandhi in South Africa, Leo Tolstoy, Rabindranath Tagore, and Martin Luther King Jr. For Satyagraha, Glass worked in close collaboration with two "SoHo friends": the writer Constance deJong, who provided the libretto, and the set designer Robert Israel.

Beckett vehemently disapproved of the production of Endgame at the American Repertory Theater (Cambridge, Massachusetts), which featured JoAnne Akalaitis's direction and Glass's Prelude for timpani and double bass, but in the end, he authorized the music for Company, four short, intimate pieces for string quartet that were played in the intervals of the dramatization.

3 (the last two extracted from the scores to Koyaanisqatsi and Mishima) gave way to a series of works more accessible to ensembles such as the string quartet and symphony orchestra, in this returning to the structural roots of his student days.

Especially in The Voyage, the composer "explore[d] new territory", with its "newly arching lyricism", "Sibelian starkness and sweep", and "dark, brooding tone ... a reflection of its increasingly chromatic (and dissonant) palette", as one commentator put it.

Most of the Etudes are composed in the post-minimalist and increasingly lyrical style of the times: "Within the framework of a concise form, Glass explores possible sonorities ranging from typically Baroque passagework to Romantically tinged moods".

[66] The final part of the triptych returned again to a more traditional setting with the "Dance Opera" Les Enfants terribles (1996), scored for voices, three pianos and dancers, with choreography by Susan Marshall.

[67][68] In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Glass's lyrical and romantic styles peaked with a variety of projects: operas, theatre and film scores (Martin Scorsese's Kundun, 1997, Godfrey Reggio's Naqoyqatsi, 2002, and Stephen Daldry's The Hours, 2002), a series of five concerts, and three symphonies centered on orchestra-singer and orchestra-chorus interplay.

Besides writing for the concert hall, Glass continued his ongoing operatic series with adaptions from literary texts: The Marriages of Zones 3, 4 and 5 ([1997] story-libretto by Doris Lessing), In the Penal Colony (2000, after the story by Franz Kafka), and the chamber opera The Sound of a Voice (2003, with David Henry Hwang), which features the Pipa, performed by Wu Man at its premiere.

Glass also collaborated again with the co-author of Einstein on the Beach, Robert Wilson, on Monsters of Grace (1998), and created a biographic opera on the life of astronomer Galileo Galilei (2001).

Glass defined the work as a "social/political opera", as a critique on the Bush administration's war in Iraq, a "dialogue about political crisis", and an illustration of the "power of art to turn our attention toward the human dimension of history".

[71] While the opera's themes are Imperialism, apartheid, and torture, the composer chose an understated approach by using "very simple means, and the orchestration is very clear and very traditional; it's almost classical in sound", as the conductor Dennis Russell Davies notes.

The musical material is cut from familiar fabric, but it's striking that the composer forgoes the expected bustling conclusion and instead delves into a mood of deepening twilight and unending night.

[84] The Double Concerto for Violin and Cello and Orchestra (2010) was composed for soloists Maria Bachmann and Wendy Sutter and also as a ballet score for the Nederlands Dans Theater.

The symphony's first performance took place on January 1, 2012, at the Brucknerhaus in Linz, Austria (Dennis Russell Davies conducting the Bruckner Orchestra Linz); the American premiere was on January 31, 2012, (Glass's 75th birthday), at Carnegie Hall (Dennis Russell Davies conducting the American Composers Orchestra), and the West Coast premiere with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under the baton of John Adams on April 5.

[97] His opera The Lost [fr], based on a play by Austrian playwright and novelist Peter Handke, Die Spuren der Verirrten (2007), premiered at the Musiktheater Linz in April 2013, conducted by Dennis Russell Davies and directed by David Pountney.

[111] Glass describes himself as a "classicist", pointing out he is trained in harmony and counterpoint and studied such composers as Franz Schubert, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart with Nadia Boulanger.

Glass counts many artists among his friends and collaborators, including visual artists (Richard Serra, Chuck Close, Fredericka Foster),[118][119] writers (Doris Lessing, David Henry Hwang, Allen Ginsberg), film and theatre directors (including Errol Morris, Robert Wilson, JoAnne Akalaitis, Godfrey Reggio, Paul Schrader, Martin Scorsese, Christopher Hampton, Bernard Rose, and many others), choreographers (Lucinda Childs, Jerome Robbins, Twyla Tharp), and musicians and composers (Ravi Shankar, David Byrne, the conductor Dennis Russell Davies, Foday Musa Suso, Laurie Anderson, Linda Ronstadt, Paul Simon, Pierce Turner, Joan La Barbara, Arthur Russell, David Bowie, Brian Eno, Roberto Carnevale, Patti Smith, Aphex Twin, Lisa Bielawa, Andrew Shapiro, John Moran, Bryce Dessner and Nico Muhly).

He made a cameo appearance—briefly visible performing at the piano—in Peter Weir's The Truman Show (1998), which uses music from Powaqqatsi, Anima Mundi and Mishima, as well as three original tracks by Glass.

In 2014, This American Life broadcast a live performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music that included the world premier of the opera Help, a short monodrama that Philip Glass wrote for the occasion.