Born in Baltimore on January 31, 1937, Philip Glass discovered music in his father's radio repair shop. In addition to servicing radios, Ben Glass carried a line of records, and, when certain ones sold poorly, he would take them home and play them for his three children, trying to discover why they didn't appeal to customers. These happened to be recordings of the great chamber works, and the future composer rapidly became familiar with Beethoven quartets, Schubert sonatas, Shostakovich symphonies and other music then considered "offbeat." It was not until he was in his upper teens that Glass began to encounter more "standard" classics.

Glass began the violin at six and became serious about music when he took up the flute at eight. But by the time he was 15, he had become frustrated with the limited flute repertoire as well as with musical life in post-war Baltimore. During his second year in high school, he applied for admission to the University of Chicago, passed and, with his parent's encouragement, moved to Chicago where he supported himself with part-time jobs waiting tables and loading airplanes at airports. He majored in mathematics and philosophy, and in off hours practiced piano and concentrated on such composers as Ives and Webern.

At 19, Glass graduated from the University of Chicago, and, determined to become a composer, moved on to New York and the Juilliard School. By then, he had abandoned the 12-tone techniques he had been using in Chicago, and preferred American composers like Aaron Copeland and William Schuman.

By the time he was 23, Glass had studied with Vincent Persichetti, Darius Milhaud and William Bergsma. He had rejected serialism and preferred such maverick composers as Harry Partch, Ives, Moondog, Henry Cowell and Virgil Thomson. But he still had not found his own voice. Still searching, he moved to Paris and two years of intensive study under Nadia Boulanger.

In Paris, he was hired by a film-maker to transcribe the Indian music of Ravi Shankar into notation readable by French musicians, and, in the process, discovered the techniques of Indian music. He promptly renounced his previous music, and, after researching music in North Africa, India and the Himalayas, returned to New York and began applying Eastern techniques to his own work.

By 1974, he had composed a large collection of new music, much of it for use by the theatre company Mabou Mines (Glass was one of the co-founders of that company), and most of it composed for his own performing group, the Philip Glass Ensemble. This period culminated in Music in 12 Parts, a 3-hour summation of Glass' new music, and reached its apogee in 1976 with the Philip Glass-Robert Wilson opera Einstein on the Beach, the 4-hour epic now seen as a landmark in 20th century music-theatre.

Glass's output since Einstein has ranged from opera - Satyagraha, Akhnaten, The Making of the Representative for Planet 8, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Juniper Tree, Hydrogen Jukebox; to film scores - Koyaanisqatsi, Mishima, The Thin Blue Line, Powaqqatsi, A Brief History of Time; to symphonic works - The Light, Itaipu, The Violin Concerto and Low, to string quartets - Nos. 2-5 recorded by the Kronos Quartet. He has created music for dance - A Descent into the Maelstrom for Molissa Fenley, In the Upper Room for Twyla Tharp; and such unclassifiable theatre pieces as The Photographer, 1000 Airplanes on the Roof and The Mysteries And What's So Funny?

Among his recently completed works are The Voyage, commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera; Orphée, a chamber opera based on the film by Jean Cocteau, and La Belle et la Bête also based on a Jean Cocteau film of the same title; the 2nd Symphony, commissioned by the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra; and the 3rd Symphony, premiered by the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra. Current projects include: a new composition for the Rascher Saxophone Quartet; two collaborations with Robert Wilson, Monsters of Grace and White Raven; The Witches of Venice, a new ballet created by Beni Montressor and commissioned by Teatro alla Scala; and the third and final piece in his Cocteau trilogy, a dance/theater work, with choreographer Susan Marshall, based on the film Les Enfants Terribles.

Philip Glass was made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 1995 and has been awarded honorary degrees from Brandeis University, the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and The State University of New York in Buffalo.

In 1992, Philip Glass launched a new recording label, called Point Music, in a joint venture with Philips Classics. The label is dedicated to presenting serious, but hard-to-categorise musicians to a broad audience. Philip Glass' first symphonic work, the Low Symphony based on Bowie/Eno Low album, was released on the Point Music label in February 1993. 1997 will see the release of Heroes - a symphony written by Philip Glass - also based on the music of Bowie and Eno (the second in the Low, Heroes and Lodger trilogy of albums). Renowned choreographer Twyla Tharp has created a ballet to the Heroes Symphony which was performed in the USA in the autumn of 1996 to great acclaim.