Philip Glass

Philip Glass (b.1937) is among the most influential American composers of the 20th and 21st Centuries. gaining prominence in the early 1970s as a chief representative on musical minimalism, characterized by highly repetitive figures and diatonic harmonic movement. Still active as a composer, performer and lecturer, his website summarizes his compositional achievements, with “more than twenty operas, large and small; eight symphonies (with others already on the way); two piano concertos and concertos for violin, piano, timpani, and saxophone quartet and orchestra; soundtracks to films ranging from new scores for the stylized classics of Jean Cocteau to Errol Morris’s documentary about former defense secretary Robert McNamara; string quartets; a growing body of work for solo piano and organ.”

Glass’s String Quartet No. 3 dates from 1985, and uses music from Paul Schrader's film Mishima, based on the life of Japanese writer Yukio Mishima (1925-1970).