Glass’s early works composed between 1967 and 1975 feature rhythm as the primary structural principle, while containing cyclical constructions adapted from Indian music. Glass recalled his early experiences with Indian music: “I [then] thought I was listening to music that was built in an additive way, but it turned out it really wasn’t. It was built in a cyclic way … In Indian music (and all the non-Western music with which I’m familiar), you stake small units, or ‘beats,’ and string them together to make up larger time values. For my whole generation, which was dominated by serialism, this music was a breath of fresh air. It allowed us to think of music in a different way.” Glass combined this approach with additive and subtractive elements commonly associated with minimalist technique. In the mid- to late 1970s, Glass began to combine rhythmic elements with drones and slow harmonic rhythm, the latter influenced not only by Indian music but also by the modal jazz of hard-bop saxophonist John Coltrane. Glass also included chromatic side-stepping in many of his works, a technique used by Debussy and other composers in the early twentieth century. In addition, Glass employed tonal–modal hybrid constructions that sounded harmonically and melodically enigmatic.

In the USA, twentieth-century stage works with music have often been hybrid compositions, in that composers have often intermingled opera with other types of music, including ragtime in Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha (1911), jazz and blues elements in George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (1935), Kurt Weill’s Street Scene (1946), and Leonard Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti (1952) and Candide (1956), as well as characteristics adapted from musicals in Stephen Sondheim’s opera Sweeney Todd (1979). For Glass, however, the template differed in that he emphasized avant-garde theater. Throughout the 1990s, many critics who had hailed Glass in the 1980s began to doubt the quality of Glass’s output and believed he had deteriorated as a composer. Other critics argued that Glass had become complacent and that this affected the quality of his work. And some journalists indicted Glass for not spending enough time on any one work because he accepted too many commissions. Yet Glass attributes his immense popularity with audiences to “good work habits” and to his being a collaborative “music theater composer.” Opera has reemerged since the early 1980s as immensely popular, and Glass has been responsible for helping to invigorate this resurgence.

Glass’s music has been both hailed and derided by audience members as well as critics. More traditional spectators asserted that his music was too repetitive, non-teleological, non-narrative, and seemingly simplistic. Nonetheless, critics at the 1984 revival of Einstein on the Beach largely hailed the work as a truly pivotal artwork of its time and asserted that it represented one of the “zeitgeists of the twentieth century.” This was also the case regarding Satyagraha (1979) following its American premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Yet many of the critics who championed these two stage works later felt that Glass had failed to live up to his promise as a progressive composer. By the late 1980s, many critics felt that the quality of his stage works had degraded, asserting that they had begun to sound formulaic and self-caricaturing. Despite this, audience members have remained largely euphoric, especially an evolving younger generation. And in Europe, Glass’s stage works have often received even greater public recognition than in the United States. Performances of Glass’s Einstein on the Beach at the Paris Opéra Comique in 1976 were sold out, with around two hundred people per night standing outside the theater in the hope of obtaining tickets; a similar phenomenon occurred in Italy, Germany, Belgium, Holland, and Yugoslavia.

Glass’s stage works were influenced by various playwrights and directors, including Bertolt Brecht and Samuel Beckett, who challenged conventional notions of society and order. They employed characters that audiences would not be likely to identify with emotionally, taking the subject out of the narrative so that characters became a means to an end rather than an end in themselves. Brecht’s works are emotionally distancing, often with banners placed onstage to form a counterpoint between actions onstage and written interpretations of these actions. Glass incorporated these types of characters and characteristics into his own stage works. Stage director Jerzy Grotowski’s approach included an emphasis on ritual, where performers participated in types ceremony, an approach Glass adopted in many of his own stage works. Richard Foreman’s Living Theater and the ensemble’s seven-hour production of Frankenstein became Glass’s first opportunity to observe extended theatrical time, and he witnessed a similar approach in Indian Kathakali, an ancient form of classical dance–music theater. Glass’s first stage work, Einstein on the Beach (1976), used this sense of extended theatrical time, as did many of his other stage works.

Glass was initially inspired to compose multimedia stage works by watching avant-garde theater productions in Europe, after which he composed incidental music for an ensemble later known as Mabou Mines. Director–designer Robert Wilson had a strong impact on Glass’s multimedia stage works, primarily with Wilson’s Theater of Images, which highlighted geometrically angular shapes coupled with evocative light patterns and stage designs. Wilson also incorporated surrealistic dreamlike images and otherworldly body movements.

Glass’s multimedia stage works often include these features, using film, slides, photographs, graphic design, computer animation, and videos. He subsequently composed music for film directors Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen and for dancer–choreographers Lucinda Childs, Jerome Robbins, and Twyla Tharp. Glass also composed three “multimedia film operas” based on films by Jean Cocteau. For La belle et la bête, Glass composed music (1994) for live singers to be performed with Cocteau’s film instead of the original soundtrack. Glass’s opera Monsters of Grace (1997) is a surrealist three-dimensional video computer graphics work with stereoscopic animation, in which eight of the scenes are to be watched with polarized lenses. The work includes “synthespians” with three-dimensional animated heads scanned from those of actual actors.

The term “minimalism” was first employed in the visual art world: painting and sculpture during the early 1960s was often abstract and inert presenting flat surfaces rather than depth or decorative detail. Minimalist artists used right angles and other clear and simple geometric forms and structures , while emphasizing stasis and impersonality. Applying the term to music is often credited to critic Michael Nyman, who allegedly borrowed the idea from art in 1968 when describing a music performance. Nyman elaborated on the label by citing works with limited or minimal music materials, whether these materials were pitches, rhythms, text, or instruments. These works avoided dissonance and release of tension as prime ingredients and eschewed contrast. Repetition was highlighted, though was often an illusion, as seeming repetition often proved to consist of changes, albeit slight, whether rhythmic or otherwise. Ironically, the term minimalism became popular at a time when Glass’s works, including his stage works, were no longer minimalist in the strict definition of the term. Discussing the developmental stages of minimalist composition is the prime goal of this chapter.

Glass often employed language in semantically ambiguous ways and incorporated visual elements as essential features of his stage works. This echoed the philosophy of stage director Antonin Artaud, who asserted that Western literary theater had reached a dead end and that playwrights should return to emphasizing images. This “anti-literary” viewpoint paralleled the ideas of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, with his conception that language and pictures do not summon the same consciousness and that neither can be reduced to the other’s terms. Glass incorporated these ideas into many of his works, including early stage works. His collaboration with Robert Wilson in Einstein on the Beach minimizes the use of language and relies heavily on visual impressions. In Satyagraha, Glass used Sanskrit for some of the text to encourage audience members to focus their attention on elements other than text within the opera. In Glass’s stage work The Sound of a Voice (2003), a Japanese soldier visits a woman who has not seen another human being for a long time. She confesses: “Anything you say I will enjoy hearing. It’s not even the words. It’s the sound of a voice, the way it moves through the air.”

This chapter will present Glass’s life up to the point when he composed his first stage work, Einstein on the Beach (1976). This background is not intended to be a comprehensive biography, but is designed to provide background information that is relevant to later chapters on Glass’s stage works. This section will also help illustrate the choices Glass made regarding his stage works and the reasons for these choices. Growing up in Baltimore, Maryland, Glass listened to various types of music from his father’s record shop. He subsequently heard bebop jazz in New York while studying composition at Juilliard. He learned much about Indian music when living in Paris, transcribing music played by sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar, whose influence led Glassto adopt cyclic elements within his own works. After returning to New York, Glass heard minimalist music by La Monte Young, Terry Riley, and Steve Reich. These experiences and influences inspired Glass to develop his own approach to composing. His style in stage composition continued to evolved, from his first stage work Einstein on the Beach (1976)to this day.