One of the most influential composers of the past half-century, Philip Glass forged a musical language whose pulsing rhythms, repeating patterns, slowly shifting harmonies, and luminous tonal structures transformed the sound of contemporary classical music. Born in Baltimore in 1937, Glass studied at the University of Chicago and at Juilliard before working in Paris with the legendary pedagogue Nadia Boulanger. An encounter with Indian music through his work with Ravi Shankar proved equally consequential, opening his ears to radically different conceptions of rhythm and musical time.  

Although Glass became one of the composers most closely associated with Minimalism, he has long regarded the label as inadequate: “It was accurate for 10 years, from the mid-60s to the mid-70s,” he has said, noting that his music subsequently moved well beyond those early experiments. Indeed, when asked what kind of music he writes, Glass has offered the characteristically practical answer “theater music,” a description that reflects a career spanning opera, dance, film, symphonies, chamber music, and collaborations across artistic disciplines. His aesthetic is less about repetition itself than about what can happen within it: Glass describes his early work as an intensive exploration of musical “vocabulary and grammar,” manipulating the fundamental materials of rhythm, melody, and harmony to create a new musical language. For Glass, inspiration has never been confined to music alone—he looks to “stories, images, movement”—and that openness, as much as his instantly recognizable sound, has defined a career built on the conviction that musical tradition is not merely to be inherited but continually reinvented. 

Glass composed the “Lincoln” Symphony with the United States’ 250th anniversary in mind. As he describes both the work and the significance of Abraham Lincoln,  

Symphony No.15 “Lincoln” was composed between 2021-2023. It is an eight-movement work for baritone and orchestra which is, in a way, a portrait of Lincoln as the image of a man who has stayed in my consciousness these many years. 

Lincoln had made his way into other works of mine. This began in the early 1980s with the CIVIL warS, a collaboration with Robert Wilson. Lincoln next appeared in The Perfect American (2013) about the death of Walt Disney in which Disney interacts with an animatronic Lincoln in The Hall of Presidents. Lincoln again appears in Appomattox (2015), an opera about the legacy of race in America. 

Opera is a species of theater, not a place for a history lesson. When writing a symphony, we are talking about a relationship made even more abstract. Unlike some of my operas centered on figures such as Gandhi, Akhnaten, and scientists like Einstein, Kepler, and Galileo, when I was invited to compose a new piece, a symphony, I thought of presenting an image of Lincoln and his legacy as it appeared to me. 

The figure of Lincoln, this self-taught man who seemingly came out of nowhere, who spoke in a very poetic style, and whose legacy of holding the country together in a period during which it was ripping itself apart—seemed an appropriate subject to consider on this, our country’s 250th birthday. (Program note by Philip Glass)

—Jennifer More, ©2026