Philip Glass

Philip Glass' soundtrack to Martin Scorsese's Dalai Lama epic Kundun captures the grace, beauty, joy and melancholy within the film. Glass uses familiar minimalist structures, but works with traditional Tibetan instrumentation and monks, giving the music an alluringly otherworldly feel. It's an entirely original, evocative score, and one of Glass' high-water marks in the field.

Over a period of many years, filmmaker Mickey Lemle set about capturing a portrait of His Holines the Dalai Lama, now in his mid-80s, as he travelled the world talking about his life, compassion, his disciplines, and his work. The film commissioned original music from Philip Glass and Tibetan musician Tenzin Choegyal. The score is performed by Glass and Michael Riesman on pianos, Tenzin Choegyal on vocals and various Tibetan instruments, Tim Fain on Violin, Robert Black on double bass, and the Scorchio String. Quintessential traditional offering, "Om Ma Mi Phad may Hum" can be heard in "Heart Strings," sung by 150 Tibetan children. The album ends with Philip Glass's own live performance of Mad Rush, composed for the Dalai Lama's first public address in New York in 1978.

"Dance" is an extraordinary epic composition from one of the most revolutionary composers of the late 20th century to the present, Philip Glass. From the mid 1960's onwards, Glass has revolutionized a form of composition that has become known as 'minimalism' (although Glass himself denies being a composer of minimal music). Several of Glass's works have gone on to be standards of modern Classical music.

The recording of the original production of Philip Glass' and Robert Wilson's Einstein on the Beach has iconic significance both in the development of the musical style unfortunately known as minimalism, as well as in the history of music in the late twentieth century. It was a watershed moment when Glass and his ensemble brought the nearly five-hour opera to the Metropolitan Opera House in 1976; his unique aesthetic convictions moved from the rarefied atmosphere of loft concerts into the face of the classical music establishment in a way that could not be ignored.