If you ask people on the street to name a living composer, the name they re likely to come up with is Philip Glass.
From early experimental works to the 1976 opera Einstein on the Beach, from collaborations with David Bowie and David Byrne to scores for The Hours and Notes on a Scandal, Glass has been all over the musical landscape.
Glass moved composition away from the over-intellectualized and atonal music that dominated from the 1920s through the 1950s.
He and composer Steve Reich were dubbed minimalists when they began making a mark in the 1970s. But they were minimal only in comparison with what had come immediately before.
Both Glass and Reich pulled from non-Western music.
For Glass, it was Indian classical, which used a repetitive and adding process. Reich was attuned to African drumming and its complex, overlapping rhythms.
Working with (the pop) side, he really reached out to a new audience, says Phillip Bush, a Columbia-based pianist who has performed with the Philip Glass Ensemble on and off for nearly 20 years.
People who would come to listen to his music wouldn t normally listen to classical or modern classical music.
Although Glass has become an icon of late 20th-century music, early in his career he was largely ignored by the music world. His collaborators were more often visual artists, dancers and theater folks than musicians.
That changed with Einstein on the Beach, which he created with Robert Wilson. The non-linear, five-hour piece, based loosely on Einstein s life and his theory of relativity, put Glass on the musical map.
Glass followed Einstein with Satyagraha (1980), based on the early life of Mahatma Gandhi.
He and Wilson also created the CIVIL warS in 1983. And he did music for the Errol Morris documentaries The Thin Blue Line and Fog of War.
Moving into more mainstream movies also has been a rich route for Glass, who has been nominated for Academy Awards for his soundtracks for Kundun, The Hours and Notes on a Scandal.
This will be the sixth time Glass has brought a production to the Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston.
The Hydrogen Jukebox, by Glass and poet Allan Ginsberg, had its world premiere at the festival in 1990. The next year he was back with Mysteries and What s So Funny, collaborating with choreographer David Gordon.
Le Enfants Terribles by Glass and choreographer Susan Marshall was at the 1996 festival.
In 2001, he and multi-instrumentalist Foday Musa Suso of Gambia performed their joint work The Screens.
Last year Glass wrote a short piece that was played on alarms of BMW automobiles at the opening ceremony.
Glass s music is seen by many as being simplistic and repetitive. It has even produced a peculiar knock-knock joke:
In the short David Ives play Philip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread, a handful of words are rearranged again and again to form a kind of musical composition.
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