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Friday March 21st, 2003

Baldwin artist Philip Glass nominated for Academy Award

Influential postmodern composer and Baldwin artist Philip Glass has been nominated for an Oscar for his soundtrack to The Hours, a film starring Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, Meryl Streep and Ed Harris. This is Glass' second Academy Award nomination for Achievement in Music in Connection With Motion Pictures (Original Score) - he was nominated for the Martin Scorsese film Kundun in 1997. The 75th Annual Academy Awards will be presented Sunday, March 23 and televised live on ABC beginning at 5:30 p.m. PST.

In addition to movie scores, Glass is known for his groundbreaking operas, dance pieces and orchestral works, and his musical experiments - called minimalist by some critics - were an early forerunner for what would later be known as ambient and New Age music. He was one of the first composers to fuse Western and world music, inspired by transcription work he did in the '60s for sitar master Ravi Shankar. In the early '70s he formed the Philip Glass Ensemble, a seven-piece group that found an audience in art galleries and later moved into New York City's underground rock clubs. He self-released his first recording, Music With Changing Parts, in 1972.

Photo courtesy of www.philipglass.com

Glass' opera Einstein on the Beach (1976), a collaboration with scenarist Robert Wilson, is considered revolutionary and brought him international acclaim. It toured Europe and was performed at the Metropolitan Opera House. He began making his mark in soundtracks in 1983 with the score to the Godfrey Reggio film Koyaanisqatsi,a cult classic that generated a sequel, Powaqqatsi, in 1988.

He has scored such diverse films as The Thin Blue Line, A Brief History of Time, Candyman, Dracula and The Truman Show, for which he won a Golden Globe Award for Best Score. One of his current touring projects is Philip on Film, a retrospective of 25 years of Glass' film work featuring the debuts of new short films as well as classics that he reinvented for live performance.

Glass was presented with The Anthony Asquith Award for Achievement in Film Music for The Hours during the 54th Annual British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Awards on Feb. 23.