By ROBERT T. JONES

Few composers in this century have achieved the sweeping popularity or influenced the musical sound of their times as much as Philip Glass, MUSICAL AMERICA’s Musician of the Year. The heady, euphoric quality of his music, its originality, driving beat, sense of drama, aura of mysticism, and its sheer magnitude have permeated not only the world of “serious” music but rock and pop as well. In opera, Glass’s specialty, he has revitalized an art form long given up for dead. (The last opera composer to acquire a really big public was Richard Strauss.) Glass’s recordings sell in numbers well beyond those expected of a classical artist; and he is almost certainly the only living composer whose concerts are invariably sold out. His music is stamped with an individuality that cannot be categorized, and it has been heard with equal success in surroundings normally devoted to opera, disco, symphony, jazz, or even sports events.

Glass has already written four works (Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha, Akhnaten, the CIVIL warS: a tree is best measured when it is down) unlike any operas ever created. These operas, which have neither unhappy heroines nor doomed love affairs, deal with philosophy and the fates of entire races. Einstein on the Beach ponders the effects of science on mankind; Satyagraha, a lyrical meditation on nonviolence, links Tolstoy, Tagore, Ghandhi, and Martin Luther King; Akhnaten concerns itself with the birth of monotheism. Glass is now at work on his fifth opera, The Making of the Representative of Planet 8, based on Doris Lessing’s visionary novel about a doomed civilization mystically surviving its destruction by a sudden ice age.

In 1984, his biggest year so far, the Philip Glass/Robert Wilson opera the CIVIL warS: a tree is best measured when it is down, was premiered in Rome and later given in a concert performance in New York (another is scheduled for Los Angeles). Akhnaten had its triumphant premiere at the Stuttgart Opera, and a different production by the Houston Grand Opera in a co-production with New York City Opera. (The New York performances sold out six weeks before opening night.) At the same time, a revival of Einstein on the Beach (1976) played for a two-week run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, followed by a full videotaping. Meanwhile, CBS released a complete recording of Einstein and will issue a complete Satyagraha next year. Confirming Glass’s stature as Serious-Composer and Big-Box-Office draw, CBS has signed him to an “exclusive composer” contract. He is the third composer ever to sign such a document—the other two were Stravinsky and Copland.

Such potent talent and sweeping success has made Glass both a hero and an enemy to people in the music world. For every listener fascinated by Glass’s complex rhythmic structures, there is another who hears only maddening repetition; for each person moved to terror by Einstein’s spaceship scene or to tears by Ghandhi’s final aria in Satyagraha (a compositional tour de force built on thirty-six repetitions of an E-minor scale), there is another who hears only Hanon exercises. One thing is certain: Glass sounds like no other composer, but being unique has its drawbacks. Originality, he has learned, is admired—unless something is too original, in which case it may be denounced as “strange.” As a result, Glass’s music has been praised and hated, loved and damned, has brought delight and occasioned fulmination. Whether he is a musical messiah or a sonic anti-Christ is a matter of conjecture, but his impact on the world of music cannot be disputed.

One might well imagine Philip Glass to be a haunted man, driven by a passion to compose from dawn until midnight, but this impression would be wrong. Glass is also a highly successful performer in the nineteenth-century tradition of composer/performers, and while his operas were being produced, premiered, and recorded, Glass was making international tours with his group, the Philip Glass Ensemble, playing his music before packed houses from Madrid to Tokyo. During quiet moments he finished the score of a film about Yukio Mishima, the Japanese novelist, and composed a few smaller works as well. For, as he says, “Part of the fun of writing music is doing the little pieces, too.”

Glass emerged from the Minimalist movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The movement began-some say in Manhattan’s Soho district, others say on the West Coast—as a rejection of serial music. “It was all very monolithic and hierarchical, with Boulez kind of laying down the law about what new music would be,” recalls Glass, “so a rejection set in. I always found serialism ugly and didactic, and so did many others. We rejected the idea of non-tonal music, of aleatoric music, of the entire idea that music had to be an intellectual enterprise.”

Glass had already attended Juilliard, studied for two years in Paris with Nadia Boulanger and had discovered Eastern music while working with Ravi Shankar. From then on, he had looked to India, North Africa, and the Himalayas for inspiration, even learning to play tabla. In the late ‘60s he began a long series of experimental works, Another Look at Harmony, culminating in Einstein on the Beach. By then, he no longer considered himself a minimalist at all: “For me, minimalism was over by 1974.”

By then, Glass had acquired an audience of dedicated followers. Einstein made him famous. The opera’s violent but neatly trammeled energy and its ability to send audiences into paroxysms of ecstasy and outrage made some recall the premiere of Le Sacre du printemps. More importantly, it proved that Glass had a marked instinct for the stage. With Satyagraha, he stood clearly revealed as a brilliant theatrical personality, one whose music vibrated with color, character, and a sure sense of drama. Akhnaten has proved even more imposing. Since the three operas—Glass refers to them as a trilogy on the themes of politics, science, and religion—are non-narrative in form, with texts of solfege syllables, numbers, or ancient languages (Glass has set texts in Hopi, Sanskrit, Accadian, Egyptian, and Biblical Hebrew, but never in English), great curiosity has been aroused by his work on the Doris Lessing novel. It will, he says, be a narrative work and sung in English.

From all evidence, Glass is a low-key, contented, albeit busy, man. Twice divorced, he now lives in a big, rather disordered house in Manhattan’s rapidly gentrifying East Village with his two teenaged offspring and a petite young woman who is an artist and designer of books. Actors, writers, painters, and filmmakers are always dropping by, but Glass’s social life is practically nil, and he likes it that way. He rises at six and composes until noon, dividing his time between desk and piano (“I prefer the desk, then I get lonely for physical sound and change to the piano”), pausing occasionally for mugs of tea. He smokes a lot, drinks hardly at all. From noon until seven he rehearses with his Ensemble, auditions performers, deals with agents, lets himself be interviewed. “All morning I’m in the music world,” he says, “all afternoon I’m in the music business.’’

He spends evenings with his family and only occasionally goes out to a play or a concert: “By seven o’clock, we’ve all had such a full day that what we want most is dinner and quiet.” He has a small coterie of friends who carefully guard his privacy, but he seldom sees them in person. “We talk on the phone a lot,” he says.

One leaves Glass’s presence convinced that he is a gentle, dedicated, and humble man. A nice man. Nobody seems interested in bad-mouthing him, no matter what they think of his music. “I wish he’d throw his weight around a little,” says an associate, “fight more to get what he wants.” But it’s a relief to meet a man who doesn’t.

“I’m a happy man,” says Glass. “I’m enormously lucky. Happiness is to have the right blend of anxiety and fear and desire. Happiness to me is to be working.”

That’s happiness to Glass’s public too.