LIFE

A life full of changes in rhythm

Life, Published on 13/04/2015

» When Philip Glass was 15, his father, who owned a record store in Baltimore, put him in charge of buying classical albums. Glass was then a precocious freshman at the University of Chicago and taking the first steps on the path to becoming a composer. When he learned of a new recording of the complete Schoenberg string quartets played by the Juilliard String Quartet, he ordered four copies. Aghast, his father asked if he was trying to put him out of business. To teach his son a lesson, he told him to put the recordings of these atonal chamber works on the shelves with the more mainstream classical records and report back when the last copy had been sold. That took seven years. The lesson Glass learned? "I can sell anything if I have enough time."