Flag Day, June 14, 2012

We are fortunate in our city to have produced one of world's greatest living musical composers and that he agreed to write Overture for 2012 being premiered this Sunday by our Baltimore Symphony Orchestra as part of our bicentennial celebration of the War of 1812. 

Below is a little biographical data on Baltimore's own Philip Glass.

But first because tomorrow is Flag Day and the lyrics of our National Anthem were written here by Francis Scott Key while he witnessed the bombardment of Fort Mc Henry from Baltimore Harbor near where Key Bridge crosses over the Patapsco River today, please visit this link to an essay on just how great the lines of that poem are:

http://www.aestheticrealism.net/poetry/StarSpangledBanner-ES.pdf 

From Wikipedia: 

Philip Glass was born on January 31, 1937, in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of Ida (née Gouline) and Benjamin Charles Glass,and the grandson of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania. 

His father owned a record store, and consequently Glass's record collection consisted to a large extent of unsold records, including modern music (such as Hindemith, Bartók, Schoenberg, Shostakovich) and Western classical music (including Ludwig van Beethoven's String Quartets and Schubert's B flat major Piano Trio, which he cites as a "big influence"), at a very early age. 

He then studied the flute as a child at the Peabody Conservatory of Music and entered an accelerated college program at the University of Chicago at the age of 15, where he studied Mathematics and Philosophy. 

His website has a biography at http://www.philipglass.com/bio.php 

Baltimore City College lists Philip Glass as a 1954 alumni, which was the same year that the high school was racially integrated.

I was not able to locate information about the block or neighborhood where Philip Glass made his home in Baltimore nor was I able to find the name and address of his father's record store. Perhaps someone else will have more success unearthing details about his Baltimore youth!