Through his operas, his symphonies, his compositions for his own ensemble, and his wide-ranging collaborations with artists ranging from Twyla Tharp to Allen Ginsberg, Leonard Cohen to David Bowie, Philip Glass has had an extraordinary and unprecedented impact upon the musical and intellectual life of his times.

The operas – “Einstein on the Beach,” “Satyagraha,” “Akhnaten,” and “The Voyage,” among many others – play throughout the world’s leading houses, and rarely to an empty seat. Glass has written music for experimental theater and for Academy Award-winning motion pictures such as “The Hours” and Martin Scorsese’s “Kundun,” while “Koyaanisqatsi,” his initial filmic landscape with Godfrey Reggio and the Philip Glass Ensemble, may be the most radical and influential mating of sound and vision since “Fantasia.” His associations, personal and professional, with leading rock, pop and world music artists date back to the 1960s, including the beginning of his collaborative relationship with artist Robert Wilson. Indeed, Glass is the first composer to win a wide, multi-generational audience in the opera house, the concert hall, the dance world, in film and in popular music – simultaneously.

He was born in 1937 and grew up in Baltimore. He studied at the University of Chicago, the Juilliard School and in Aspen with Darius Milhaud. Finding himself dissatisfied with much of what then passed for modern music, he moved to Europe, where he studied with the legendary pedagogue Nadia Boulanger (who also taught Aaron Copland , Virgil Thomson and Quincy Jones) and worked closely with the sitar virtuoso and composer Ravi Shankar. He returned to New York in 1967 and formed the Philip Glass Ensemble – seven musicians playing keyboards and a variety of woodwinds, amplified and fed through a mixer.

The new musical style that Glass was evolving was eventually dubbed “minimalism.” Glass himself never liked the term and preferred to speak of himself as a composer of “music with repetitive structures.” Much of his early work was based on the extended reiteration of brief, elegant melodic fragments that wove in and out of an aural tapestry. Or, to put it another way, it immersed a listener in a sort of sonic weather that twists, turns, surrounds, develops.

There has been nothing “minimalist” about his output. Glass has composed more than thirty operas, large and small; fourteen symphonies, thirteen concertos; soundtracks to films ranging from new scores for the stylized classics of Jean Cocteau to Errol Morris’s documentary about former defense secretary Robert McNamara; nine string quartets; a growing body of work for solo piano and organ. He has collaborated with Paul Simon, Linda Ronstadt, Yo-Yo Ma, and Doris Lessing, among many others.

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Michael Riesman, the multi-talented composer, conductor, keyboardist, and record producer, has influenced many of today’s greatest talents as the innovative musical director of the world-renowned Philip Glass Ensemble.  Riesman has had a long-lived collaborative relationship with Philip Glass. Indeed, when Glass received his Golden Globe Award in 1999 for The Truman Show score, he publicly proclaimed Riesman "a genius."

Riesman has been playing keyboards in the Philip Glass Ensemble since 1974, and has served as its Musical Director since 1976. In addition to conducting the Oscar nominated scores Notes On A Scandal, The Truman Show, and Martin Scorsese’s Kundun, he is the conductor of the revolutionary Einstein on the Beach (both recordings), Glassworks, The Photographer, Songs From Liquid Days, Dance Pieces, The Illusionist, Hamburger Hill, Music in 12 Parts (all three recordings), Passages, Koyaanisqatsi (both recordings), Mishima, Powaqqatsi, The Thin Blue Line, Anima Mundi, The Secret Agent, A Brief History of Time, La Belle et La Bête, Candyman, , Naqoyqatsi, Taking Lives, Secret Window, and numerous other soundtracks and albums. Riesman was the pianist on the Oscar-nominated score for The Hours, and has also released an album of his arrangement of that music for solo piano. 
In addition to his work with the Philip Glass Ensemble, Riesman has also conducted and performed on albums by Paul Simon (Hearts and Bones), Scott Johnson (Patty Hearst), Mike Oldfield (Platinum), Ray Manzarek (Carmina Burana), David Bowie (BlackTie/White Noise), and Gavin Bryars (Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet). 
Along with interpreting the music of others, Riesman also finds time to create original works. He has released an album, Formal Abandon, which he wrote, produced and performed entirely, on the Rizzoli label, which originated from a commission by choreographer Lucinda Childs.  In the theater, he collaborated with Robert Wilson on Edison (presented in New York, Paris, and Milan).  His film scores include Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, Pleasantville (1976), and Christian Blackwood's Signed: Lino Brocka.