The Fall of the House of Usher

The Sound of a Voice (Composer). Renowned for music for opera, dance, theater, chamber ensemble, symphonic works, and film. A.R.T.: commission and world premieres of The Juniper Tree (co-composed with Robert Moran), The Fall of the House of Usher, and Orphée; presentation of 1000 Airplanes on the Roof (with libretto by David Henry Hwang and designs by Jerome Sirlin). His 1976 opera Einstein on the Beach, a five-hour epic created by Glass and Robert Wilson, is now seen as a landmark in twentieth-century music-theater. Other operas: Galileo Galilei, (directed by Mary Zimmerman, commissioned by the Goodman Theatre in Chicago); The Voyage (with libretto by David Henry Hwang, premiered at the Metropolitan Opera); Akhhnaten; the CIVIL warS (Rome Section); The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 and Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five (librettos by Doris Lessing and based on her novels); Hydrogen Jukebox (libretto by Allen Ginsberg and based on his poetry); In the Penal Colony (based on the short story by Franz Kafka); presented in venues such as Houston Grand Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Boston Lyric Opera, San Francisco Opera, Seattle Opera, the English National Opera, the Music Theater of Amsterdam, and the Stuttgart Opera. Orchestral works: Symphony No. 5 (commissioned by the Salzburg Festival, premiering in 1999 with subsequent performances worldwide); Symphony No. 2, Symphony No. 3, Symphony No. 6 (Plutonian Ode, with text by Allen Ginsberg, commissioned by Carnegie Hall to commemorate Philip Glass's sixty-fifth birthday); Low Symphony and Heroes Symphony (both based on the music of David Bowie and Brian Eno). Films: The Hours (nominated for an Academy Award and winner of the British Academy of Film and Television Association Award), Martin Scorsese's Kundun (nominated for an Oscar), The Truman Show (Golden Globe award), Godfrey Reggio's trilogy Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi, and Naqoyqatsi; Errol Morris's The Thin Blue Line, A Brief History of Time, and Paul Schrader's Mishima, among others.