Philip Glass was discussing his father Ben Glass in 2024, and the composition of his first Violin Concerto. Glass, who grew up working in his father’s record store, “probably learned more about music from working in that store than anywhere else.”

When Glass returned to New York in the late 1960s after 20 years of studying, he started to form his reputation for works which were highly repetitive and reduced to extremes of minimal materials. After his rather traditional classical formation, Glass had purposefully placed himself on the very fringes of music. It would have to wait until the American Composers Orchestra and conductor Dennis Russell Davies offered a commission to a 50-year-old Glass to write a violin concerto that a rapprochement with tradition began.

“This concerto is really the foundation. It’s his first concerto for any instrument and was written in memory of his father,” says violinist Anne Akiko Meyers. Philip Glass adds, “He loved all the great violin concertos – Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Brahms, Mendelssohn, all of them.” So when the opportunity to write a concerto presented itself in 1987, Glass chose the violin. Sadly, Ben Glass never heard this concerto; he died in a car accident in 1974, having never seen his son’s global successes or the legacy of his violin concerto.