Philip glass at 90: The Music That Keeps on Beginning | Nova Linea Musica

There are composers you study, and there are composers you have simply lived inside without realizing it. Philip Glass is the second kind. His repeating figures and patient, unfolding forms have reached well beyond the concert hall, into film, theater, and the wider texture of how a generation hears music. As he approaches his ninetieth birthday on January 31, 2027, Nova Linea Musica devotes an evening to him, and to the question his music keeps asking: what happens when you let a small idea repeat, and turn, and slowly become something vast.

Join us on October 28, 2026 at Guarneri Hall for Celebrating Philip Glass at 90, an evening anchored by a new work that NLM has commissioned for the occasion.

A language that opened a door

Born in 1937, Glass helped reshape the course of contemporary music. The early minimalism, the breakthrough of Einstein on the Beach, the operas, the symphonies, the string quartets, and the film scores that carried his sound to audiences who never thought of themselves as new-music listeners: across all of it, he made a case that rigor and accessibility are not opposites. His additive patterns and cyclical structures gave performers and listeners a new way to experience time itself, music that seems to stand still and move forward at once.

That combination sits close to everything Nova Linea Musica was founded to do. Glass spent a career closing the distance between the person who writes the music and the person who hears it, and he did it without lowering his standards by a single degree. Celebrating him at ninety is, for us, a celebration of the whole proposition that living composers belong at the center of the repertoire.

A Chicago homecoming

Leading the evening is clarinetist Anthony McGill, Principal Clarinet of the New York Philharmonic and the first African American principal player in that orchestra’s history. McGill is the recipient of the 2020 Avery Fisher Prize and was named Musical America’s 2024 Instrumentalist of the Year. He is also, fittingly, a son of this city, raised on the South Side in Chatham before his path led to Interlochen, Curtis, and the front desk of one of the world’s great orchestras. To welcome him home for this program is a particular joy.

He is joined by NLM Artistic Director and violinist Desirée Ruhstrat, alongside the NLM artists who have become the heart of our seasons, violinist Rabia Brooke, and cellist Wendy Sutter.

The world premiere: a tribute from the inside

Every Nova Linea Musica concert features a world premiere that we commission, because resourcing the creation of new work is not a flourish for us, it is the reason we exist. For a tribute to Philip Glass, no choice felt more right than Alex Weston.

Weston spent years working as Philip Glass’s music assistant, at his side on film and concert projects, before going on to a celebrated career of his own. His score for Lulu Wang’s film The Farewell earned wide acclaim and an Academy Award shortlist, and his concert music has been heard from the Kennedy Center to the Venice Biennale. In other words, this premiere comes from someone who knows Glass’s music not as an admirer at a distance, but as a colleague who watched it take shape in the room. A new work written by that person, performed for a Chicago audience, is exactly the kind of closeness between composer, performer, and listener that we set out to create.

Join us

Nova Linea Musica was founded to resource the creation of new music, to close the distance between composer, performer, and listener, and to make Chicago a city where new music belongs. An evening built around Philip Glass at ninety, carried by a homegrown artist and a brand new score, is about as clear a statement of that purpose as we know how to make.

Celebrating Philip Glass at 90

October 28, 2026 | 6:30 PM

11 E Adams St, Suite 350 A, Chicago, IL 60603

Tickets $50 at tickets.novalineamusica.org

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