This week, John talks to New York composer Philip Glass, who published his acclaimed memoir Words Without Music earlier this year. Philip Glass grew up in a secular Jewish family in 1930s/40s Baltimore, Maryland where his father owned a record store and would bring home the records that didn’t sell and listen to them. In this way, Philip got an early education in classical greats such as Bartok and Stravinsky. In 1952, at the age of 15, he went to university in Chicago to study maths and philosophy and was exposed to a jazz and blues scene second to none at that time – Charlie Parker, for one, was a regular on the circuit. He went on to study at the world-famous Juilliard School of Music in New York and then with Nadia Boulanger and Ravi Shankar in Paris. Back in New York in the 1960s, early works by Philip Glass marked him out as an innovator (in the company of Steve Reich, Terry Riley and others), and changed the grammar of modern classical music. The opera Einstein on the Beach was his first major success in 1976 but he worked as a furniture removals guy and a New York taxi driver (Dali was one passenger) until he was 41 to fund his composing. Now 78, Glass is as prolific and as much in demand as ever. The breadth of his work is highlighted in the range of people he has worked with from Samuel Beckett to Woody Allen, and Paul Simon, David Bowie and Leonard Cohen.