The Philip Glass Ensemble

The Philip Glass Ensemble is a musical group founded by composer Philip Glass in 1968 to serve as a performance outlet for his experimental minimalist music. The Ensemble's instrumentation became a hallmark of Glass' early minimalist style. After Glass wrote his first opera, Einstein on the Beach, for the Ensemble in 1976, he began to compose for other instrumentation more frequently. While the Ensemble's exact instrumentation has varied over the years, it has generally consisted of amplified woodwinds, keyboard synthesizers, and solo soprano voice (singing solfege).