Koyaanisqatsi...and Sesame Street

Donald Macleod continues the week of exclusive interviews with the composer Philip Glass, first broadcast to mark the composer's 75th birthday in 2012.

Philip Glass's music has captured the popular imagination - and come to soundtrack our lives - in a way almost unthinkable for a contemporary composer. Yet Glass also divides opinion like no other figure in contemporary music. A one-time "enfant terrible" of the New York arts scene of the 60s and 70s - whose simple, seemingly endless repetitions would stretch for hours and enrage critics - Glass has long since swapped hardline minimalism for a comfy, lushly Romantic sound...and alienated many of his former fans. Disarmingly frank, witty and engaging, Philip Glass has always wryly put aside criticism of his commercial success. All this week on Composer Of The Week, Donald Macleod talks to him about his extraordinary life in music, with a playlist that encompasses his entire career.

By the mid-1980s, Philip Glass was among the most famous musicians in the world, having cemented the success of "Einstein On The Beach" with two more acclaimed 'portrait' operas - Satyagraha and Akhnaten - and the breakthrough success of his hypnotic score to Godfrey Reggio's art-film Koyaanisqatsi (1982). Yet unknown to most music fans, he'd also composed a work that delighted millions of children - with incidental music to an animated sequence on the TV show Sesame Street!

Donald Macleod discusses the fruits of Glass's early success with the composer himself - a period when he was famous enough to lend his face to adverts for luxury watches and scotch whisky - and introduces his first foray in orchestral writing since his student days: his Violin Concerto (1987), inspired by his father.