World Soundtrack Awards 2025 – Philip Glass

OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENT

Philip Glass will be honoured on 16 October 2025, at Muziekcentrum De Bijloke at the film music concert Minimalism in Motion: Glass, Nyman and Beyond which will close Film Fest Gent’s Film Music Days 2025. During this concert, a selection of Philip Glass’s work will be performed by the Brussels Philharmonic conducted by maestro Dirk Brossé, who personally presented the award to Philip Glass in New York.

While initially renowned for his work for opera and his symphonies, Glass has made an equally impressive contribution to film music, with a rich oeuvre of film scores that include Koyaanisqatsi, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, The Truman Show, Kundun, The Hours and Notes on a Scandal. Glass’s work has been recognized at the World Soundtrack Awards in 2007 with two nominations for his score for Notes on a Scandal.

Philip Glass is minimalism, minimalism is Philip Glass. Even if he prefers to call his own pieces “music with repetitive structures”, it’s hard to separate him from this movement, as Glass was at the helm of this musical turn in the 1960’s. Minimalism became a new musical language and proved that less really could be more.

Not only are Glass’s scores an essential part of film music history – legendary film scores for The Truman Show, Kundun and Koyaanisqatsi are just a few examples – they changed what film music as an art form itself could be. Glass is one of the first composers to introduce minimalism to the world of film music and recognize that cinema doesn’t always ask for big, thrilling scores. With his characteristic repetitive style, he intensified the intimate and compelling nature of the films he scored.