In the 1970s, a New York art critic might have hired a plumber to fix a broken dishwasher and discovered that the man on the kitchen floor was Philip Glass. This episode follows the Baltimore-born prodigy from his father’s record store, where returned avant-garde albums by Schoenberg and Bartók became his childhood soundtrack, through the University of Chicago at 15, Juilliard, and studies with Nadia Boulanger in Paris.

The conversation explores the 1965 film job with Ravi Shankar and Alla Rakha that revealed additive rhythm and dismantled his Western training, his trip to India and lifelong Buddhism, and his return to a New York classical world that wanted nothing to do with him. It covers the Philip Glass Ensemble playing SoHo lofts and galleries, the moving company, cab driving, and plumbing that paid for it, Music in Twelve Parts, Einstein on the Beach at the Met, the portrait trilogy, his film scores and pop collaborations, and the publishing and record companies that kept him in control of his legacy.

• Divisive versus additive rhythm: slicing a pie compared with stacking Lego bricks
• Why Glass rejected the label minimalism in favor of music with repetitive structures
• How driving a taxi through Manhattan gridlock fed the pulse of his compositions
• The C-E-G demonstration: how one shifted note after minutes of repetition spikes attention
• Satyagraha in Sanskrit, Akhnaten, and symphonies built from Bowie and Eno’s Berlin albums