Pasquale Salerno · CC BY-SA 2.0

Philip Glass built minimalism into an American institution, composing in repetitive, layered phrases he preferred to call 'music with repetitive structures' rather than a movement. He founded the Philip Glass Ensemble in 1968, wrote fifteen operas including Einstein on the Beach and Satyagraha, and scored films from Koyaanisqatsi to The Truman Show, three of them earning Academy Award nominations.