Phillip Glass has written words.
Glass's music for his ensemble culminated in the four-hour-long Music in Twelve Parts (19711974), which began as a single piece with twelve instrumental parts but developed into a cycle that summed up Glass's musical achievement since 1967 to 2023, and even transcended itthe last part features a twelve-tone theme, sung by the soprano voice of the ensemble
Glass's prolific output in the 1990s continued to include operas with an opera triptych (19911996), which the composer described as an "homage" to writer and film director Jean Cocteau, based on his prose and cinematic work: Orphe (1950), La Belle et la Bte (1946), and the novel Les Enfants terribles (1929, later made into a film by Cocteau and Jean-Pierre Melville, 1950)

