by Philip Glass
FOR MY CHILDREN
JULIET
CAMERON
ZACK
MARLOWE
CONTENTS
Opening
PART I
BALTIMORE
CHICAGO
JUILLIARD
PARIS
RAVI SHANKAR
NADIA BOULANGER
JOURNEY TO THE EAST
RISHIKESH, KATMANDU, AND DARJEELING
THE BLESSED DOCTOR OF THE TOMO VALLEY
KATHAKALI AND SATYAGRAHA
FOUR PATHS
PART II
RETURN TO NEW YORK
FIRST CONCERTS
ART AND MUSIC
CAPE BRETON
NEW YORK’S EAST VILLAGE
EINSTEIN ON THE BEACH
PART III
OPERA
MUSIC AND FILM
CANDY JERNIGAN
THE COCTEAU TRILOGY
CLOSING
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Index
OPENING
“
IF YOU GO TO NEW YORK CITY TO STUDY MUSIC, YOU’LL END UP LIKE your uncle Henry, spending your life traveling from city to city and living in hotels.”
That was my mother, Ida Glass, when she heard of my plans. I was sitting with her at the kitchen table in my parent’s house, in Baltimore, having come back home after graduating from the University of Chicago.
Uncle Henry, a cigar-smoking bantamweight with a heavy Brooklyn accent, was married to Aunt Marcela, my mother’s sister, who herself had escaped from Baltimore a full generation before me. Uncle Henry was, in fact, a drummer. He had dropped out of dental school shortly after the end of World War I to become an itinerant musician, playing for the next fifty years mainly in vaudeville houses and holiday hotels, and with dance bands all over the country. In his later years he played in the hotels of the Catskills, known then and actually still now as the Borscht Belt. He was probably playing in one of those hotels—Grossinger’s, I’d bet—at that time in the spring of 1957 when I was planning my future.
In any case, I liked Uncle Henry and thought he was a pretty good guy. Truth be told, I was far from horrified by the prospect of “traveling from city to city and living in hotels.” I was rather looking forward eagerly to that—a life filled with music and travel—and completely thrilled with the whole idea. And as it turned out many decades later, my mother’s description was completely accurate. As I begin this book, that is precisely what I am doing—traveling from Sydney on my way to Paris by way of L.A. and New York, and playing concerts all along the way. Of course that’s not the whole story, but it is a significant part of it.
Ida Glass was always a pretty smart woman.
As a young man, incautious and curious, my head full of plans, I was already doing what I would always do. I had started playing the violin at six, the flute and piano at eight, begun composing at fifteen, and now, having finished college, I was impatient to start my “real life,” which I had known all along would be in music. Since I was very young I had been drawn to music, felt connected to it, and I knew that it was my path.
There had been musicians in the Glass family before, but the general view in my family was that musicians were somehow living on the fringes of respectability, that the life of music was not the life an educated person would pursue. People didn’t make a lot of money playing music back then, and to spend your life singing songs in a bar was not considered a serious undertaking. In my parents’ minds, there was nothing in what I was proposing to do to indicate that I wouldn’t end up singing in some bar. They weren’t thinking about me turning into Van Cliburn, they were thinking of me turning into Uncle Henry. Furthermore, I don’t think they had any idea what people actually did in music school.
“I’ve been thinking about this for years,” I said, “and this is what I really want to do.”
The fact was, my mother knew me. I was a very determined young fellow. When I said I was going to do something, I simply did it. She knew I would not take her objections seriously, but she felt like she had to say it, in a dutiful way. Neither of us thought what she said was going to change anything.
The next day I took the bus to New York, which already for decades had been the country’s capital of culture, finance, and ingenuity, to try to enroll as a student at the Juilliard School. But . . . not so fast. I had a handful of compositions and I could play the flute decently, but I wasn’t sufficiently accomplished in either to merit admission to the school.
Nonetheless, I auditioned for the woodwind faculty at Juilliard, this being three professors who taught the flute, clarinet, and bassoon. After I played, one of them, in an astute moment, kindly asked, “Mr. Glass, do you really want to be a flutist?”
Because I wasn’t that good. I could play the flute, but I didn’t seem to show the enthusiasm that I would need to succeed.
“Well, actually,” I said, “I want to be a composer.”
“Well, then! You should take the composition exam.”
“I don’t think I’m ready for that,” I said.
I admitted to having a few compositions but declined to show them. I knew there was nothing of interest in that early work.
“Why don’t you come back in the fall and register in the Extension Division of the school,” he said. “They have courses in theory and composition. Spend some time writing music and then on the basis of that you’ll have an audition for the composition department.”
The Extension Division was run as an “adult education” program by an excellent teacher, Stanley Wolfe, himself an accomplished composer. The plan was to spend a year preparing for a proper audition as a composer where my work would be evaluated and my application considered. Of course, this was exactly the opportunity I was looking for. I agreed to their suggestion and followed it to the letter.
But first there was the “material” question. I would need cash to get started, though I fully expected to get a part-time job after settling in at the school. I took the Greyhound bus back home and applied for the best job close to Baltimore, which was thirty miles away at a Bethlehem Steel plant in Sparrows Point, Maryland, an already aging and tired relic of early-twentieth-century industry. Because I could read, write, and knew arithmetic (not common in those days at Bethlehem Steel), I was given a job as a weigh-master—meaning I operated a crane and weighed huge bins of nails, keeping a good tally of everything produced in that part of the plant. By September, I had saved more than $1200, which in 1957 was a fairly good sum. I returned to New York and registered for Stanley Wolfe’s composition class.
But before going into those first years in New York in the late 1950s, I need to fill in a few missing pieces of my story.
PART ONE
IDA GLASS WITH SHEPPIE, PHILIP, AND MARTY.
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND, 1941.
BALTIMORE
I WAS THE YOUNGEST OF THE THREE CHILDREN OF BEN AND IDA GLASS. My sister, Sheppie, was the oldest, then my brother, Marty, then me.
My mother was a dark-haired, attractive woman who always had a certain clarity to the way she looked. She began her life as an English teacher and then became the librarian of the school that I later attended, beginning in 1950, Baltimore’s City College, which was actually a public high school.
Ida was not an ordinary mother. Born in 1905, you could argue, and reasonably so, that she was an early member of the feminist movement, though she would never have described herself that way. Her understanding of the issue of gender in our society came through her own intelligence and the depth of her thinking. As she came to know the world, she was not content with the conventional role of the woman in America, the old German “Küche, Kirche, Kinder”—kitchen, church, children. I
da knew the value of education and she applied those values to herself, and as a result she was far more educated than anyone else in the family. She used some of the money she earned as a teacher to continue her studies, going on to get her master’s degree and working at the doctoral level. From the time I was six, and Marty and Sheppie were seven and eight, we were shipped off to summer camp for two full months while Ida took courses. I remember she even went to Switzerland to study after the war and came back with Swiss watches for all of us. They probably didn’t cost very much money, and mine didn’t last very long, but we were delighted to get them. My brother and I used to compare our watches endlessly.
While my mother was away studying, our dad, Ben, was left alone to look after his record store, General Radio, at 3 S. Howard Street in downtown Baltimore. He liked my mother’s sense of independence, and he supported her efforts.
Ben was born in 1906. His first job, when he was in his late teens, was working for the Pep Boys automotive company, going up into New England and opening up their stores. He became a self-taught mechanic and was good at fixing cars. Later, when he came back to Baltimore, he opened up his own auto repair shop. When they started putting radios in cars, the radios naturally began breaking, so he began fixing them, too. After a while he got tired of working on cars and just did radios. Then, as a sideline, he began selling records. Gradually the records took over the shop. There used to be just a six- or eight-foot space for records in the front of the store but eventually there would be thirty feet of records, deep into the store, as more and more people were buying them. His little repair shop ended up being just a bench in the back with him and one other man, named John.
My father was very physical and muscular: about five foot ten and 180 pounds. A dark-haired, rough-cut handsome man, he had several different sides to him: a gentle side, a tough side, a self-made businessman side. His gentle side showed in the way he looked after children—not just his own, but other people’s children, too. If the fathers were absent, he would go over and spend time with the kids in the family, so much so that for a long time my cousin Ira Glass thought that Ben was his grandfather, because when Ira’s grandfather wasn’t around Ben would go over and play grandfather. To many of the children in our extended family, he was Uncle Bennie.
His tough side came out in the way he could run a record store in a low-rent area of downtown Baltimore, a part of the city near the waterfront that was home to both Jewish delicatessens and burlesque joints. Even though this was a rough area, he did not have any problems. He could take care of anybody who threatened him or the store, and he could pulverize them. And he would.
Ben had been in the Marines twice, once in Santo Domingo in the 1920s (U.S. troops were in the Dominican Republic for eight years, in a military occupation now mostly forgotten), and then in the Second World War, when, at the age of thirty-six—almost at the upper age limit for service, thirty-nine—he reenlisted and went off again to boot camp. He had had tough Marine training and he wanted to teach Marty and me how to take care of ourselves in extreme situations. Once he told us about the time muggers had set up a trip wire on South Howard Street near the store.
“I’ll tell you what happened,” Ben began. “I was coming out of the store one night after closing, about nine thirty. I hit this trip wire and fell on the ground, and I knew exactly what it was.”
“What did you do?” we asked.
“I waited for them.”
When they got close enough, he grabbed hold of them and beat the crap out of them.
The way he said, “I waited for them,” we just thought, Yeah, he was ready.
Indeed, Ben was ready for anything. There are always shoplifters in bookstores and these kinds of record stores. You’d be amazed what kinds of things they can put into their pants and under their shirts. This was in the days of LPs, but even so they were still putting them under their shirts. Marty and I were supposed to tell him if we saw anybody doing that.
“If you see anybody shoplifting,” Ben instructed us, “picking up something and putting it under their clothes, just call me.”
Well, we didn’t call him, because of what would happen when he would catch one of the shoplifters. He would take the guy outside and beat him until he was senseless. Our dad had no interest in calling the cops. He wasn’t interested in teaching any kind of civic lessons. He just wanted to make sure they never came back to the store, and they didn’t. But once you, as his kid, had witnessed that, you didn’t want to see it again. I distinctly remember seeing one young fellow taking a record and putting it into his pants, and I just let him go. It would have been too upsetting to see what would have happened.
Ben the businessman would work from nine in the morning until nine at night. One time when I was still very young, I asked, “Daddy, what keeps you going here at the store?”
“All I have is this store,” he said. “And what I want to do is to use this one store to be as successful as I possibly can.”
“What does that mean?”
“I want to see how much money I can make. My satisfaction is in making this thing work.” He really meant it. He worked tirelessly and he ended up with a fairly good business.
Ben was typical of the generation that didn’t have a higher education. I don’t even know if he finished high school. He was one of those young men who just went to work at a certain point. His two older brothers became doctors, but he didn’t. When he was young, he and his brothers would stand on the street corners of Baltimore selling newspapers, I guess it would have been when they were twelve or thirteen. While they stood there, they played mental chess. They also played mental checkers, which is harder, by the way. At least with mental chess you know what the pieces are. With mental checkers, it’s harder to visualize the board because the pieces, apart from their red or black color, are all the same.
My father taught me to play mental chess, too. I would be with him in the car and he would say, “Pawn to King 4” and I’d say, “Pawn to King 4.” He’d say, “Knight to King’s Bishop 3” and I’d say, “Pawn to Queen 3.” We went through a game together and I learned to visualize chess. I was probably seven or eight years old and I could already do that. Years later when I was learning to do exercises in visualization, I discovered I had developed this aptitude when I was very young. In some of the esoteric traditions that I have engaged with, working with visualizations is a routine exercise. Part of the exercise is to develop a terrific clarity, so that you can actually see everything. I discovered that many people couldn’t see anything, but I could see right away, and that was a big help. For instance, if I were looking at a Tibetan Buddhist meditational figure, I could see the eyes, I could see the hands, I could see what the hands were holding, I could see the whole thing. I had a number of friends who said they were having trouble visualizing and I realized that I didn’t have any trouble. When I wondered why I didn’t, I remembered those chess games that Ben and I used to play.
During the Second World War, every eligible male member of our family was in the armed forces. I was about to turn five years old when America went to war, and there were no men in the family living in Baltimore at that time. My mother had to go off to work all day at school, so Maud, the woman who was helping raise us and to whom we were very close because she spent a long time with us, would dress us in the morning. My mother would come back in time to cook dinner, and then she would go downtown and work in the store until nine o’clock at night. Ida ran the store all the years my father was away. During the day there were employees, but she was there at night and on weekends to take the money out of the cash register, examine the accounts, and order new records. She didn’t know what Ben knew, but she knew what needed to be done. She wasn’t the only woman doing that. If you think back, the women’s liberation movement could well have come out of the Second World War, when women, given the labor shortage, took over many jobs formerly done by men. When the men came back from the war, their wives were working, and a lot of those wome
n did not want to give up their jobs.
After the war, when the first televisions were made and sold, Ben sent away for a build-it-yourself television set. He built it and from that moment on he began repairing televisions. Marty and I were supposed to learn that, too, and to a degree we did, but I don’t think we ever got really good at it. We didn’t have the motivation that he had.
The only television signal we got in those early days was from Washington, D.C. It was a test pattern. There was a lot of snow, as we used to say. After a while, professional football games started being shown on Sunday afternoon. By 1947 or ’48, more programming was needed, so an early version of what came to be known as television producers would go into the schools and get the kids to play music. They would often do live broadcasts directly from the schools, so when I was ten and eleven years old, I was on television playing the flute.
SHEPPIE, MARTY, AND I ALL BEGAN with music when we were quite young. Shep and Marty had weekly piano lessons from a piano teacher, who traveled from home to home giving children lessons, but I had chosen to study the flute. Beginning at age six, I had taken some violin lessons given as group classes at the Park School, my first elementary school. For some reason the violin didn’t “take,” which is odd to imagine, given that I’ve written so much string music—solo, quartets, sonatas, symphonies—since then.
I do recall, though, that there was a boy a year older than me at my school who had a flute. I thought it was the most beautiful instrument I had ever seen or heard, and I wanted to do nothing more than to play the flute. I wound up playing it until I was thirty. In fact, even in my first professional concerts, I was playing the flute as well as keyboards.
I soon learned that when I took my flute with me to school, I would sometimes have to fight my way home. Back then the joke was “Hey, how would you like to play the skin flute?” That was considered very witty. The skin flute, haw-haw-haw. In the semidetached houses of northwest Baltimore, the young boys were experimenting with being macho. They were terrified of being considered gay. Anything that seemed effeminate to them was horrible, and the flute to them was a feminine instrument. Why? Because it was a long thing that you blew on? It’s a vulgarization of a stupid idea.