Words Without Music

by Philip Glass

  My father was self-taught, but he ended up having a very refined and rich knowledge of classical, chamber, and contemporary music. Typically he would come home and have dinner, and then sit in his armchair and listen to music until almost midnight. I caught on to this very early, and I would go and listen with him. Of course, he had no idea I was there. At least, at that time, I didn’t think so. Until I was nine years old, we lived in one of the row houses with the marble steps that were the rule in the downtown Baltimore residential neighborhoods. The children’s bedrooms were only one floor above the living room where my father sat for his evening music listening. Somehow, I would find myself awake and would quietly sneak part way down the stairs behind him and, sitting there, join him in listening. My childhood nights were spent with him in this way from a very early age. For me, those years were filled with the music of the great Schubert string quartets, the Opus 59 quartets of Beethoven, piano music of all kinds, and quite a lot of “modern” music as well—mainly Shostakovich and Bartók. The sounds of chamber music entered my heart, becoming my basic musical vocabulary. I thought, simply, that was how music was supposed to sound. That was my base, and quite a lot of everything else eventually became layered around it.

  Always concerned about our education, my mother put us into the best places she could. My brother and sister went to private schools, but I don’t think they could afford a third private school, so I went to a public high school, City College. Baltimore, in its day, was quite progressive in its ideas about public education, and I was registered in an “A” course, an enriched education program emphasizing math and language. City College is what today would be called a magnet school. Apart from the fact that it was racially segregated, as all public schools in Baltimore were, it was very forward-looking in its thinking. Graduates of the “A” course would often enter college or university as sophomores, not freshman. The point is that I was already in a high-quality educational program before the question of an early entrance to the University of Chicago ever came up.

  Since my mother was the librarian in my high school, I would stay in the library after classes were over. If I had no other plans, I would wait for her to close it up for the day and get a ride home with her from school. While waiting, I passed the time browsing through college catalogues. I dreamed, of course, of escaping Baltimore and knew that my ticket out would be connected to a college. Eventually, I stumbled on to the University of Chicago catalogue and discovered, to my delight, that a high school diploma was not required, and one could be accepted by simply passing their entrance exam. This had been put into effect by the then-president, Robert Hutchins, who was regarded as one of the most progressive educators in the country. Besides this unusual entrance requirement, he had also initiated a “Great Books” program at the College of the University of Chicago. This idea came from Mortimer Adler, a philosopher and educator who had identified the one hundred great books that an educated person should have read to earn a university degree. It was a formidable list—Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Newton, and so on. In fact, in those days, not surprisingly, a large part of the College curriculum was based on the list.

  I suppose that this loophole in admission policies which allowed bright and ambitious young men to enter college without having completed high school may have had something to do the end of World War II and the fact that thousands of GIs returning from Europe and Japan were taking advantage of the GI Bill that helped them go to college. By the time I came along, it was already in place, offering a way to skip over the last two years of high school and begin the exciting years of education that a big university could offer.

  My high school adviser thought taking the exam would be great practice. It never occurred to him that I might pass. The test was a comprehensive measure of education: math, essay writing, and history. I didn’t consider it very hard, which is partly a credit to the quality of the courses I was taking. I passed the exam and was accepted as an “early entrant” to the school, but passing the entrance exam was only the first hurdle. The real question was: Would my parents allow me to leave for a big university and live far away from home at such a young age?

  One evening, shortly after I was accepted, two alumni from the Baltimore Alumni Association of the University of Chicago came to visit our home. I was sent to bed early that evening, and I have no idea what was discussed or what assurances were given, but at our usual breakfast of oatmeal and hot chocolate the next morning my mother said, “We had a meeting last evening and it was decided you can go to Chicago.”

  I was completely surprised. It never occurred to me that a decision would be made so quickly, but I was elated. It was as if the top of my head exploded. I knew I had completely outgrown Baltimore and I was ready to pack a few bags and leave my childhood, family, and home behind to begin my “real life” (whatever that was).

  As always, with Ida, she didn’t show a lot of emotion. It was there, but somewhat concealed. An odd coincidence is that my mother had herself graduated from Johns Hopkins at the age of nineteen. In fact, she was their first woman graduate, and this at such an early age, and she was made an honorary member of the faculty club. Did she, therefore, have some special insight about what a university education could mean for me?

  Outwardly, both my parents’ reactions were guarded. They were hesitant to even talk about it. My sister, Sheppie, told me later on that my father was the one who was doubtful, and the one who was determined that I would go was my mother. This was the opposite of what I thought at the time.

  “You went there because Ida wanted you to go there,” Sheppie said. “She wanted you to have the best education possible.”

  If my mother was proud of me for having been accepted, she never showed it. Nor did she let me know of her anxiety and understandable apprehension. After all, in 1952, I was just fifteen years old.

  CHICAGO

  THE OVERNIGHT TRAIN TO CHICAGO WAS RUN BY THE OLD B&O RAILroad, which left every day in the early evening from downtown Baltimore and arrived in the Loop in Chicago early the next morning. That, or a long drive through western Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana, was the only way to get from Baltimore to Chicago. In 1952, very few people took planes, although commercial airlines were beginning to offer an alternative.

  I was on my way to college with two friends from high school, Sydney Jacobs and Tom Steiner, both of whom I knew quite well. But our going out to the Midwest together was unplanned, sheer chance. They were part of a local, self-made club they called the Phalanx—a group of superbright, geeky teenagers who banded together for mutual company and entertainment. I knew them from the Maryland Chess Club, though, being several years younger, I was tolerated to a degree but had never been a part of their highly introverted and intellectual group. But I liked them all—they and their friends: Irv Zucker, Malcolm Pivar, and Bill Sullivan. Poets, mathematicians, and techno-visionaries of an order very early and remote from anything going on today.

  The three of us were on the train together, bonding easily for the first time. I was extremely excited to be on my way and had barely noticed the lectures, warnings, and assurances from Ben and Ida that in the end came down to letting me know I could come home anytime I needed to if things at the University of Chicago didn’t work out.

  “We can arrange with your school that if you come back from Chicago before Christmas, you can go back into your grade at the high school,” my mother said. Of course, I knew there was zero chance of that. They considered the three months until Christmas a trial run. For me, though, it was every kid’s dream—the Great Escape.

  I didn’t sleep at all that night. Soon after leaving the station, the lights were out. It was just an old passenger train from Dixie to the Midwest, with no amenities of any kind. No lights, no reading, nothing to do but make friends with the sounds of the night train. The wheels on the track made endless patterns, and I was caught up in it almost at once. Years later, studying with Alla Rakha, Ravi Shankar’s great tabla player and mus
ic partner, I practiced the endless cycles of 2s and 3s that form the heart of the Indian tal system. From this I learned the tools by which apparent chaos could be heard as an unending array of shifting beats and patterns. But on this memorable night, I was innocent of all that. Oddly enough, it wasn’t until almost fourteen years later, when I was on my first voyage of discovery in India and trains were the only way to travel, that I did some serious train travel again, much as I had as a boy on my many journeys between Baltimore and Chicago. The facts of travel were similar, at times almost identical. But my way of hearing had been radically transformed in those years. One might think that the trains from Einstein on the Beach came from a similar place, but no, that wasn’t so. That train music came from quite a different place altogether, which I’ll get to later. The point was that the world of music—its language, beauty, and mystery—was already urging itself on me. Some shift had already begun. Music was no longer a metaphor for the real world somewhere out there. It was becoming the opposite. The “out there” stuff was the metaphor and the real part was, and is to this day, the music. Night trains can make those things happen. The sounds of daily life were entering me almost unnoticed.

  RIGHT AWAY, CHICAGO HAD MUCH MORE of a big-city feel than Baltimore. It had modern architecture—not just Frank Lloyd Wright but the landmark Louis Sullivan buildings that were a bit older. It had a first-class orchestra—the Chicago Symphony conducted by Fritz Reiner; the Art Institute of Chicago, with its collection of Monets; and even art movie theaters. Chicago was a real city that catered to intellectuals and people with serious cultural interests in a way that Baltimore couldn’t. Chicago was also a place where you’d hear jazz that you wouldn’t hear in Baltimore (I didn’t even know where the jazz clubs were in my hometown). If you wanted to go to a good Chinese restaurant in Baltimore, you had to drive to Washington, but in Chicago we had everything.

  The university stretched from Fifty-Fifth Street to Sixty-First Street on both sides of the Midway, which had been the center of amusements and sideshows at Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Fifty-Seventh Street was built up with restaurants and bars, and the South Side jazz clubs, like the Beehive, were on Fifty-Fifth Street. Of course I was too young to get into some of the places I wanted to go, since I was fifteen and looked fifteen. By the time I was sixteen or seventeen, I had gotten a little bit bigger, so I was able to go to the Cotton Club, nearby on Cottage Grove, and also the clubs downtown. Eventually, the people at the door got to know me because I would stand there—just listening—looking through the window. Finally, they would say, “Hey, c’mon kid, you come on in.” I couldn’t buy a drink, but they would let me sit by the door and listen to the music.

  The first day of freshman orientation, I walked into a room and the first thing I noticed was that there were black students. You have to look at it from the point of view of a kid who had grown up in the Dixie South—because that’s where Baltimore was. There hadn’t been any African-American students in any school I’d ever attended. I had lived in a world where segregation was taken for granted and not even discussed. This was my conversion from being a kid from a border state, a Dixie state, whatever you want to call it, which was segregated top to bottom—its restaurants, movie houses, swimming pools, and golf courses. I think it took me less than a minute to realize that I had lived my whole life in a place that was completely wrong. It was a revelation.

  The College of the University of Chicago was quite small in those days—probably fewer than five hundred undergraduates, counting all four years of the usual program. However, it fit into the larger university of professional schools—business, law, medicine—and divisions devoted to science, humanities, social science, theology, and the arts, as well as the Oriental Institute. The relationship of the College to this large university was surprisingly intimate, and quite a number of the university faculty taught in the College. It was thought of then as a kind of European system, though I have no idea whether that was actually true. Classes were small, consisting of twelve or fewer students with one professor—we were never taught by graduate students. We sat together at a round table and talked through our reading lists—a classic seminar format. There were a few lecture classes, but not many, and in addition, there were lab classes for science.

  Very often when the seminars were over in the classrooms, the debates that had begun initially with the teachers would be continued among ourselves in the coffee shop on the Quadrangles at the center of the campus. That actually was the idea. The seminar style was something that was easy to reproduce in a coffee shop, because it was practically the same thing.

  There were some sports at the school, but at that time we didn’t have a football, basketball, or baseball team. I wanted to do something active so I went to the physical education bulletin board and found out they really needed some people for the wrestling team. I had wrestled in high school, so I volunteered, weighing in at about 116 pounds. I did pretty well with the team until my second or third year of competition with nearby schools. Then some farm boy from Iowa beat me so soundly and quickly that I gave up wrestling for life.

  The University of Chicago was renowned for its faculty members. I remember vividly my freshman course in chemistry. The lecturer was Harold C. Urey, who had won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He had chosen to teach the first-year chemistry class to seventy or eighty students, and he brought an enthusiasm for his subject that was electrifying. We met at eight a.m., but there were no sleepyheads in that class. Professor Urey looked exactly like Dr. Van Helsing from the Tod Browning 1931 movie Dracula—the doctor who examines one of Dracula’s victims and says, “And on the throat, the same two marks.” Now, when would a freshman or sophomore kid get to even be in the same room with a Nobel Prize winner, let alone being lectured on the periodic table? I think he must have thought, There must be young people out there who are going to become scientists.

  Professor Urey lectured like an actor, striding back and forth in front of the big blackboard, making incomprehensible marks on the board (I couldn’t figure out what he was doing—I only knew it had to do with the periodic table). His teaching was like a performance. He was a man passionate about his subject, and he couldn’t wait until we could be there at eight in the morning. Scientists on that level are like artists in a way. They are intensely in love with their subject matter, and Urey was one of them. In fact, I don’t remember anything about chemistry. I just went to see his performances.

  In my second year I had a small seminar class in sociology taught by David Riesman who, along with Reuel Denney and Nathan Glazer, was the author of The Lonely Crowd, a very famous book in those days. I suppose it might seem a little quaint today, but in the 1950s it was very new thinking. The thesis of the book was simple: there are three kinds of people, inner-directed, other-directed, and tradition-directed. These became personality types. The inner-directed is someone like Professor Urey, or like an artist—someone who doesn’t care about anything except the thing that he wants to do. The other-directed has no sense of his own identity other than that which came from the approval of the world around him. The tradition-directed are concerned with following the rules that have been handed down from the past. When you read these books, you immediately understand that the inner-directed people are the people that are the most interesting.

  Dr. Riesman would have eight or ten students in the class—no more than that—and I liked him immediately. He was, like Urey, a brilliant man, part of a new generation of sociologists who, coming after anthropologists like Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, brought methods of anthropology to bear on an analysis of modern urban life. My connection to Dr. Riesman extended well beyond the classroom. Twenty-five years later, his son Michael Riesman, who was about five years old at the time I was taking his father’s course, became the music director of the Philip Glass Ensemble.

  When the ensemble played at Harvard in the 1970s, Dr. Riesman was teaching there. Michael came to tell me, “My dad is here at th
e concert.”

  “Oh, I’ve got to see Dr. Riesman,” I said.

  “Dr. Riesman, do you remember me?” I asked when I met him.

  “Of course I do,” my onetime professor said.

  I didn’t really see any reason that he would have remembered me after all that time, though I had, in fact, caused a bit of a fuss with him once by challenging his ideas in the seminar. I had told him that I thought the three categories of people that he was suggesting were very much like the endomorph, ectomorph, and mesomorph types that had been proposed by an anthropologist who was studying the human body.

  “Do you think so?” he had asked me.

  “I think it’s absolutely the same,” I said.

  He looked at me like I was nuts. It’s funny, whenever I got an idea, if I thought I was right, I could not be talked out of it, and maybe that’s why he remembered me. I was a sophomore in college, sixteen years old, and he was in his midforties at the time. Why wouldn’t I keep my mouth shut? In truth, I never did. The same sort of confrontation I had with David Riesman was repeated with Aaron Copland a number of years later, when he and I got into an argument about orchestration.

  In the summer of 1960, four years after I had graduated from Chicago, Copland was a guest of the orchestra at the Aspen Music Festival and School, where I had come from Juilliard to take a summer course with Darius Milhaud, a wonderful composer and teacher. The orchestra was playing some of Copland’s pieces at the festival, and through Milhaud’s class, Copland invited students to meet with him one-on-one to show him their compositions. I took him one of my pieces, a violin concerto for solo violin, winds (flute, clarinet, bassoon), brass (trumpets, horns, trombones), and percussion.