by Philip Glass
Mr. Copland looked at the first page. What I had done was to pencil in a theme for the violin—it’s so similar to what I do today, I’m surprised that I had even thought of it then—and every low note of the theme, I had played on the French horn. So the violin went da-da, da-da, da-da, and the French horn outlined the bottom notes, which became the countermelody. I thought it was a very good idea.
Mr. Copland looked at it and said, “You’ll never hear the French horn.”
“Of course you will,” I said.
“Nope, you’ll never hear it.”
“I will hear it.”
“You’re not going to hear it.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Copland. I’m going to hear it.”
Mr. Copland got extremely annoyed with me, and that was pretty much the end of my lesson. He’d only seen the opening page of the piece! We never got beyond the first eight or ten measures.
What’s wrong with me? I thought. Mr. Copland was much older than me. He was a real composer, a famous composer. He’d invited students to show him their compositions—a wonderful opportunity—and I had totally blown it. I had one lesson with Aaron Copland and we had a disagreement and he basically kicked me out.
As it turned out, I was right, at least that time. On a student recording the next year at Juilliard, sure enough, there was that French horn line, outlining the countermelody to the violin theme. You could hear it clear as a bell. I am sorry I didn’t keep in touch with Mr. Copland, for I would have sent him the recording.
THE IMPACT OF SUCH ORIGINAL AND PROFESSIONAL researchers and academicians on our young minds was enormous. This level of leadership was everywhere—in philosophy, mathematics, classical studies. Oddly, though, the performing arts were not represented at all. No dance, theater, or music performance training was to be found. On the other hand, there were parts of the University of Chicago that were involved in studies so radical that we barely knew what they were up to at all. One of its graduate programs, the Committee on Social Thought was one such group. To graduate from the College and enter the Committee as a graduate student—to be accepted, as it were, by the Committee—would have been their greatest dream for some. Its faculty consisted of writers, scientists, and thinkers. These were men and women that some in the College—including myself—deeply, almost fiercely admired and attempted to emulate as best we could: in those years, Saul Bellow, Hannah Arendt, and Mircea Eliade, among others.
Bellow’s big novel at that time was The Adventures of Augie March, the story of a man’s life and search for identity from childhood to maturity. I was a big reader, and the two writers from Chicago who interested me were Bellow and Nelson Algren, author of The Man with the Golden Arm, about a heroin addict’s struggles to stay clean, and Walk on the Wild Side, in which Algren tells us, “Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom’s. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.”
What I admired about Bellow and Algren was that they took absolutely colloquial language—and not just colloquial language but vulgar language—and used it as a medium of expression. Until then, I had been very taken with writers like Joseph Conrad, who wrote in a very eloquent early-twentieth-century prose, but these new writers were using the vernacular of the street.
I never saw Bellow on campus, but we all knew about him. Both he and Algren were idolized by the young people in Chicago because they were Chicago. They were not New York, they were not San Francisco. When I went to Chicago, I picked up Chicago writers, I picked up Chicago jazz, I picked up Chicago folk music—people like Big Bill Broonzy and Charlie Parker and Stan Getz. All these people worked in Chicago.
As often happens around a great school or university, the University of Chicago projected its aura well beyond its Hyde Park neighborhood and, for that matter, the rest of the South Side. Writers, poets, and thinkers would come to live in the shadow of the university. This larger world included theater groups and cutting-edge bebop jazz clubs, like the Beehive or the Cotton Club on Cottage Grove. There was even a rumor, and perhaps a true one, that Alfred Korzybski, the scholar and author of Manhood of Humanity and Science and Sanity, had lived and worked in Hyde Park. He was an early proponent of the study of semantics and a radical thinker who, for some reason, appealed to me. Perhaps it was his ideas about history, time, and our human nature I was drawn to—he originated the concept of time-binding, that human culture is the result of the transmission of knowledge through time. I haven’t seen his books in years or even heard tell of him. Perhaps just another great soul, an American Mahatma, if you will, to be found somewhere in our libraries and collective memories.
As I learned early on, the academic arrangements made for the College were especially striking. We were assigned to courses (there were, famously, fourteen courses, each three quarters long—Fall, Winter, Spring). However, attendance was not required or even noted. There were quarterly exams that students could take. These exams were strictly optional, and the grades given were not counted toward failure or success in the course. The courses that were considered the core of the curriculum consisted of three levels each in science, sociology, and humanities. Five other courses made up the fourteen. Completion of these were the only requirements for graduation.
There would be, though, a “comprehensive” exam for whatever courses the student had registered for at the end of the year, in May. Each of these exams would take an entire day and include at least one essay to be written in the examination room. Needless to say, the subject of the essay would be unknown to the students before the exam, so of course this could be, and often was, a terrifying experience. However, the reading list for each course was available at the beginning of the academic year. The readings themselves were to be found at the U of C bookstore, either as individual books or as a collection of readings in a syllabus.
Now, the simplest and most straightforward way to prepare for the comprehensive was to buy the books and syllabus for each course and simply attend the seminars, lectures, or laboratory classes in the normal unfolding of a three-quarter course. To be truthful, I never once followed that path. Perhaps there were some who did, but in all my years there I never met them.
There were several problems that made the ideal plan difficult to follow. The biggest problem was embedded in the culture of the university itself. It was like this: though we were assigned to specific seminars, we were free to “audit” any course in the College we liked and even many courses in the university. To audit a class, you simply asked the professor for permission to attend. I never heard of a request being refused. Of course, we were encouraged to attend our registered courses, but it was not required, and in the end, the only grade earned and which actually counted was the comprehensive exam. So, in theory, one could skip all the classes and exams and just take the comprehensive. But almost no one did that, either. I think many of us took a middle road. We emphasized our regular course work, but freely “grazed” through much of the university curriculum.
Along around late March or April, when we discovered we had fallen behind in our reading lists, we started frantically reading the missing texts. It could be helpful, too, if you could find someone who had taken good notes of classes missed and was willing to share them, but this was not likely. Basically, I did a lockdown. I would go to the bookstore and buy the books, and I began reading them slowly. I read everything. The advantage was that when I went into the exams, everything was fresh in my mind. I hadn’t forgotten anything because I had barely learned it to begin with. So I never failed the exams. My very first year, I had four exams, and I got an A, B, C, and D. My mother was horrified, but I pointed out that actually that was a B-minus average
The next year everything resolved into As, Bs, and Cs. I got rid of the Ds, but I never got all As. I wasn’t that kind of student. I wasn’t concerned with having a good grade point average. I wasn’t going to medical school—what did I care? I didn’t think the grades mattered. They weren’t a systematic appraisal
of what I knew. I was more interested in hanging out with someone like Aristotle Skalides, a wandering intellectual and would-be academic who wasn’t a student but who liked to engage young people in the coffee shop in discussions about philosophy. Spending an hour with him at the coffee shop was like going and spending an hour in the classroom. I was more interested in my general education than the courses. It almost didn’t matter to me whom I studied with, as long as I found the right teacher, and that was pretty much my attitude. In fact, I think that has persisted. I’ve found teachers all through my life, people I knew who were otherwise unknown.
Another distraction from the regular course work was that there were some professors who offered informal classes, usually in their homes, on specific books or subjects. For these classes, no registration was required, no exam was given, and no student was turned away. This practice was, I believe, understood and tolerated by the university itself.
Now, why would you spend your time as a student (or professor, for that matter) this way, when there were reading lists that needed to be completed? Well, the answer is that some of the classes were unique and otherwise not available. They were not offered officially, were known by word of mouth, but were quite well attended. I went to an evening class entirely on one book—Homer’s The Odyssey—once a week for at least two quarters, taught by a classics professor named Charles Bell. These kinds of “private” courses given within the university community, though not generally known, could be sought after and found. That in itself probably accounted for their appeal.
A third distraction, and perhaps the biggest one of all, was Chicago itself. For example, during its season the Chicago Symphony Orchestra offered Friday afternoon concerts to students for a fifty-cent admission price. From the South Side, it was a quick ride on the Illinois Central train to downtown Chicago. I had been a regular concertgoer to the Baltimore Symphony practically from childhood. The editor of the Baltimore Symphony concert program, Mr. Greenwald, taught at my mother’s high school, and he often gave us free tickets. The Baltimore Symphony was quite good, but the Chicago Symphony was in a class by itself.
Fritz Reiner, the famous Hungarian conductor, was fascinating to watch. He was somewhat stout, hunched over with round shoulders, and his arm and baton movements were tiny—you almost had to look at him with binoculars to see what he was doing. But those tiny movements forced the players to peer at him intently, and then he would suddenly raise his arms up over his head and the entire orchestra would go crazy. Reiner knew the classical repertoire, of course, but he was an outstanding interpreter of Bartók and Kodály, both countrymen of his. Of course, Bartók’s music was already familiar to me through my father. There was also the Art Institute of Chicago, the Opera House, which I only occasionally visited, and the downtown jazz clubs, which, for a time, were still off-limits to me because of my age.
I mentioned earlier the influence of the Great Books of the curriculum, but it extended far beyond that. Whenever possible, which turned out to be all the time, the books we studied would be firsthand, primary sources. We were never given summaries to read or even commentaries, unless they themselves rose to the level of a primary source. So, for example, we read Darwin’s The Origin of Species in the biological sciences, and we reperformed Mendel’s fruit fly experiments. In physics we reenacted the experiments with rolling balls and inclined planes of Galileo. We also read Newton and followed physics up to and including Schrödinger, while in chemistry we read Avogadro and Dalton.
So the study of science became the study of the history of science, and I began to understand what a scientific personality could be like. This early exposure would be reflected in Galileo Galilei, which I composed forty-five years later, in which his experiments become a dance piece—the balls and inclined planes are there. I found the biographical aspects of scientists intensely interesting, and the operas about Galileo, Kepler, and Einstein pay tribute to everything I learned about scientists and science that came out of those years.
The same primary-source method was carried out in social science, history, and philosophy. Learning American history meant reading the Federalist Papers and other late-eighteenth-century essays by the men who wrote the Constitution. Of course, humanities meant theater and literature from ancient to modern. Poetry, same thing. The effect on me was to cultivate and understand in a firsthand way the lineage of culture. The men and women who created the stepping-stones from earliest times became familiar to us—not something “handed down” but actually known in a most immediate and personal way.
At this time, I became comfortable with the university’s Harper Library, where I learned to research events and people. The work I later took up in opera and theater would not have been possible without that preparation and training. My first three full-scale operas—Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha, and Akhnaten—were made with collaborators—Robert Wilson, Constance DeJong, and Shalom Goldman, respectively—but I fully participated in the writing and shaping of the librettos for all three. I could do this with complete confidence in my academic abilities. In fact, I now see clearly that a lot of the work I chose was inspired by men and women whom I first met in the pages of books. In this way, those early operas were, as I see it, an homage to the power, strength, and inspiration of the lineage of culture.
AFTER SPENDING THE SUMMER IN BALTIMORE, I returned for my second year at the University of Chicago in September 1953. It would be my last year living in the Burton-Judson dormitory, located on the south side of the Midway, formerly the southern boundary of the University, an area that included the prefab housing where young men with families stayed. These were families who were there thanks to the GI Bill, still very much part of the landscape.
So there I was, in the corridor outside my dorm room, when I saw a young man with a fencing mask and sword prancing around practicing his moves. The minute he saw me, he pressed a mask and sword on me. After quickly showing me some of the basics, we began fencing. His name was Jerry Temaner, and I would say that first encounter was emblematic of a friendship that has continued into the present.
He, like me, was sixteen, but was a native of the place, having grown up on Chicago’s Great West Side. He was skinny, with horn-rimmed glasses, the same size as me, five foot eight, with long dark hair.
The remarkable thing about Jerry Temaner was that his father was in the same business as mine. Jerry’s dad, who was called Little Al, used to run a number of record stores in Chicago. Since his father’s store was called Little Al, he and I would call my father’s store Big Ben. At our first meeting, we discovered not only that we had both grown up in record stores but that our experiences were, in many ways, identical—we learned music from the stores, we worked in the stores, and we knew the same records. It was through Jerry that I discovered Chicago and, actually, a lot about the university, for he also introduced me to the bebop jazz clubs on Fifty-Fifth Street, where I heard Bud Powell and saw Charlie Parker for the first time.
Charlie Parker was the great genius I had admired most in my youth. I saw him many times through the window of the Beehive before I was ever allowed to get in. To me, he was the J. S. Bach of bebop: no one could play like him. His alto playing was beyond superb.
The next person who, for me, came along and had that power in his music was John Coltrane, who could take a melody like “My Favorite Things” and pull out harmonies that one would never imagine were there. That gave him a freedom—both melodic and rhythmic—but also the harmonic freedom to explore implied harmonies. These he could outline in his playing to a point that was breathtaking. You almost never knew where he would go, because he could take it so far, and yet he was never really that far away. He was another great bebop player of our time.
In addition to Parker and Coltrane, there were other great players in Chicago: saxophonists like Jackie McLean and Sonny Rollins, as well as piano players like Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell—the great players of the forties and fifties. I came to know and love their music, and b
eyond that, I understood it. I heard it as a variant of baroque music. It is even organized in the same way. Jazz relies on a song’s chord changes and the melodic variations that the changes inspire. Furthermore, the song has a bridge—an ABA form—and jazz solos will follow the same pattern.
Singers like Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, and Frank Sinatra were able to expand the performance of popular song by using techniques of the great jazz players. Louis Armstrong is an example of a singer who began as a trumpet player and “crossed over” to popular music from the jazz side. Years later, I came to appreciate the skills of these great musicians.
What I learned from that music became part of my own language. I’ve become very comfortable combining melodic material with harmonic material that does not at first seem to be supported. The melodies may not be part of the harmony, but the ear accepts them as alternate notes. They’re extensions of the harmony and can even sound as if the music is in two keys at once. That way of hearing melodies certainly comes out of listening to jazz, and I hear that in my music when I’m writing symphonies and especially operas.
What was interesting about the pianists Bud Powell, Monk, and Red Garland was that they had developed a playing technique that didn’t at all resemble the way classical music is performed. They punched out the tunes, almost the way a boxer would punch out and use his fists. I found that especially with Bud Powell. He would attack the piano. He was a fantastic player and he became my favorite because of his personal orientation toward the piano. He and the piano weren’t adversaries, but he was able to physically pull the music out of the instrument. He had a rough style of playing, which at the same time was extremely sophisticated. Art Tatum was a more accomplished pianist, however, Bud Powell was, for me, the more emotional player.
Jerry Temaner and I also visited the Modern Jazz Room in the Loop, where you could often hear Stan Getz, Chet Baker, and Lee Konitz. It was through Jerry that I was introduced to the finer points of modern jazz. Of course, I was already a musician, with at least the beginnings of a music education as a student at Peabody, but Jerry was coming to jazz from a different place. He was really a connoisseur and, after playing a record for me, he would test my knowledge of a full array of the jazz talents he expected me to be familiar with. After a year of his tutelage, one afternoon he gave me his usual “blindfold” test, playing a saxophonist who was new to me. I had to measure the degree of his talent and explain what I liked. In fact, I liked the music very much and made a strong case for it. My mentor was very pleased. We had been listening to the tenor saxophonist Jackie McLean, though until then I hadn’t heard his music.