Words Without Music

by Philip Glass

  Besides knowing music, Jerry was also very knowledgeable about film, and it was he who introduced me to the classics at the Hyde Park movie theater, which specialized in European films with subtitles. That’s where you could see the films of the French director René Clair, the stark, almost morbid work of the Swedish master Ingmar Bergman, or the neorealist movies of the Italian director Vittorio De Sica. Nothing like them had been shown in Baltimore. In fact, films with subtitles were then unknown in that city. For that you would have had to go to Washington, D.C. So all of this was a revelation to me. It was in Chicago that I saw À Nous la Liberté, The Seventh Seal, and The Bicycle Thief. When I moved to Paris a decade later, I found myself in the middle of the formidable 1960s cinema revolution, la Nouvelle Vague (the New Wave), championed by Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. By that time I had a solid background in European art films and absolutely knew what I was seeing.

  Of all these films, the ones dearest to my heart were those of Jean Cocteau—in particular, Orphée, La Belle et la Bête, and Les Enfants Terribles. During my years in Hyde Park these films appeared several times. They must have become lodged in my mind, safe and whole, because in the 1990s, when I undertook a five-year experiment to reinvent the synchronicity of image and music in film, I chose these three films of Cocteau that I knew so well.

  Jerry introduced me to other aspects of Chicago life. Besides the bebop of the South Side, there were the “big bands” you could hear—Stan Kenton, Count Basie, Duke Ellington—as well as singers Billie Holiday (I heard her at the Cotton Club on Cottage Grove on a double bill with Ben Webster), Anita O’Day, and Sarah Vaughan. So many great musicians were then coming to Chicago. When I moved to New York City in the late fifties, I became familiar with the jazz world there in the same way. As a Juilliard student I would write music by day and by night hear John Coltrane at the Village Vanguard, Miles Davis and Art Blakey at the Café Bohemia, or Thelonious Monk trading sets with the young Ornette Coleman, who was just up from Louisiana playing his white plastic saxophone at the Five Spot at St. Marks Place and the Bowery.

  Years later, I got to know Ornette. He had a place on Prince Street with a pool table in the front room. A good spot to hang out and talk about music. I met numerous musicians there of all kinds, including members of his ensemble, especially James “Blood” Ulmer, who had his own band as well. Ornette gave me a piece of advice that I have pondered ever since. He said, “Don’t forget, Philip, the music world and the music business are not the same.”

  SO FAR I HAVE WRITTEN ABOUT TWO TRADITIONS that became sources of the music I was later to compose. The first was the “classical” chamber music, which I learned about through my father, both from listening to music and from working at his store Saturdays and, especially, holidays. Christmas was a peak season for record sales—Ben told me once that 70 percent of his income came between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. By age fifteen I had become the classical music buyer of the store, continuing to look over the stock whenever I was home from school. In those days the big companies would send lists of new releases and older catalogues, and I would check off the items and quantities that we needed. When Columbia released the complete string quartets of Arnold Schoenberg, performed brilliantly for the recording by the Juilliard String Quartet, I was thrilled. Now, buying records of classical or “art” music is a whole lot trickier than buying Sinatra, Streisand, or Presley. Often only one or two, maybe three copies at the most of the standard classical repertoire would be enough for a Baltimore record store and would easily be sufficient for a few months, or until the next buying period came up. However, carried away by my enthusiasm for the music, I ordered four sets of the Schoenbergs!

  About two weeks later the box arrived from the distributor. That was always an exciting moment. Marty and I would be joined by Ben, who also enjoyed the moment. In those days we didn’t know what the covers looked like—the order books provided just lists of names. But these were the early days of LPs and artists and photographers had a field day with twelve-by-twelve-inch covers. With great anticipation we tore open the box, and there were the four Schoenbergs.

  Ben’s jaw dropped in amazement.

  “Hey, kid, what are you doing?” he roared. “Are you trying to put me out of business?”

  I explained that these were the new masterpieces of modern music, and that we needed them in the store.

  Ben looked at me for a long, silent moment. He was shocked by my naïveté. After all, I had been in the record business almost four years, and he couldn’t believe I had been that dumb.

  “Okay,” he finally said, “tell you what I’ll do. Put them on the shelves with the regular classical stock and let me know when we’ve sold the last one.”

  For the next seven years I would come home to Baltimore, stop by the store and check on them to see how we were doing. Finally, near the end of my Juilliard years, I came home and found they were all gone. I was elated and showed Ben the empty space where they had been.

  “The Schoenbergs . . . they’re gone!”

  Ben, always patient in moments like these, quietly said, “Okay, kid, did you learn the lesson?”

  I said nothing. Just waited.

  “I can sell anything if I have enough time.”

  It was just as Ornette would tell me many years later—the music world and the music business are not the same.

  And so we learn. Ben taught Marty and me many, many things, but, like this one, not every lesson was easily learned.

  The actual sound of Central European art music, especially the chamber music, was a solid part of me from an early age but maybe not audible in my music until almost five decades later, when I began to compose sonatas and unaccompanied string pieces as well as quite a lot of piano music. Though I did write a few string quartets for the Kronos Quartet, and some symphonies besides, these works from my forties, fifties, and sixties didn’t owe that much to the past. Now that I’m in my seventies, my present music does. It’s funny how it happened this way, but there it is.

  It was also a long time before I began to realize how jazz had entered my music. Because it is a form that is mainly improvisational, I didn’t connect it at all with my work. Only quite recently, while reflecting on my own history with jazz, I was surprised by what I found. In the last few years, Linda Brumbach and her Pomegranate Arts Company put together a new production of Einstein on the Beach. Since parts of the Einstein music have been part of my ensemble’s repertoire for years, I have mainly been involved with performing the music. Recently, though, I was listening to some early recordings of the “Train” music from Act 1, scene 1. Suddenly I was hearing something that I had failed to notice for almost forty years. A part of the music was almost screaming to be recognized. I began looking around in my record library and I came upon the music of Lennie Tristano. I knew this music very well. It was from my early listening years with Jerry. At that moment, in fact, I recalled that when I arrived in New York, I had somehow gotten Tristano’s phone number and called him up. I was in a phone booth on the Upper West Side near Juilliard, and to my total surprise he, Tristano himself, answered the phone.

  “Mr. Tristano, my name is Philip Glass,” I managed to say. “I’m a young composer. I’ve come to New York to study, and I know your work. Is there any chance I can study with you?”

  “Do you play jazz?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Do you play the piano?”

  “A little. I came here, really, to study at Juilliard, but I love your music and I wanted to be in touch with you.”

  “Well,” he said, “thank you for the call, but I don’t know that there’s anything I can do for you.”

  He was very kind, almost gentle. He wished me luck.

  Now fifty years later, listening to Tristano’s music again, I found what I was looking for. Two tracks: the first, “Line Up” and the second “East Thirty-Second Street.” I listened to them and there it was. No, the notes weren’t the same. Most listeners wo
uld probably not have heard what I did. But the energy, the feel, and, I would say, the intention of the music was completely and accurately captured in the “Train.” It doesn’t sound like him, but it shares the idea of propulsion, the self-confidence, and the drive. There’s an athleticism to it, a nonchalance, an “I don’t care if you listen to it or not—here it is.”

  These were Tristano’s one-hand improvisations and were, for me, his most impressive achievements. He would record, slowly, a steady flow of sixteenth notes, then afterward speed up the tapes. That gave the music a tremendous buoyancy and an electric energy that was completely unique. Once you hear these driving piano lines, you know who is playing. I don’t know that Tristano ever became very well-known. He was well-known to me because I found his records and I admired him. I never heard him play live—I don’t think many people did. He might have been known as a teacher among some jazz players, and he certainly was a teacher to me. He died in 1978, but he remains an icon in the jazz world, though still largely unknown. However, he was without a doubt a master.

  When I look back on it, I was also very influenced by the raw power of bebop music. Above all, I was interested in this kind of drive—a life force that was in the music itself. And that’s what I heard in the music of John Coltrane and Bud Powell as well as Tristano. That’s what I heard with Jackie McLean—it goes on and on. Charlie Parker, same thing. I’m talking about a flow of energy that seemed unstoppable, a force of nature.

  And that’s where I knew I wanted to be. For the music I wrote in the late 1960s—in particular, “Music in Fifths,” “Music in Contrary Motion,” “Music in Similar Motion,” and Music in Twelve Parts—this flow of energy had to be an important source. Clearly, the inspiration for one of the major themes of Einstein came from that piano work of Tristano’s. I sometimes hear about work described in terms of “originality,” or “breakthrough,” but my personal experience is quite different. For me music has always been about lineage. The past is reinvented and becomes the future. But the lineage is everything.

  In this vein, I recall something Moondog, the blind poet and street musician, told me. He was highly eccentric and very talented, and in the early 1970s he lived at my home on West Twenty-Third Street for a year.

  “Philip,” he said, “I am following in the footsteps of Beethoven and Bach. But really, they were such giants, and their footsteps were so far apart, that it is as if I am leaping after them.”

  IT WAS DURING MY FIRST YEAR IN CHICAGO that I seriously began my piano practice. I had befriended Marcus Raskin, a fellow student a few years older than myself who was very bright and had been a young pianist at Juilliard. He had given up the idea of a music career and was then at the College aiming for a career in law. (As it turned out, he was later a founding member of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington.) When I met him he was still quite a good player and knew, besides the classical repertoire, modern music as well. He played the Alban Berg Piano Sonata, op. 1, and helped acquaint me with that part of the new music world, the school of Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg. In those days, we called it twelve-tone music. Later, it was called dodecaphonic music, but twelve-tone was probably more accurate because it followed the music theories of Schoenberg, where you had to repeat each of the twelve tones before using a particular tone again, the idea being to create a kind of equality of tonal center so that no melody could belong to one key.

  I asked Marcus for help with the piano, and he became my piano teacher. With him I started on a real piano technique, and he was serious about my progress. As I mentioned, the university wasn’t much help in developing my music interests. There was a small music department run by a musicologist named Grosvenor Cooper, whom I met several times and who was encouraging to a point, but there was nothing there of interest for me. In those days, musicologists studied the baroque period and the romantic period, but they were neither equipped to teach nor interested in teaching composition.

  My love of the piano began at an age so early I can’t even recall exactly when. As a child, I was often at the family baby grand when I wasn’t playing the flute. When I came home from school, I’d run straight to the piano. But my real piano technique began with Marcus, who instructed me on scales and exercises and urged me to play Bach. Later, when I was studying in Paris with Boulanger, Bach’s keyboard music was my syllabus, but in the years 1952 and 1953 Marcus gave me a good start, for which I will always be grateful.

  The curriculum of the College was a great adventure, as were my classmates. Though most of them were a bit older, I didn’t notice the age difference much, nor was I treated very differently. It wasn’t long before I had learned to drink coffee and even smoked a bit. At the University of Chicago, social life didn’t revolve around fraternities. In fact, I barely noticed that they were there at all. The social hubs for me were Harper Library, the main coffee shop on the Quadrangles, various theaters (including the already mentioned Hyde Park movie theater), and some of the local restaurants.

  The coffee shop was open from morning until early evening, and people were there constantly between classes. I always went to see if my friends were there. My dormitory was a few blocks away, but I didn’t go back to it, since you had to walk across the Midway to get there. The Midway was two blocks wide, with named streets running through it, and could be dangerous at night. You’d see students walking to school with baseball bats because they were afraid. Nothing ever happened to me, but I learned to be careful.

  I didn’t study in my room that much—mostly I studied in the library because that’s where the girls were. Going out with girls maybe a bit older than me was quite informal. A “date” at the library was common. There were a handful of younger people my age—it was a policy of the school to admit “early entrants”: fifteen-year-olds, or even fourteen-year-olds who had passed the exam—and the older students, rather than ignore us, would take us out to eat and talk with us like older brothers and sisters.

  Naturally, it was through the older kids that I was initiated into the mysteries of sex. It was very friendly and it was all arranged. When my friends discovered I had never had sex with a woman, a young woman I knew and whom I liked quite well miraculously missed her last bus home and had to spend the night on the South Side of Chicago. By this time, I had my own apartment with another student. She asked whether she could spend the night at my house and one thing led to another. I learned later that it was all completely orchestrated by other people—everybody knew it was going to happen. My older friends considered it important. Though I didn’t particularly look at it that way, I liked the fact that it had happened, and that it wasn’t with a person my own age who likely would have been just as ignorant. It was tender, and it was sweet, and there was no embarrassment. I can’t think of a better way it could have happened.

  In Chicago in the early 1950s, the people I knew did not do drugs. In fact, there were scarcely any drugs around, not even marijuana. Maybe there was a little of what was called Benzedrine—there was one fellow who was supposed to be taking drugs, and it turned out that he was taking speed. But everyone I knew thought he was completely degenerate.

  The people in my crowd were interested in politics, not drugs. In the fall of 1952, during my freshman year, we were inspired by Adlai Stevenson, who was running for president against Dwight Eisenhower. One must remember that these were the McCarthy years, and the University of Chicago was considered to be a hotbed of communism. It is true that we studied Marx and Engels, but it was in the same way that we studied any theory of economics. The very fact that it was taught at all would have made it seem to others that we were all Communists, but, in fact, very few people had radical politics of that kind. Our idea of radical politics was Stevenson, who lost the election to Eisenhower, which was considered, in my day at Chicago, a huge tragedy. We thought it was the end of the world.

  In retrospect, those years, far from being all work and no play, seem to have been mostly play and very little work at all. Besides the classes,
which I mainly found entertaining, there were all sorts of diversions, especially concerts at Mandel Hall, the small, cozy concert hall on the Quadrangles. There were regular chamber music concerts there—the Budapest String Quartet, for instance, but you could also hear Big Bill Broonzy, Odetta, and a whole raft of fifties folksingers. It must seem that I was just having a lot of fun and, truthfully, that’s just about the way it was. I would say that the rhythm of my life was then, as it is today, not just active but quite intense. I had acquired, in those Chicago years, the habit of a 24/7 schedule—meaning I didn’t recognize holidays or weekends—and I suppose it suited me well then, as it does now.

  As an undergraduate, I made regular visits to Baltimore during Christmas and Easter. My parents and I also had a Sunday phone call scheduled every week. In those days we thought a five-minute phone call—long distance to Baltimore—very expensive, even though it was actually half price because it was Sunday. When I got home that first Christmas, my parents asked me if I had had trouble making friends, because the other students were older. “Absolutely not,” I told them. In fact, it seemed to be easy to make friends. The University of Chicago was a very gregarious place.