by Philip Glass
He watched me load the heavy boxes until they were stacked almost chest high.
“Okay. Now you got the heavy ones on the bottom. You look strong, so take this one”—he picked up a smaller, lighter box—“and you see the back wall there?”
He pointed to the far back wall of the inside of the truck.
“Throw it as hard as you can at the back wall.”
He showed me how to do it—whack!
The box bounced off the wall and landed with a dent in it. He looked me straight in the face and said, “We don’t give a damn.”
That was my training.
I never did throw the boxes into the back of the truck. I didn’t get that big of a kick out of it. I just loaded the Orange, Connecticut, truck and went home. I had that job for a year, and that was how I made a living my first year in New York.
I found my first music friends in Stanley Wolfe’s composition class. It appeared that anyone was welcome. The class was, in fact, fairly small, and we soon knew each other quite well. There were a handful of serious and aspiring young composers like me who hoped to use the class as a way to enter the composition department of the school, but there were also amateurs, some quite elderly, who were there to pick up whatever skills they could for their composing. One man, clearly retired, was only interested in waltzes. The class was run in an open seminar fashion, with students bringing their music for comments and advice from Mr. Wolfe and reaction to their work from fellow students. I was impressed by how seriously all of the students’ work was addressed by our teacher. The “waltz man” brought in a new waltz for every class and was offered serious and good advice.
Mr. Wolfe, tall, with black hair and eyebrows and a thin face, was an excellent teacher, and by the following spring, when my audition before the composition department came around, I had composed ten to twelve new pieces that the faculty composers looked at. I was anxious more than nervous. Stanley Wolfe had already let me know that I was doing pretty well. He had really guided me in what I should be doing in order to prepare for that audition, which was, in effect, an entrance audition.
The letter of admission didn’t come for about ten days, but when it did, not only was I admitted to the school, I was also given a small scholarship. It was very encouraging: in other words, they wanted me to come. This scholarship was a special nod of approval that let me know that I didn’t get in by the skin of my teeth. From then on, I had part scholarships, part fellowships, and, somewhat surprisingly, a little bit of money from Uncle Willie, who finally relented and began sending me a couple hundred dollars a month, which was a big help.
I knew by then that moving from the Extension Division to the regular school curriculum was not at all common, but I had worked very hard that year and had been able to make a good case for myself to the composition faculty. I was accepted as a regularly enrolled student in the composition department for the fall semester of 1958. Once admitted, I took only music courses and worked directly toward a diploma, which I accomplished in two years.
William Bergsma was my composition teacher. No more “classes.” One-on-one instruction was available now that I was in the department. Bergsma was still a young man when I knew him. He had made a name for himself with an opera The Wife of Martin Guerre, as well as a host of orchestra and chamber works. Bergsma and I got along well and I was soon absorbing everything I could in the school—the L & M classes, a second major in piano, and regular attendance at the orchestra rehearsals, as well as permission to audit conducting classes taught by Jean Morel, who was a regular conductor at the Metropolitan Opera in New York and himself a superb musician.
Bergsma was considered an up-and-coming composer in the Americana school of Aaron Copland and Roy Harris. I was already a tonalist by then, so he was the right teacher for me at that time, and was highly encouraging. He showed me what he called tricks, which often were very simple things, like how to set up a page of music so that it was easier to read, and how to review a piece by taking all the pages, putting them on the floor, and standing on a chair and looking down at the whole piece at once. That way you didn’t have any page turns. I had a great affection for him because he took it so seriously. In fact, I would compose my first string quartet with him.
We would decide together what I would write, and then I would work on it until it was complete. Then we would go on to the next piece. With him, I was composing a piece every three or four weeks. There was one student at the school, a dedicated dodecaphonist, and he could spend a whole semester writing two pages of music. He almost got kicked out. At the end of the year, you were supposed to hand all your pieces in to a jury of composers, and you could flunk out at that point. It was impossible for me to flunk out—I had written too much music. I had the naïve but probably correct idea that if I wrote enough music, I would start to get better.
My compositions at Juilliard sounded rather like those of my teachers. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, composers had to make a big decision, whether they were going to write twelve-tone music or tonal music. I had already made that decision in Chicago, so it was no longer an issue. I was not going to write twelve-tone music any longer. I had done that already. As far as I was concerned, I was over it. Now I was interested in the music of Copland, Harris, Schuman, and Thomson. They were very good composers who dominated the American music scene at the time, and they were my models. Their music was tonal the way a popular song would be. It had melodies that you could sing. It could be beautifully orchestrated and have surprising harmonies in it—it didn’t use routine harmonic phrases. It could be polyrhythmic and polytonal, but it was always meant to be heard and remembered, which was very hard to do with the European twelve-tone style of music.
During the period I was coming of age, these two schools—the American tonal school and the European-American twelve-tone school—competed for dominance. There were bitter arguments fought out in the academies, magazines, and concert halls. For a while, it appeared that the twelve-tone school had prevailed. However, almost any young man or woman now writing music in the new millennium has embraced an openness and tolerance to fresh and new musical styles that make those earlier battles seem distant, quaint, and ill-conceived.
Though I was a very busy and dedicated music student, that wasn’t all I was up to. I had become quickly engaged with discovering New York City. After moving out of my Eighty-Eighth Street room, I ended up moving all over the Upper West Side, usually within walking distance of Juilliard. Soon, I was spending twenty dollars a week for a larger room with a small kitchenette. Along the way I met a young man the same age as myself working as a super on West Ninetieth Street. Michel Zeltzman had just emigrated from France with his mother and (new) American stepfather. As a young Jewish boy with red hair and blue eyes, Michel had spent the war years hiding in a Catholic boarding school somewhere in the South of France. His stepdad was an American soldier who had been stationed in Paris after the war. His own father had been deported from Paris by the occupying German army and sent to die in one of the death camps set up to exterminate Jews, gypsies, and other “undesirables.” In exchange for putting out the garbage and keeping track of the people in the building on Ninetieth Street, Michel had gotten the ground-floor apartment there free.
We became friends on the spot. He was then an undergrad at Columbia with an aptitude for acting and a love of literature. Michel had an inborn reverence for culture, history, and art, and it was a very European point of view. He began teaching me French right away, so that by the time I went to Paris seven years later I had a working knowledge of the language. He would also introduce me to the work of Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Jean Genet, both of whom used a French so rich in argot that I never was able to read them in the original. Besides French and literature, Michel and I discovered all sorts of things together—motorcycles, yoga teachers, vegetarianism, anything to do with India or music, as well as many new friends who were musicians, dancers, actors, writers, and artists. For a time he worked at the French
Cable Company down on Wall Street. It was a night job and during countless evenings we roamed around lower Manhattan before he was off to work at midnight.
From the time I moved to New York in 1957 until I left in 1964, Michel was part of my life. Whenever I talk about the things I was doing during that period, he was always there. During the time I was away from New York, from 1964 to 1967, living in Paris and traveling to India, Michel moved to Baltimore to work as an assistant to my cousin Steve, by now a young doctor doing research on fish brains. After some time, Michel decided to become a nurse and began taking courses. It was only years later that I found out that part of Michel’s nursing education was taken care of through the organization that my mother, in the years just after the war, had become involved with, working to resettle families, mainly Jewish refugees, in the States. This organization provided scholarships for children of the emigrants for university education. Michel and his family weren’t emigrés from the war years, but came a bit later. Ida never mentioned her involvement to me, but my sister, Sheppie, knew about it and later told me of the connection. Then I remembered that Ida would frequently ask about Michel, wanting whatever news of his life I could give her.
After he earned his degree, Michel would spend the rest of his life as a nurse in a pediatric cancer ward at Johns Hopkins Hospital, working with children that had cancer.
I asked him once, “Michel, after all the work you’ve done, why don’t you just become a doctor?”
“If I became a doctor, I wouldn’t be able to work with the children” was his reply.
He wasn’t interested in being a doctor, he was interested in doing the work.
“What’s it like?” I would ask him. “You must lose kids all the time.”
“I lose them all the time and it is very, very hard.”
Michel and I knew each other for fifty years, and his life, and his recent death, made a deep impression on me. In his seventies, Michel himself became sick with cancer. The illness lasted long enough so that he would go in and out of chemotherapy, which could be debilitating. But when he came out, as soon as he was able to work again, he would go back to the hospital and resume working with the children. As long as he could move, he continued his work at the hospital. I have met only a few people in my life who had the same awareness and tireless, active compassion as Michel.
SOON AFTER MEETING MICHEL, I became more adventurous regarding my housing. Over the next few years I left the Upper West Side to live all over Manhattan. I was, like Michel, even a super in an apartment building in the East Sixties close to the Central Park Zoo. In the late 1950s and early 1960s apartments were not expensive, and they were plentiful all over the city, not as it is now. Rents were low and the subways dirt-cheap. When I first arrived a token was fifteen cents, the same price as a slice of pizza. A truism known probably only to New Yorkers is that the price of a subway ride and a slice of pizza would always be the same. Or they play tag with each other so closely that you would have to suspect that somewhere behind the scenes the prices of these two New York City staples are inextricably bound together—fixed, as it were. Odd facts like this abound in New York City and can keep the place endlessly interesting.
Today a young musician or dancer will have a much harder time finding an affordable place to live and work. Even part-time and occasional work was easy to find in those days. I could manage quite well working as few as twenty to twenty-five hours a week—in other words, three full days or five half days. Even after I returned from Paris and India in the late 1960s, and well into the 1970s, I could take care of my family by working no more than three or four days a week.
It wasn’t only that living was cheaper and work easier to find. Back then the city was considerably less violent. On an early summer evening it was common for my friends and me to walk down Central Park West from 110th Street to Times Square, have a $1.50 dinner at Tad’s Steakhouse on Forty-Second Street, go to a movie for $1.25, then stroll back up the length of Central Park West. If it was a warm night, in the time before air-conditioning, there would be people sleeping in the park.
My last two apartments on the Upper West Side were both on Ninety-Sixth Street. By then my rent had climbed to $69 a month and, finally, a high of $125 a month, and I was ready for a change—and it was a big one. In 1959, I moved all the way downtown to Front Street, just a block away from the Fulton Fish Market. It was the beginning of the years when artists and some musicians were making over industrial lofts into living-work places. My loft was on the second floor of a building that backed onto the building on South Street that housed Sloppy Louie’s, a seafood restaurant. Between the fish market and the restaurant, there was a pervasive aroma of fish in the air—fresh, salted or cooked. The fish market itself seemed to be 24/7. I don’t remember ever seeing it completely closed, though it could slow down in the afternoons.
My first loft was an unheated square room and very large compared with what had been my standard apartment until then. It had a toilet and a cold-water basin. My neighbors and friends, there being only artists in the building, initiated me into loft living. First, I learned how to use a potbelly stove, installing it on a metal plate and connecting it with stovepipes through the top of a nearby window, then loading it with wood. The wood itself was easy to find and plentiful in that part of the city. It was almost entirely from the wooden pallets that were used to haul around materials, manufactured goods, and sometimes fish. After being used they were abandoned in the streets. You could go out with a hammer and saw and bring back armfuls of broken planks in way less than an hour. However, that was only when we didn’t have coal. In our building there was an empty elevator shaft and a few of us got together and had a half ton of coal dumped right into the shaft from the ground floor. From there we would bring soft coal up to our lofts a pail at a time.
I learned how to stack the coal so it could burn eight to ten hours without having to touch it. First you would make a good bed of embers with wood. Then on top of that you would stack the coal in a half-pyramid shape up to the top of the stove. In this way, the coal would slide down into the embers as it was burned. At that point you would shut down all the dampers and air inlets of the stove. These were not the airtight stoves, the beautiful ones from Vermont you can buy today, but they were tight enough. I kept a pail of water on the stove at all times and that was my hot water for washing and cleaning up. If you got it right, the stove could go all night. In the morning I would shake down the ash and replenish the coal. It was quite common to keep the stove burning sometimes continuously for a week, letting it go out only long enough to completely clean out the ash and start over. If you needed really hot water, you just had to open the air vents at the bottom of the front door and open the damper on the stovepipe leading out of the stove, and in twenty to thirty minutes the stove would be cherry red. I sometimes lit it up like that for company just to show off.
The stoves were easily found. A lot of hardware stores downtown would have them right out on the sidewalk for forty or fifty dollars. Then there was always Lee-Sam’s, a plumbing supply place on Seventeenth Street and Seventh Avenue. They always had a few stoves out front. The only trouble with the stove system was that this was soft coal, not anthracite, and a fine but persistent dust settled throughout the entire loft. Not many years later, living in Paris, I had a coal stove once again. Of course I was a complete expert by then, and I loved the hard anthracite that would come delivered to our atelier in a huge burlap sack carried on the back of a local workman. It was a much cleaner burn, but not as easy to maintain and even harder to start.
The rent for my loft on Front Street was $30 a month, and I soon learned that the other artists in the building were furious with me, because they were paying only $25. They were sure the landlord had taken advantage of my naïveté and, by charging me more, would use this as an excuse to jack up everyone else’s rent to $30. In fact, I don’t think that actually happened. I paid my rent every month to a company in Long Island City named Sterlin
g Real Estate. I sent them a $30 money order and I don’t remember ever signing a lease.
The other tenants were all artists. John Rouson, a painter from London just a few years older than me, became a great friend. It was mainly John who tutored me in the details of loft living as we knew it in the late 1950s. He showed me how to stack the coal in the stove; he rolled his own cigarettes, which I also learned to do; and he showed me how to read the I Ching. He was short and slim and wore thick glasses. He spoke rarely and with a Cockney accent, to great effect. His judgments about painting, politics, poetry, and women were clear and crisp, if sometimes a bit harsh. By then Michel and I had taken up with a yoga teacher, Yogi Vithaldas, and John didn’t think much of that at all. I think his whole I Ching connection had more to do with the fact that John Cage used it as a compositional method than it had to do with Chinese philosophy—though he did know a bit of that, too. John was a beautiful, beautiful painter. His work was quasi-realistic—still lifes and landscapes.
John Rouson was a deep fellow, no question. He knew what it was to be an artist and live without money. He would periodically take a job at a tobacco shop near Wall Street, because he liked getting free, loose tobacco and, after a few weeks or a month, he would have a bit of cash put aside, quit work, and go back to painting. I don’t remember him ever selling a single painting. He, like Michel, had a childhood disrupted by the war. In his case, John had been sent out of London to avoid the Blitz bombing that was visited on the city. I think he missed London but didn’t miss the bombs.
Eventually, Michel and John came to know each other quite well and the three of us shared a huge appetite for new painting, dance, and performance. We would travel around the East Village and lower Manhattan seeking out the latest new and unusual artistic experiments. In 1961–62 I remember going with John to Claes Oldenburg’s “The Store” in a first-floor railroad apartment on East Second Street. In each room—they were strung out one after the other, like railroad cars—was a happening or an installation, or both. In one room you might encounter a long-legged girl in fishnet stockings handing out marshmallows and hugs to the spectators who wandered casually and carelessly between the rooms. Or perhaps a room of mirrors with flashlights and candles. These were the early days of happenings. I loved everything about them, the weirder the better. And, I must say, I feel the same way today. I like all kinds of art/performance, but I love it the most when it’s fresh out of the can, not even reheated.