by Philip Glass
I began attending the orchestra rehearsals led by Jean Morel. He himself had been thoroughly trained in the French system of solfège, figured bass, and harmony, and I assume, being French, he had also had the usual studies in strict and free counterpoint, analysis, and orchestration. He was a fine conductor and an excellent musician who was a tremendous inspiration and influence on the many Juilliard students who came his way. In my case, I asked him if I could audit his conducting class as well as attend his rehearsals, to which he agreed. He was kind to me, and he conducted and recorded my graduation piece with the Juilliard orchestra. I did find that my ideas about orchestration sometimes differed from Morel’s, but, unlike my previous experience with Aaron Copland, I kept my mouth shut.
During my years at Juilliard, Morel covered the standard repertoire as well as early modern and contemporary music. I would arrive at the rehearsals with the scores borrowed from the library and follow the rehearsals, paying particular attention to his many comments to the players as well as to his own conducting students. His instructions were clear and illuminating. I attended these rehearsals many, many times. Besides the orchestra players, all of his own students were there, but surprisingly very few composers (apart from the occasional faculty member who happened to have a work of their own being performed). The conductor Dennis Russell Davies became a student of Morel’s about the time I was leaving Juilliard. Since his first performance of Satyagraha in Stuttgart in 1980, Dennis has been a constant supporter of the music I have been composing, and I don’t doubt that our very close music collaboration was facilitated by his deep connection to Morel.
My second study of the orchestra came through a time-honored practice of the past but not much used today—copying out original scores. In my case I took the Mahler Ninth as my subject and I literally copied it out note for note on full-size orchestra paper. Mahler is famous for being a master of the details of orchestration, and though I didn’t complete the whole work, I learned a lot from the exercise. This is exactly how painters in the past and present study painting—even today, some can be seen in museums making copies of traditional paintings. It works the same way in music. This business of copying from the past is a most powerful tool for training and developing a solid orchestration technique.
The person who set up this task was, for me, the most influential musician whom I met at Juilliard, a fellow student named Albert Fine. It was he who interceded so that I was allowed into Morel’s class, something very rarely done. Morel permitted it because I was a friend of Albert’s—Morel preferred to speak French when he could, and he and Albert talked about Proust together. It was Albert’s encouragement that got me to the rehearsals, and he also started me on the detailed study of Mahler that was at the core of the copying exercise.
One could easily wonder how such a young man could have made such an impression on me. The answer is that he was simply the most highly developed musician I met at Juilliard. The fact that he was close to my age made no difference at all. And I wasn’t the only one who thought so. One evening, Albert and I were having a dinner at the Tien Tsin, then a popular Chinese restaurant at 125th Street and Broadway. At one moment William Schuman who was also dining there, approached our table and said to Albert, “Hi, Albert, I have a question for you regarding the bass clarinet part in a new symphony of mine. Do you think you would have time to look at it for me?” I was totally shocked to discover that Albert’s opinion would be so openly solicited by the president of Juilliard.
Another time, once I was a regular student of his and had a private lesson from him every week, I was in Albert’s apartment and saw a score by Vincent Persichetti on his kitchen table. I remember very clearly it was his Symphony no. 5. I knew this would be Vincent’s new symphony, only recently completed. I asked Albert how it came to be in his house. Albert told me that it was being prepared for publication and that Vincent had asked him to “look it over” before it went to press. I asked Albert whether he had found anything amiss. He said it was fine but he had found one mistake: in the last movement a theme from the first movement had been incorrectly quoted by either Vincent or the copyist. He also told me that the editor later confirmed that it was an error.
I had met Albert when I was first registered as a composer. He was in his early twenties then, a very striking young man, with a round face and long blond hair brushed to one side. He was always elegantly dressed, in a jacket and ascot, and always had a volume of Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu in his hand. He conversed with Morel only in French and he quickly became a friend of Michel’s after I introduced them. Once I became aware of his very high level of musicianship, I begged him for lessons. He agreed to give me a weekly lesson at no charge, provided I followed his teaching regimen to the letter. “Of course,” I agreed. None of my other teachers knew about this. But I soon discovered he had one other “secret” student in the school. It was the singer Shirley Verrett, soon to be a famous opera singer in her own right. I saw Albert regularly for several years and one day asked where he got his training. He was born in Boston, where his mother was a music teacher, but his real training came from Nadia Boulanger. I discovered later, when I was her pupil, that many of the exercises that I had learned from Albert were a regular part of her teaching.
Among my Juilliard friends, Albert was the only one who shared my interest in the downtown art world. Indeed, he would in time become known as one of the founders of the Fluxus movement that was then taking shape. He eventually developed his own circle of friends that overlapped with mine. He knew John Rouson and Bob Janz quite well, and through him I met a host of interesting and unusual people. Among the most striking was Norman Solomon, a very unusual painter, not well-known today, who specialized in a personal kind of calligraphy, making large black and white paintings, but not at all like Franz Kline.
The most memorable of Albert’s friends was Ray Johnson, who is still known today as the founder of the New York Correspondence School. Then, and again in the late 1960s, when I was back from Paris, Albert would bring Ray to visit me. He was a most enigmatic character and very quiet. You might almost think he was shy. He was slim, of medium height, and completely bald, with bright clear eyes. When he did speak, he would make puzzling, outrageous pronouncements, which I have never forgotten.
Once, during one of those strange visits, and after not having spoken at all, he said, “There is so much time, and so little to do.”
The New York Correspondence School seemed to be mainly Ray Johnson himself. He would send out postcards to his friends, usually just images or some enigmatic remarks. Really, it could be most anything. I didn’t reply to him, I just collected the postcards, and they would arrive always unexpectedly.
Ray died in 1995, an apparent suicide. He was last seen swimming out to sea off of Sag Harbor, Long Island. I heard about his death and was very surprised to hear he had taken his life. I knew him as a good friend of Albert’s, a latter-day Dadaist and one of the founders of the Fluxus movement. Though I didn’t know his art all that well, I thought of him as a quintessential artist of our time.
Albert had also developed a taste for the most avant-garde, cutting-edge work. He was well versed in John Cage’s writings and music, both of which had made a deep impression on my circle of friends. Albert, John Rouson, Michel, and I had all been immersed in Cage’s Silence, the Wesleyan University Press collection of writings published in 1961. This was a very important book to us in terms of the theory and aesthetics of postmodernism. Cage especially was able to develop a very clear and lucid presentation of the idea that the listener completes the work. It wasn’t just his idea: he attributed it to Marcel Duchamp, with whom he was associated. Duchamp was a bit older but he seemed to have been very close to John. They played chess together, they talked about things together, and if you think about it that way, the Dadaism of Europe took root in America through Cage. He was the one who made it understandable for people through a clear exposition of how the creative process works, vis-�
�-vis the audience.
Take John’s famous piece 4' 33". John, or anyone, sits at the piano for four minutes thirty-three seconds and during that time, whatever you hear is the piece. It could be people walking through the corridor, it could be the traffic, it could be the hum of the electricity in the building—it doesn’t matter. The idea was that John simply took this space and this prescribed period of time and by framing it, announced, “This is what you’re going to pay attention to. What you see and what you hear is the art.” When he got up, it ended.
The book Silence was in my hands not long after it came out, and I would spend time with John Rouson and Michel talking and thinking about it. As it turned out, it became a way that we could look at what Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Serra, or almost anybody from our generation or the generation just before us did, and we could understand it in terms of how the work existed in the world.
The important point is that a work of art has no independent existence. It has a conventional identity and a conventional reality and it comes into being through an interdependence of other events with people. Later on, when I would be talking with students, I would ask them, “What do you have in the library here?”
“Music books,” they would say.
“No, but what is it?” I would ask again.
“It’s music,” they’d say.
“No, it isn’t music. It’s pages with lines and dots on them, that’s what it is. Music is what you hear. Those books aren’t music, they’re just the evidence of somebody else’s idea. Or you can use them as a way of making music. But they’re not actually music.”
The accepted idea when I was growing up was that the late Beethoven quartets or The Art of the Fugue or any of the great masterpieces had a platonic identity—that they had an actual, independent existence. What Cage was saying is that there is no such thing as an independent existence. The music exists between you—the listener—and the object that you’re listening to. The transaction of it coming into being happens through the effort you make in the presence of that work. The cognitive activity is the content of the work. This is the root of postmodernism, really, and John was wonderful at not only articulating it, but demonstrating it in his work and his life.
I immediately abandoned any idea I had that music had some kind of eternal existence, an existence that was independent of the transaction that happens between the performer and the listener. What John was focusing on was that transaction. Later on I understood that the performer has a unique function in terms of what I call this transactional reality which comes from being in the presence of the work: that the interpreter/player of the music becomes part of that. Until then, I had really thought of the interpreter as a secondary creative person. I never thought he was on the same level with Beethoven or Bach. But after I had spent some time thinking about all that and began playing myself, I saw that the activity of playing was itself a creative activity and I came to have a very different idea about performance and also a different idea about the function that performing can have for the composer.
The activity of the listener is to listen. But it’s also the activity of the composer. If you apply that to the performer, what is the performer actually doing? What is the proper attitude for the performer when he is playing? The proper attitude is this: the performer must be listening to what he’s playing. And this is far from automatic. You can be playing and not pay attention to listening. It’s only when you’re engaged with the listening while you’re playing that the music takes on the creative unfolding, the moment of creativity, which is actually every moment. That moment becomes framed, as it were, in a performance. A performance becomes a formal framing of the activity of listening, and that would be true for the player as well.
When I’m playing a concert now, I know that what I must do is to listen to the music. Now, here are some curious questions: When does that listening take place? Does it take place in the present? Do you listen to what you’re playing, or do you listen to what you’re about to play? I don’t really have a prepared answer, except my intuition is this: the best-case situation is that I’m playing, and I’m almost hearing what I’m about to play. And my playing follows that image. In other words, it’s like a shadow that precedes the object, rather than follows it. If you start playing the piano, and you’re thinking that way, and you’re hearing that way, you have a very different engagement. You’re not just playing a piece because you practice it—there are pieces that your fingers can play for you, everybody knows that. You can train your fingers so that you can even find yourself thinking about something else, which is not a good way to perform. The ideal way of performing, to my way of thinking, would be when the performer allows the activity of playing to be shaped by the activity of listening, and perhaps even by the activity of imagining listening.
ALBERT FINE DIED IN 1987, one of the early victims of AIDS in those years when there was no known treatment. His musical legacy was left in the hands of others, like myself, who were inspired and deeply influenced by him. He was trained as a conductor at Juilliard, but I saw him conduct only once and, then, with a student ensemble.
Albert once described his whole life to me in the following sentences: “I began playing the clarinet when I was six, the piano when I was eight, composing when I was twelve, conducting when I was sixteen. Then I gave up conducting, then composing, then piano and finally clarinet.” Such a strange story in one way, but in another way, genuine and all too believable.
Albert’s death was a personal tragedy for all his friends. It was also part of what was really a worldwide tragedy. The world I knew well and lived in and worked in—the world of dance and music theater, as well as the world of painters, composers, writers, and performers of all kinds—was decimated. During the 1980s it was as if the loss of life and talent were an unrelenting wave of pain and death to a degree that was literally unimaginable to most of us. I will give a simple list of irreplaceable artists whom I knew well, and some of whom I worked with. It is meant to represent the depth and breadth of the disaster and, though small, might help to illustrate:
Albert Fine, musician and artist, died 1987, age fifty-four
Robert Mapplethorpe, photographer, died 1989, age forty-two
Charles Ludlam, playwright/director/actor, died 1987, age forty-four
Ron Vawter, actor, died 1994, age forty-five
Jack Smith, filmmaker/playwright/actor/performer, died 1989, age fifty-six
Arthur Russell, composer/musician/performer, died 1992, age forty
David Warrilow, actor, died 1995, age sixty
I was personally close to four of them—Mapplethorpe, Fine, Russell, and Warrilow—sharing music and music projects together. I also knew Ludlam, Smith, and Vawter, but did not work with them. The quality of their work impressed me and had become part of the downtown theater landscape where I thrived. No doubt, if you asked anyone working in the arts during those terrible years, they would give you seven completely different names. The amount and depth of the talent lost was continuous throughout every day, week, and month of that decade. It was as if a reign of terror had been inflicted on a generation—really, it was cross-generational—of performers and art makers. It was a catastrophic time, for sure. Slowly, slowly, medicine and therapies began to appear to ease the worst of those days, and now, AIDS seems far less the death sentence it once was.
The AIDS epidemic blunted the tremendous surge of the fifties, sixties, and seventies, which had been an incredible period of sustained growth and innovation in the arts. It could not have been otherwise. Too many artists and too much talent had been lost to the disease. The loss of idealism and energy that came with the lives lost became a decisive fact. The gay community suffered most heavily. Progressive art-making has always been the haven for non-conformists and innovators, and not surprisingly the gay community has contributed splendidly and with terrific commitment to the arts.
In books of this kind, stories about talented and clever, famous an
d charismatic people are expected. Yet, some of the most important people to us may never have lived long enough to become famous or generally known. And perhaps they didn’t care for that kind of fame anyway. Leaving that aside, I knew so many people who died too young, and not only from AIDS, though sometimes it could have been that. John Rouson, Ray Johnson, the writer Kathy Acker, the artist Gordon Matta-Clark, and many more were like that for me. Some readers may have heard of some of them, but others remain entirely unknown. I do miss them all the same.
AT THE END OF EACH ACADEMIC YEAR Juilliard gave out prizes to its students. As there were very few composers in that department—eight at the most—and as there were numerous annual prizes set up by former students and successful musicians, it was almost a cinch to get a prize or two. That meant $500 to $1500 every May or June. I suppose we were meant to use the money to allow for a summer of work and practice, but I didn’t always do it that way. At the end of my third year as a full-time student, when I won a $750 prize, I immediately went to a BMW motorcycle shop in the Eighties on the West Side and bought a used BMW R69 500-cc motorcycle, all black and, though used, in great shape. I must have learned to drive it on my way home that very day. I don’t remember ever having any lessons. For me, the bike offered a quick way of getting around the city and also a recreational escape from the intense job of preparing for an uncertain future.
I was living in Chinatown by then and I had a basement in the tiny house I rented. It was really only two rooms, one on top of the other and a basement big enough for the bike. I found a wide, heavy wooden plank that I would lay down on the basement steps that led to the sidewalk. I would start the bike in the basement and leave it running in neutral, then run up the steps to the sidewalk to make sure it was clear of pedestrians, then run back to the bike and ride it up the plank to the sidewalk, park it at the curb, and go back to lock the basement door. From there I drove to West Street and onto the West Side Highway. I could get to the 125th Street exit to Juilliard in twenty to twenty-five minutes.