by Philip Glass
Some of my Juilliard friends had also taken up an interest in motorcycles, and during the academic year, we kept our bikes in shape with fairly regular evening runs from 125th Street in Manhattan to Coney Island. The route was highway all the way to Ocean Parkway—West Side Highway, the tunnel to Brooklyn, and then the Belt Parkway. Except when there was snow or ice on the road, we made the trip all through the winter, though, with the wind in your face, it could be quite cold. Once in Coney Island, we would stop at Nathan’s near the boardwalk and park our bikes with the other motorcycles that lined the curb. On many nights there could be fifteen or twenty bikes parked there. Everybody had a hot dog and a Coke but me—I had a knish and a Coke because I was already a vegetarian by then. The way out was maybe thirty-five minutes, max. Then, a brief walk on the boardwalk after our stop at Nathan’s and the return ride would bring our outing to less than two hours. The regulars were Peter Schickele, Bob Lewis (a Russian language major at Columbia but practicing to become a professional oboist), and me. Sometimes we were joined by John Beal, an excellent double bass player, then a student at Juilliard.
We mainly had German bikes but there were a few British (BSAs) and Italian (Moto Guzzis) bikes among us. For no particular reason, no Harleys. But for sure the BMWs were great road machines. Nothing could be better for the long flat American highways than a BMW 500-cc or 600-cc. I made the cross-country trip—New York to San Francisco, out and back—twice in the next two years. Going out I favored the northern route—the turnpike from New York to Chicago and then pretty much Route 80 straight across Iowa, Nebraska, and Wyoming (staying on Route 80) then heading down through the top of Utah, straight across Nevada on Route 40 and, finally heading south for San Francisco.
The way home was a little different. We called it the southern route. We would pick up Route 70 just east of Los Angeles and stay on that through Arizona, New Mexico, and the panhandle of Texas. Then we headed northeast on Route 66 through Oklahoma and into St. Louis. Starting from Route 40 out of St. Louis, we would drive northeast until connecting with the Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey turnpikes. I made the journey with Michel for the first time in 1962 and the second time in 1963 with my cousin Steve.
On those long drives we always wore helmets, leather jackets, and boots, because if you fell down and you were in your shirtsleeves, you could lose the skin off your arms. The leather jacket was offered as a sacrifice to the demons of the asphalt streets that were waiting to devour you. Same thing with the shoes: the boots were to protect your ankles and your legs. If you went down and you ended up with a bike on top of you, which could happen, the leather boots would protect your feet. It would have been crazy not to wear the gear, and we weren’t crazy people. We liked riding bikes, but we were going fifty, sixty miles an hour on the highways. Basically, you’re traveling through space on nothing, really, and if the bike goes down and you go hurtling off by yourself into the ditch, you better have the right clothes on. We didn’t even consider not being equipped like that.
I only went down twice during those years, both on wet highways, and, luckily, just sliding into a ditch. The bike was not so big and, with a little help, I pulled it out and, in a few minutes, was on the highway again. We would ride for about two tanks of gas. You stopped and filled up once and you went another two hundred miles, so you could do about four hundred miles in a day. That could be about six or eight hours.
On the Road by Jack Kerouac had just been published, in 1957, and we all had read it and no doubt were inspired to make the journey ourselves. You got a sense of the vastness of the country from the extreme distances that you had to travel. The huge lacunae—hours and hours and hours of empty landscapes—and the power and the beauty of the American landscape were what we were involved with, much more than the kind of people that Kerouac was writing about. His book is full of interesting characters, but that’s not what happened for us. We weren’t interested in having those kinds of experiences, we were out and abroad in America, consuming the country visually and experientially by driving through it.
On the way out we would stay in the little hotels that follow the Pacific Northwest Railroad. They were always near the train station and so were easy to find. A completely clean, decent room could be had for ten or fifteen dollars a night, or we would just stay in the town park. In those days, every Midwestern and Western town had a park, and when we came to a small town, we found out the best thing to do was to go to the police station and say, “We’re traveling across the state and we camp at night—where do you recommend we stay?”
They would say, “It’s good that you came and told us you’re here. Just go to the town park. No one will bother you there.”
The southern route on the return wasn’t so easy. The deserts were cold at night and not as inviting, but Route 70 had plenty of little motels, gas stations, and diners. Going out we would take two days to get to Chicago, two or three to get to the Rockies, and from there about two days to get into San Francisco—six or seven days in all and the same thing going back.
I HAVE SO FAR WRITTEN ABOUT TWO important threads that were central to my learning before I went to Paris. The first was the downtown world of art and performance. The second was the uptown conservatory world of Juilliard. The third thread was no less significant for me.
During the spring and summer of 1957, when I was working at Bethlehem Steel, I would have intense periods of less than an hour when I was weighing and recording the nails produced in the nail mill. In between I would sometimes have two hours or so while I waited for the bins to fill up again. During that five-month period I read all the works of Hermann Hesse that were available in English. These included Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, Journey to the East, and The Glass Bead Game.
The late 1950s produced an important literary and cultural moment in time. As I mentioned, On the Road was published in 1957, with Cage’s Silence coming in 1961. I knew the Kerouac and Cage books almost from the day they were published, and I was far from alone in reading Hesse, who had won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946. These were all staples of the beat generation poets, readers, and activists. And, in their own way, they were also deeply connected to the music world of the time.
I want to go over this literary background because it is essential in understanding the intellectual and emotional world in which I lived. Alfred Korzybski and Immanuel Velikovsky (the iconoclastic thinker who wrote Worlds in Collision and Earth in Upheaval) were authors, for example, whom I read while still only fifteen or sixteen. By 1957 I had become an avid reader of Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Paul Bowles. The work of Hesse, a Swiss German writer, had, however a huge, though generally unnoticed, impact on the young Beats.
It was a time of awakening. The culture encouraged you to make a profound change in your life through the way you saw the world. The reason Hermann Hesse was so interesting was his vision of a transcendental life. He was in between the East and the West, and he was talking about a path, a way of life, that took you beyond the visible world.
Up against the suggestions of transformation and transcendence to be found in Hesse’s work, there were only two other European movements worth acknowledging. The first was led by the existentialist writers, known popularly through the writing of the French authors Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Their work was heavily nihilistic and oddly narcissistic, and these sentiments simply did not play well to the aspirations of a new and powerful generation of Americans who came up after World War II. Their books struck me as full of self-pity and despair at the meanness of their lives and their inability to find value therein, and my generation was impatient with all that. Though they were known and even somewhat admired, they were, like the romantic but gloomy films of Ingmar Bergman, simply too dark and hopelessly lost for the new American spirit that was about to make itself known.
The second and quite formidable influence following the war was the work of Bertolt Brecht, often accompanied by the neo-cabaret music of Paul Dessau and
Kurt Weill. I don’t mean to be dismissive of these composers. They are both wonderful, and very little theater music today can match the expressivity and power of their music. I am referring to their largely mannerist style, which, though very popular, sets a limit to its emotional range. In any case, Brecht, in my opinion, was largely misunderstood. His idea of epic theater was always fundamentally political in nature. His main characters in Mother Courage or Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, for example, were not meant to be heroic figures, but poor, lost victims to the unfeeling power of a capitalistic state. Brecht, who died in 1956, never lived to see the failure of his own Communist ideology as it played out in Eastern Europe and China. It’s a strange irony that his most popular works in the States, The Threepenny Opera and Mother Courage, themselves ironic in nature, are now presented as triumphs of the human spirit. I truly don’t think that was what Brecht had in mind.
The more radical authors—in particular, Jean Genet and Samuel Beckett—were a different matter altogether. I would get to know their work much better in Paris, but I had already been reading them in New York. By the end of the 1950s I already knew Beckett’s novel trilogy of Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, and his plays Waiting for Godot and Endgame.
What I liked about Genet, author of Our Lady of the Flowers (a novel) and The Balcony, The Blacks, The Maids, and The Screens (plays), was his exuberance and his complete disdain for all things conventional. There was a vitality in his writing that appealed to me, and it was certainly true as well of Beckett, an Irish writer who was the most dire, the very grimmest of the modernists, but even so, had a joyfulness about him. What you found in Beckett that was so refreshing was a clearing of the decks. He wasn’t interested in any kind of artifice or pretense at all. What you ended up with was a joy in his writing that I loved. It was also very, very funny. What I embraced was the way he swept past the cobwebs of so-called modernism and just got rid of it. Dumped it. Cleaned the table off and said, “Okay, what’s really here?”
In spite of my constant reading, I wasn’t a literary person. I didn’t study books and I didn’t take courses in literature. I pursued literature as a personal refreshment. My opinions didn’t need to be authenticated or verified by anyone else. I read books for pleasure and their transformative power.
For me, Beckett’s and Genet’s worldview was much closer to Hesse’s—being more radical in intent and closer to Hesse’s ideas of transformation and transcendence. Though there was a strong political dimension to the Beats’ activism, it was, at heart, a philosophy of “going beyond” the ordinary world and, at its root, a strategy for transformation. As Hesse is not read much these days, the impact on young people some fifty to sixty years ago may be largely unknown. But missing his profound impact on that moment is missing a vital part of that story. And that is my story as well.
Michel and I were very much in the sway of these ideas, so fresh at the time. We were eager to make them an active part of our lives, to begin our own “journey to the East.” Accordingly, we decided to take up the study of yoga. The problem was that in 1958 there were simply no public yoga studios in New York, let alone reliable teachers of any competence. From time to time, starting after the World’s Parliament of Religions in 1893 in Chicago, where Swami Vivekananda had created a sensation with his opening speech, there had been visiting swamis and yogis in North America. But few schools had emerged, and no reputations had been established. Better known, perhaps, was Yogananda, whose Autobiography of a Yogi appeared in 1946. It was a wonderfully accessible book but, again, in terms of a wide audience, largely unknown at the time. However, it is probably Yogananda’s book that Michel and I had read and had led us to search for a practicing yogi in New York.
Finally, after having had no success in finding such a teacher, I had the idea to look in the white pages of the New York City telephone book under the letter Y. There we found one entry—Yogi Vithaldas! We called him, made an appointment, and a few days later were at his apartment door in a high-rise on the Upper East Side. We had no idea what to expect. “Yogi” at that point was just a word to us. We had no idea what a yogi did or how or where one might live.
Yogi Vithaldas answered the door, a man in his late forties, barefoot and in loose-fitting Indian-looking clothes.
“Ah, my chelas have finally arrived,” he said when we walked in, greeting us with open arms.
Chelas means “students” or “followers,” but Michel and I didn’t know that at the time. He marched us into his living room and gave us our first yoga lesson on the spot. In time I came to realize that his clients were mostly Upper East Side ladies looking for an exercise program, so he was delighted to have us as his students.
It was a decisive meeting. We both now had a yoga program we followed every day. Yogi Vithaldas was a teacher of hatha yoga—the yoga asanas or positions—which was the only branch of yoga most people would have known about. After our lesson, he invited us into his kitchen and begun instructing us in vegetarian cooking. My conversion to a vegetarian diet was immediate, and it has been a cornerstone of my personal life ever since. Only years later did I discover that Yogi Vithaldas was the main yoga teacher of the famed violinist Yehudi Menuhin.
My second teacher was Dr. Ramamurti S. Mishra from India, who was at that time a resident psychiatrist at Bellevue Hospital. Dr. Mishra taught raja yoga, normally taken to mean, simply, meditation. Michel, Albert Fine, and I found him a few years later, perhaps 1960, teaching a small class in his apartment on Twenty-Eighth Street near Second Avenue. He was quite a handsome man, in his forties, extremely gentle, with dark penetrating eyes. The classes were detailed instruction on meditation practices, bringing the mind to a point of clarity and steadiness. Mantric repetition of sacred syllables and pranayama (breathing exercises) were a normal part of the training. I was not a close student of his, but I was a regular one. Albert, on the other hand, became very involved with Dr. Mishra as his meditation teacher, and he went much further in his practice than either Michel or I. Soon Albert was going on solitary retreats in the country, and sometimes, in New York, he observed long periods of absolute silence.
Some years afterward, I came across Dr. Mishra’s book The Textbook of Yoga Psychology. Firmly based on Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, I do not know of a better book or a more fully outlined account of the Indian yoga system and its philosophy. Just remembering his intelligence and the depths of his attention to his students is a warm thought for me.
AS MY YEARS AT JUILLIARD WERE WINDING DOWN, I told Albert I wanted to go to Paris and study with his teacher, Nadia Boulanger. He agreed that it was an excellent plan, and he offered to write a letter recommending me. I applied for, and received, a Fulbright to study with her in Paris, but at the same time I had applied for a fellowship from the Ford Foundation under a program for newly graduated composers to become “composers in residence” in U.S. public school systems. The program involved no teaching by the young composers, only composing for the orchestra, vocal ensembles, and instrumental chamber groups in the school system.
About ten young composers a year were awarded these positions in cities like L.A., Pittsburgh, Seattle, and St. Louis, and when I was chosen I decided to accept. The Fulbright committee informed me that I would have to reapply, and the next year I did just that, reapplying for Paris while spending that academic year of 1962–63 in Pittsburgh.
I found a loft–living space on Baum Boulevard in a lower-middle-class to middle-class neighborhood not far from downtown. Pittsburgh reminded me of Baltimore. Both towns were close enough to the South that there was a strong presence of Southern culture, with Baltimore not that far from Virginia and the Carolinas while Pittsburgh was in close proximity to Appalachia. The cities were similar in size, and both had good schools and universities, large Jewish and Catholic populations, and Bethlehem Steel plants. Living in Pittsburgh revealed almost nothing to me that I didn’t already know from growing up in Baltimore.
The city of Pittsburgh had an administ
rator for instrumental music and one for vocal music who were responsible for all the music in all the schools. I had just come out of Juilliard, and now I was given basically a school system with tens of thousands of children, a huge number. I wasn’t teaching, I was only composing. There were orchestras all over the town, there were brass bands, there were string quartets, there were choir ensembles—they played everything. Being the early 1960s, this was the heyday of music programs in public schools. You could be a kid with not a dime in your pocket and you could go to a school in Pittsburgh—or, in fact, most big cities in the United States—and they would give you an instrument and you would start to take music lessons. Public schools in those days had instruments and conductors, and we had people coming out of high school and going right into conservatories. It was a tremendous time for music education in America. These days such programs have pretty much been gutted. Some public schools may provide them, but the money usually has to be supplied by the parents in order for music teachers to be hired.
In Pittsburgh, I wrote some music for children in grade school and some for high school orchestras. These were young people who could actually play. I wrote a huge amount of music when I was there. I usually completed a piece in three weeks, then I’d follow up with yet another piece. I would go to the rehearsals and performances, too, because that was part of my duties. I had a car and what I thought was a huge salary in those days, which was probably around $7000 a year—maybe $600 a month. But you have to remember, you could get a good apartment for around $80 or $90 a month at that time.