Words Without Music

by Philip Glass

  We never forced music on anybody. Stanley Levine, the administrator of instrumental music, would say, “There’s a high school in South Hills and they’ve got a woodwind quintet. Could you write a piece for it?”

  “Sure,” I’d say.

  Or I’d go to a high school football game and sit in the stands and listen to the marching band play the march I had written for them. At the end of the year we had a big concert, where all the music I had written was played. It was very satisfying. Here I was, twenty-six years old, and I was having a complete concert of my own music.

  In the spring of 1963, near the end of my first year in Pittsburgh, I reapplied for the Fulbright and was awarded it a second time. However, the Pittsburgh school system asked me to stay a second year and I accepted. But before starting the 1963–64 academic year, I made my second cross-country motorcycle trip. In San Francisco I met up with my friend Jerry Temaner, whom I hadn’t seen since our college days. Jerry was in the Bay Area visiting JoAnne Akalaitis who, like us, was a University of Chicago graduate.

  When Jerry introduced us at a coffeehouse, I was immediately enchanted by this young woman. JoAnne was then twenty-six years old, very beautiful, and very, very smart. She was working in San Francisco with Alan Schneider, a charismatic new theater director famous for championing the work of Samuel Beckett in the United States, and who was leading a small company of young actors.

  After barely thirty minutes of the three of us talking over coffee, I asked JoAnne, “Do you want to ride on my bike?”

  She said yes, and we got on the bike, and we then drove up and down and around San Francisco’s hills. By the time we got back to where we were having our coffee, she had told me that she was on her way to New York with some other actors.

  “I’m going to be living in Pittsburgh,” I said, “but I have the bike and I’ll drive to New York and come and see you.”

  And that’s what I did.

  In fact, this was the first great romance of my life. It led to a marriage two years later in Gibraltar, our two children—Juliet and Zack—and, even after the end of our marriage, a lifetime of theater work together. In time, JoAnne’s skills as a theater director and author would enable her to play a leading role in the new theater that would emerge in New York City in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, but already in 1963 both of us were working in the theater. I had been writing theater music and dance music since I was twenty, so I was very interested in the work she was doing. Within two years we would take part in forming our own theater company in Paris and be working directly with Samuel Beckett.

  Once I got settled again in Pittsburgh, I commuted to New York by motorcycle. I would spend the weekends with JoAnne in her place in Little Italy, not too far from Chinatown, where she lived with her dog, a beautiful boxer named Gus. I did what I used to do in my steel mill days in Baltimore, when I used to work a swing shift, putting in ten days in a row and then having four days off. I thought that was an admirable schedule. I could get to New York in about eight hours, and then I had two full days there before I had to head back. JoAnne and I went to the theater and movies and hung out with my friends John Rouson and Michel Zeltzman, who thought JoAnne was fantastic. She and I were both interested in experimental theater, but at that time, in 1963, there wasn’t that much to see. Many of the people who would become part of the explosion of theater and performance in New York as the sixties progressed were still too young and hadn’t yet begun to do their work.

  At the close of my second year of residency in Pittsburgh, in the spring of 1964, I reapplied for the Fulbright and was awarded it a third time. Now it was time to go to Paris. As JoAnne and I had become serious about each other, I said, “I’ve got a fellowship to go to Paris. Why don’t you join me there?”

  “It’s interesting that you said that, because I’ve been thinking about going to Paris. Peter Brook is there, the Living Theater is there, and Grotowski is nearby in Poland.”

  These innovators in the world of theater—Jerzy Grotowski, the Polish experimental theater director and author of Towards a Poor Theatre; Brook, the English director; and the Living Theater, the experimental theater group founded by Julian Beck and Judith Molina in New York, but at that time working in Europe—were the models for the kind of theater JoAnne wanted to study and practice. At that point, she had already been working with her friends Ruth Maleczech and Lee Breuer. All three, who had come from Alan Schneider’s Actors Workshop in San Francisco, were heading for Europe, and wanted to go to Paris. Genet was in Paris, too, and so was Beckett. Paris looked to us like the place where modern theater was happening.

  At this stage, my commitment to becoming a composer was complete. The only risk I had was that I might die before I could become one. The immediate difficulty was, though my commitment was complete, my actual musical technique wasn’t. In order to be able to produce work of any quality, I needed to improve my ability to handle some basic materials of music—harmony and counterpoint. Even after Juilliard, I still didn’t feel I had truly mastered them. That’s why I wanted to study with Nadia Boulanger. I felt that I needed an absolute paragon of musical technique to be my teacher.

  I had put off the trip to Paris for two years. Now I was finally free, and I was setting out to do the work for which I had been preparing. I had a premonition that important events were on the way and that I was finally setting my feet in the right direction.

  After taking my motorcycle back to the BMW dealership at Eighty-Fifth Street and Amsterdam Avenue and trading it in for cash, I was ready for the next big step. In the fall of 1964 I left for Paris.

  PARIS

  BEFORE LEAVING THE STATES, I WROTE TO CARLISLE READY, A poet friend in Paris, whom I knew from New York. Carlisle had been close to John Rouson and they had sometimes stayed at my house in Chinatown. She had left New York before me and had since married Jonathan Nicole, an English painter.

  When I wrote her I would be coming to Paris, she answered, “What a pity. We’re just about to leave. By the way, would you like to buy the studio?”

  I didn’t even know what that meant. “What do you mean?” I wrote back.

  “It’s called a buy. It’s a lease. In France, a lease can be bought and sold. You just register the legal documents at the mairie,” she replied, referring to the town hall of that district (arrondissement) of Paris.

  In short order, we came to an agreement, and when I arrived, I found my new lodging was an atelier on a little street in the Fourteenth Arrondissement, Rue Sauvageo, which has since been swallowed up by the new Gare Montparnasse. At that time it ran parallel to and just south of Avenue du Maine.

  The Fourteenth was a marvelous part of Paris. It wasn’t packed with tourists or students as was the nearby Sixth. It had very much its own character—domestic, but with artists’ studios scattered throughout. I was told that Constantin Brancusi, the expatriate Romanian sculptor, once had a studio nearby, and that Samuel Beckett was still in the neighborhood. It was only a few blocks from the Gaîté subway, near the Café les Trois Mousquetaires on the corner of Avenue du Maine and Rue de la Gaîté, and a short walk to the big brasseries and cafés of Boulevard Montparnasse. The atelier itself had once been a small carriage house, then a garage, and had been finally made into a “stand-alone” two-room studio. The bathroom-kitchen was, even by my standards, a little primitive, but the main living room was big enough for an upright piano and a combined living room–bedroom. There was a coal stove in the large front room and a big window facing the courtyard, where I placed my desk. I was very comfortably set up there from September 1964 until April 1967, when I returned to New York.

  It was in Paris where my formal training was completed, my professional music life began, and a number of very important friendships were made. A few months after I settled in, JoAnne joined me. Apart from the eight to nine hours of study that my work with Mademoiselle Boulanger demanded each day, JoAnne and I spent all our time together, absorbing the Parisian culture and language and wo
rking on theater projects, principally Brecht and Beckett in those first years. We were both free of professional responsibilities, and it seemed a time of almost unlimited growth and freedom.

  Our main and always pressing problem was that we had very little money. The Fulbright allowed only 700 francs a month ($140). However, the atelier was practically paid for when I bought the lease. The maintenance costs were another $18 a month. At the beginning of the month when I got my stipend of 700 francs, we bought a couple dozen tickets for the student restaurants. These were scattered throughout the city, so even though the menu hardly changed, at least the location did. For 2½ francs (roughly 50 cents) you could have a meal (with almost no variation) of noodles, bread, a piece of camembert, a quart de rouge (a small carafe of red wine), and an orange. You could live on this regime, but it wasn’t much fun. At any rate, we didn’t use the tickets until the very end of the month when we were close to broke.

  Throughout our stay in Paris, JoAnne was very energized and organized. My music lessons and language lessons were all paid for, and also, thanks to Michel, I had a good beginning with my French. I was not entirely fluent, but I could handle the language fairly well. I supplemented my knowledge with private lessons at the Institut Phonétique. JoAnne signed up immediately at the Alliance Française and within six months had quite a good working knowledge of the language. There was a large daily market nearby our house on the Rue de l’Ouest, and it wasn’t long before she could negotiate quite skillfully with the vegetable, fruit, wine, and cheese merchants—not an easy task for any foreigner. We almost never ate out in normal restaurants, though there were some prix fixe restaurants where you could still eat for four or five francs.

  Besides the student restaurants, the city of Paris provided all kinds of discounts for students, theater and movie tickets being therefore extremely cheap. The French government had a strategy, and a very good one. If you were a foreign student in Paris, you could eat, live in student housing and get a French education very cheaply. The idea was to attract young people from all over the world—Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and North and South America—to Paris, where they would absorb French culture, language, and general French points of view on politics and art. These young people would then go home taking with them a French bias about almost everything. Even today it is possible to find in Africa, Asia, and the Americas people, though mostly men, in positions of authority and influence with a true French education. And that certainly happened to me. My music for my entire professional life has been influenced by the French musical pedagogy. And I am sure I benefited from it.

  There remained, however, another problem. As a foreign student in Paris it was very difficult to make friends among the French. Foreign students are a subculture—almost “untouchables” in French society. So, apart from the American and English theater friends with whom JoAnne and I worked, we mostly spent time with young people from Africa, other parts of Europe, and North and South America. Our common language was French. JoAnne and I did become very good friends with a man named François Kovaks, who had left Hungary in the 1940s. He had managed to escape from the Nazis when, as a prisoner being transported to jail, he evaded the guards and ran into the woods. Over a period of several months, he then worked his way across Europe to France. He seemed to me to have been completely integrated into French society, though he complained, somewhat bitterly, that after all his years in Paris, he was still referred to by his neighbors as le Hongrois (the Hungarian). It wasn’t until the early 1970s, when I came back to Europe with my ensemble, that I made my first real “French” friends, Daniel and Jacqueline Caux, and was invited to their home. He was a music broadcaster at France Musique and she was a documentary filmmaker.

  The mid-1960s were a marvelous time to be in Paris. The Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) cinema was led by Jean-Luc Godard (Band of Outsiders, Pierrot le Fou, Masculine Feminine) and François Truffaut (The 400 Blows, Jules and Jim), who were working then at a furious pace. Every few months, and often more frequently than that, there would be a new film playing in Paris. You could feel the excitement among the young people at the screenings. At the same time, Pierre Boulez, the French composer and conductor, was presenting the latest in European music at his “Domaine Musical” concerts, which were musical highlights of my years in Paris. I found many of these new works stunning, especially the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen, the German composer who had once come to Juilliard to meet with the composition department when I was still there. Just talking about his music, he hadn’t come across well as a person. His self-importance was alienating to most everyone. However, when I came to know his music during the years when I was living in Paris, I found it quite easy to put aside his personality problems. In the presence of his powerful music, those issues just faded away.

  I learned from that experience to separate the work from the social and even musical/political problems that artists sometimes bring with them. The never-ending insistence on the seminal, historical quality of the “dodecaphonic serial” school was easily overlooked. And in fact, this overstatement of their importance doesn’t in the least take away from the very real beauty of some of their music. Writing about this now in the early years of the twenty-first century, we can clearly see that music and the arts have moved in a direction far different from what one might have expected thirty to fifty years ago. Still, the music I heard in Paris during those years was exciting, if not altogether so new, and retains all its qualities today, no more but no less. The way things changed during my professional lifetime is, in part, the subject of this book.

  The Paris theater world had a great producer in Jean-Louis Barrault at the Théâtre de l’Odéon. He and Madeleine Renaud, his wife, presented Oh les Beaux Jours (Happy Days) by Samuel Beckett in 1964. It’s a “two-hander,” as it is called in the theater world—just those two on stage with a gorgeous set. Other works were produced there, more by Beckett and also by Genet. JoAnne and I were there during the premiere performance of Les Paravents (The Screens), Genet’s play set during the French-Algerian war, and we witnessed an actual police riot in front of the theater at the Place de l’Odéon.

  The TNP (Théâtre National Populaire) was also busy presenting more traditional work as well as the work of Bertolt Brecht, the East German playwright. Between the Théâtre de l’Odéon, the TNP, and other smaller companies in Paris, JoAnne and I were able to get a good idea of what was happening in contemporary European and progressive theater. This was so far and away different from the American “naturalist” theater we had grown up with—the works of Tennessee Williams, William Inge, and Arthur Miller—that this new theater was a kind of culture shock, and refreshingly so. JoAnne, along with Ruth Maleczech and Lee Breuer, was already moving in the direction of a new theater, much more in alignment with the works of Peter Brook, Grotowski, and the Living Theater, as mentioned before.

  As part of our immersion in the European theater modernists, JoAnne and I went to Berlin to see the work of Brecht as produced by his original theater company with his widow, Helene Weigel, still at its head. In 1965, Berlin was in fact two cities. We took the train from Paris and spent almost two weeks there (it must have been during one of the rare holiday breaks that Mlle. Boulanger allowed during my years with her). In any case we stayed in an inexpensive hotel in West Berlin and, late every afternoon, we passed through Checkpoint Charlie to enter East Berlin. The tension between East and West Berlin was very high in those days, and passing through that checkpoint could be quite scary. These were the days when people escaping from the Eastern bloc countries would routinely try to cross the no-man’s-land between East and West Berlin. The East Berlin police were there in their sentry towers, eager and ready to shoot them down. It made a normal visit on a one-day pass feel very uncertain. But we persisted and, in a short period of time, saw four or five original Brecht productions that included The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Mother Courage and Her Children, and The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. There happened to be a productio
n of Brecht’s Galileo in West Berlin during that same time, and we also took that in.

  While in Paris, JoAnne and I would go to London from time to time. JoAnne would take the train-ferry-train, and I would auto-stop (hitchhike) the train parts of the itinerary. Auto-stop was very common in the sixties. Many young people—students all—would travel throughout Europe regularly in just that way. Often JoAnne and I would be on the same ferry crossing the Channel together, then separate again for the last leg of the journey to London. When we arrived, we would find a bed-and-breakfast for very little money (not much more than a pound a night), and then go to the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) and queue up on the all-night line, which ended in midmorning when standing room tickets would go on sale at the box office. This most thoughtful and generous plan set up by the RSC allowed a limited number of students to see these productions for little more than a few shillings apiece. While in London we also saw memorable performances by Laurence Olivier in Shakespeare’s Othello and in Strindberg’s Dance of Death.

  Our third theater pilgrimage was to the South of France, this being the summer of 1965. That first summer I didn’t study with Boulanger—she was in Fontainebleau, teaching a summer school program. We had August off, like the rest of France, so we put together a few hundred dollars, bought a wreck of a VW Bug, and drove south. First we headed to Spain to visit an American painter friend, Dante Leonelli, who had a place in Mojácar. His adobe house on the beach was primitive by any standards. I don’t even believe there was running water in it.

  After Mojácar, we continued our trip, driving west to Gibraltar.

  “You know,” JoAnne said, “we can get married here for five pounds.”

  We were both twenty-eight years old. Both of us had artistic agendas—hers as committed as mine. She was always very clear about her commitment to her life in the theater and her work in the theater—that was never in doubt. Both of us also took getting married and having children very seriously. I knew that there were sacrifices that would have to be made and I knew that we would both have to make them. JoAnne was not the kind of woman who was going to stay home while I went out to work. But whatever was going to happen, we were going to be partners—it didn’t even have to be discussed. What we were talking about was sharing a family and working together. In the end, our professional relationship has lasted over fifty years.