Words Without Music

by Philip Glass

  We took our five pounds to the civil office of a Mr. Gonzalez, and that’s where we were married. It only took about ten minutes. Mr. Gonzalez wore a herringbone suit with a tie, I was wearing the clothes I was traveling in—a light shirt, sandals, and jeans—and JoAnne was in a summer dress with sandals and sunglasses. It was a real marriage, with a legal Gibraltar marriage certificate. Afterward we celebrated in an inexpensive way—we had very little money and almost never ate in a real restaurant in those days, but that night we splurged with a meal and a little champagne, then we found a room for a few dollars, and that was our wedding night.

  From Gibraltar we traveled back to France to see the Living Theater in Avignon. In Europe the company was known simply as “the Living,” a most appropriate name. Led by Julian Beck and Judith Molina, they were performing Frankenstein. JoAnne and I were bowled over by it. The work was written and produced collectively by the company, arrived at through a process of improvisation and editing. It was very much the way our own new company, just being formed, wanted to develop.

  Frankenstein was an imagistic, stream-of-consciousness work that was lyrical, dynamic and, to our eyes and ears, completely fresh. We met Julian and Judith afterward. They were both around forty then, though the other members of the company were, generally speaking, far younger. Julian was tall, slim, and very alert. He had the air about him of a Talmudic scholar—bright-eyed and intense, but without the yarmulke. Judith was altogether different—short, round, and with a bristly, Afro-like halo of hair.

  I’m sure meetings like this were common for them. Starstruck young people like us, willing to give up everything to be part of an ecstatic theatrical environment. For some it was a young adult version of running away to join the circus. JoAnne and I had not gone that far, but were pretty close to it all the same. Julian and Judith were warm and sympathetic as they listened to our dreams of a new theater company. In the end they encouraged us to go off on our own, which was what we had meant to do all along. I appreciated their kindness, even to spend that small amount of time with us. That kind of support, especially as given by the older ones to the younger, I found to be generally present among the new generation of experimental theater groups.

  AFTER JOANNE AND I RETURNED TO PARIS, I sent my parents a letter telling them that we had gotten married. Even though I was from a Jewish family and JoAnne was from a Catholic one, I didn’t think very much about it because my father’s two brothers, Lou and Al, had both married Gentile women. Half of my blood cousins, those on my father’s side, were Protestants.

  In the return mail I got a letter from my father that was very brief and to the point: “You are not allowed to come into the house again.”

  I was shocked. Basically my father had said, “You can never come home.”

  I didn’t say anything to JoAnne. I read my father’s letter twice, and then I destroyed it. I thought that was the right thing to do, because after that I forgot the details and just retained the gist. I also destroyed it because I thought it was a letter my father would be sorry he had written. I wanted it just to disappear.

  Thus began a long silence between my father and myself.

  Silence can be a strange business. At the time, it didn’t make sense. My father and I had been very close. I didn’t know the reason, and I never could understand why my father didn’t talk to me.

  Nine years later, in 1974, I was living in New York. I had two children by then—my daughter Juliet, born in 1968, and my son Zachary, born in 1971. During all that time, my father and I hadn’t seen or spoken to each other at all.

  One day I got a phone call from my cousin Norman, who along with his two sisters and mother—Aunt Jean, my mother’s sister—had lived upstairs from us on Hillsdale Road.

  “It’s time for Ben and Ida to meet their grandchildren. Come to Baltimore.”

  Norman arranged everything. When I got to my parents’ house, Ben met the kids and immediately loved them. He always loved kids. He was happy, and relieved, to see me, too.

  “Hey, kid,” he said. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  We got about halfway around the block before he said anything. “Look, you remember that letter I wrote you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Let’s forget it.”

  “I already have.”

  That’s all we ever said. We didn’t discuss it. That was the whole conversation.

  Two weeks later, I was back in New York. I got a call from my brother, Marty, saying that Ben had been running across the street in downtown Baltimore and had been hit by a car. He was in the hospital. He had been hit by one of those drivers who liked to beat the lights. He was sixty-seven, still a relatively young man even for those days. He just couldn’t run as fast as he thought he could.

  About three hours later, I got another call from Marty. Ben had died.

  After our meeting, I had expected that we would be seeing each other more, but that never happened. Sadly, he never saw a public concert of mine. Had he lived two more years, he could have been at the Metropolitan Opera and seen Einstein on the Beach. After his death, when I went down to the store with my brother, I found that Ben was carrying my first album on the shelves. He hadn’t said anything about it when we met that last time. He never said to me, “I have your record in the store.” I was looking to see whether he was keeping up with new music, and there was Music with Changing Parts, the album I had recorded in 1971, on the shelf in the classical section.

  Soon after my father’s death, I began a psychoanalysis that lasted nine years, trying to understand why he had stopped talking to me. At a certain point I said to my analyst, “You know, I don’t know what happened, but I don’t care anymore. I’ve been talking about it for years and years and I’m bored with the whole topic. Let’s just forget it.”

  My analyst was a Freudian, so he, of course, didn’t say anything.

  Many years later I was in Washington, D.C., to hear a piece of mine that was being performed by the National Symphony. Afterward, I was walking back to my sister’s house with my cousin Norman as well as some of the younger children. My nephew Michael Abramowitz, my sister Sheppie’s son, said, “Uncle Phil, I hear that you and Grandpa didn’t talk to each other for a while. What was wrong?”

  He was just fourteen or fifteen, and he was understandably curious.

  “I really don’t know,” I said.

  Norman, who was walking alongside us, said, “I know.”

  “What?” I replied.

  “I know why he wouldn’t talk to you.”

  “You know? How could you know this? Please tell me, because I have to tell you, I spent nine years in psychoanalysis trying to understand it and I never succeeded.”

  “I’ll tell you,” Norman said. “What happened was this. When your uncles Lou and Al got married to Gentile women, your mother wouldn’t allow them into the house anymore. So Ben wasn’t able to see his brothers in his own home. That was a big blow to him because he was very close to them, but that was the rule and they never did come to the house again. When you got married some years later, it was your father’s chance to get even. It was as if Ben were saying that if he wasn’t allowed to see his brothers, he was going to make sure that she couldn’t see her son. When you married JoAnne, a Gentile woman, it was your father’s turn.”

  On those Sunday mornings, when my dad would say to me, “Come on, kid, let’s go get some bagels,” he was actually using that time to go see his family. He always made up a reason why we had to leave the house, as if we were supposed to be at the store doing inventory or something else, but the real reason was that we were visiting his brothers. I knew that, but no one else did. I was the one my father used to take with him. My sister and brother rarely went. For some reason, he liked to take me along, and I, of course, liked going, and I got to know them all, my uncles and my cousins. But they never came to our house. It was clear that something was wrong, but I didn’t know what.

  What made my father’s letter so incomprehen
sible to me, and probably why I didn’t understand it until Norman’s explanation, was that neither my father nor my mother had much interest in traditional religion. Atheism was a way of life in our family. As far as I know, my father only went to Temple twice—to see my brother and then me do the bar mitzvah rites. The fact is that the trouble in our family was not about religion. But it was the kind of dispute that sometimes happens within a family, and unfortunately it happened in mine.

  Years later, in 1987, I wrote a violin concerto for Ben. I knew he loved the Mendelssohn violin concerto, so I wrote it in a way that he would have liked. In his actual lifetime I didn’t have the knowledge, skill, or inclination to compose such a work. I missed that chance by at least fifteen years. But when I could, I wrote it for him anyway.

  ONCE RUTH MALECZECH AND LEE BREUER arrived in Paris, our as-yet-unnamed theater company began to take shape. I was automatically the resident composer and we now included two other performers—Fred Neumann and David Warrilow. Fred and the rest of us were Americans, but David was an Englishman, bilingual, and the editor of a Parisian Vogue-type magazine called Réalités. He was an incredible actor, but I don’t know if he had professional training. I think he had been an amateur actor in college. He and Fred had formed a kind of an American-in-Paris theater company at the American Church. They were going to be permanent expatriates, living in Paris and having their small English-speaking theater company. Ruth, Lee, and JoAnne, coming right out of San Francisco and Alan Schneider’s theater, represented a cultural adventure that was unknown to them. They were very attracted to the intensity of the commitment to a pure kind of noncommercial theater—to an art theater. We were doing Beckett and Brecht but they didn’t know that work. What they knew was commercial theater and movies, yet both of them eventually pulled up stakes and came to live with us when we went back to New York.

  Fred and David had already found a livelihood in Paris, working in films as actors, doing doublage (dubbing English onto the lips of French actors in movies) or figuration (being extras in French films). A few hours’ work would mean seventy-five francs, which, when you were living on seven hundred francs a month, seemed more than adequate. JoAnne and the others joined them and did quite well. Although I had no problem synchronizing my spoken words to the image on the screen, since I was not even an amateur actor I was only hired once for doublage. Still, occasionally I could get work as an extra. Those were my very first experiences working in film and now, looking back, I am very glad for it. I learned many things about filmmaking just by being a small part of it. Some were useful, others just curious. Years later, when in my fifties I began writing film scores, it all came back to me. One of the odd things I learned was that doing figuration was considered an actual métier (profession or craft). There were more than a few people in Paris who made a living doing only that. They usually had their own costumes and complete wardrobes so, when they were called for a job, they would show up all dressed and ready to go. Although I was a complete interloper in their world, they were usually quite friendly to me and, because I was a composer, considered me an artist, though a young and very poor one. That was one of the things I loved about France and the French. As an artist in that country, one was respected and routinely well treated.

  I soon learned another of the not so well-known tricks of figuration. If the day’s filming began with a crowd scene, and it usually did since that’s why the extras were hired, the best thing was to not be in the picture during the first (or “master”) shot. If you were caught in the picture, then you had to be in all the shots thereafter. If you were not in the master shot, then you could spend the rest of the workday in the canteen, drinking coffee and reading or even writing music if so inclined. Truthfully, it was dead easy not to be in the first shot. All the professional extras in their beautiful costumes were gently shoving their way into camera range. It’s what they lived for. I never once ended up in the picture. Though I was paid at the end of the day, I still had to wait it out in the canteen. Figuration paid better than doublage, but that was the real price you paid—a day in the canteen.

  Our little company began by spending an enormous amount of time on Play (Comédie), a work of Samuel Beckett. Our form of collaboration depended on collective work as well as direction by Lee and music by myself. The immediate by-product of this was to develop a personal connection to Beckett. David Warrilow became the main conduit for our discussions with Beckett. He was quite willing to work closely with one of us (David) in the exchange of ideas and direction, but he was not at all interested in meeting and talking with the whole company. In any case, Beckett actually lived in our neighborhood and actively participated with suggestions of his own.

  As a company and individually, we were involved in Beckett’s work from 1965 until well past his death in 1989. Among these works were The Lost Ones, Mercier and Camier, Endgame, and Play. Some were actual plays, others adaptations from his narrative works. He remained in touch with us and was aware of all of our productions of his work. Some years later, when we were all back in New York, Fred was adapting and directing Company, which would premiere at the Public Theater in 1983. I was asked to write music for the production. By then Fred had established his own relationship with Beckett and I asked him to inquire whether the author had any thoughts about the placement of the music. Beckett’s reply, though perhaps puzzling, was quite precise: “The music should go into the interstices of the text, as it were.” And that’s exactly what I did. That particular piece of music—four short pieces for string quartet—was later published with the same name, “Company,” and has been performed as a concert piece, sometimes with a full string section, countless times since then.

  The most emphatic and long-lasting effect of the theater work I was doing in 1965 in Paris began with the music for Play. The play itself is the story of the love affair and death of one man, his wife, and his mistress. The story is told by all three characters—played by JoAnne, Ruth, and David—each with a strikingly different version of the tale. The telling of the story begins when a spotlight shifts from the face of one character to another. These shifts appear to be random in sequence and in length of time. We, the spectators, see only the heads of the actors appearing on three large funeral urns that are supposed to be holding their ashes. As the light falls on each character, he/she begins speaking as rapidly as he/she can, and each actor begins to tell the story of the triangle. Clearly, Beckett, who was always among the most radical theater writers, was in this work unmistakably “breaking the narrative,” by using the light to disrupt the normal story line. In that regard he was close to, if not identical with, what the earlier Dadaists—and later on, the writers Brion Gysin and William Burroughs, who would take a narrative piece, cut it up with scissors, and then paste it back together again—were doing in making his art out of cut-ups. This jumble of plot and character produced an instant abstract art form, leaving the spectator with the problem (or privilege) of completing the work. Beckett, Gysin, and John Cage, with his 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence—a strange family of artists working out an artistic strategy, in tandem with each other, probably unknowingly.

  For me, the exercise of combining this theater work with a new music pushed me into what became my first really original music. Play itself provided no clue as to what the emotional shape of the music might be, and what the response of the audience could be. As the composer, I was thereby liberated from the necessity of shaping the music to fit the action, or even to not fit the action. I think that I had stumbled my way into a situation similar to the one in which the choreographer Merce Cunningham and John Cage found themselves during their collaborations—often making the dance and music separately, without a particle of reference between them.

  I learned of all this later, but even so, I saw the situation then for what it was, and, considering my age and inexperience, I responded quite well and, perhaps, even elegantly. I wrote a series of short, twenty- to thirty-second duets for two soprano saxophones. Ea
ch instrument had only two notes for each segment, and they were played in repetitive and unmatched rhythmic phrases. The effect was of an oscillating, constantly changing musical gesture. I composed about eight or ten of these and then recorded them. From these short pieces, and allowing a five-second break in between, I strung together a composition that was the length of the play. The music began when the first light was seen in the play and continued until darkness had been completely restored. The volume of the music was low, but always audible. As it turned out, it worked extremely well in providing music aligned to the stage action, text, and lighting.

  After the first series of performances were completed, I took the tape home and listened to it many times. I needed to teach myself how to hear the music. What I noticed during the run was that, from one night to the next, my experience of the theatrical event was substantially different, depending on how my attention was functioning. The epiphany—the emotional high point—came in different places, due to the disruption of the narrative. I had found the music that would fit with that, and that became the third element: there were the actors performing the text, there was the light, and there was the music.

  The music functioned as an accomplice in triggering a moving epiphany. The way the play and the music worked together had become a strategy for tempering the attention of the spectator—making the attention solid and focused. In this way, the flow of emotion experienced by the spectator was both dependent on and independent of the theatrical event.