Words Without Music

by Philip Glass

  The musical solution I had found formed the basis of a busy stream of new music that I began to produce. The very next work I composed was a string quartet in which I applied the same technique of structure and discontinuity as the basis of the piece, but this time for four string parts. This was recorded as my String Quartet no. 1 by the Kronos String Quartet almost thirty years later.

  Clearly this new music was born from the world of theater.

  “If you’re not a minimalist, what are you?” many have asked over the course of my career.

  “I’m a theater composer,” I reply.

  That is actually what I do, and what I have done. That doesn’t mean that’s the only thing I ever did. I’ve written concertos, symphonies, and many other things. You only need to look at the history of music: the big changes come in the opera house. It happened with Monteverdi, with his first opera, L’Orfeo, first performed in 1607. It happened with Mozart in the eighteenth century, Wagner in the nineteenth century, and Stravinsky in the early twentieth century. The theater suddenly puts the composer in an unexpected relationship to his work. As long as you’re just writing symphonies, or quartets, you can rely on the history of music and what you know about the language of music to continue in much the same way. Once you get into the world of theater and you’re referencing all its elements—movement, image, text, and music—unexpected things can take place. The composer then finds himself unprepared—in a situation where he doesn’t know what to do. If you don’t know what to do, there’s actually a chance of doing something new. As long as you know what you’re doing, nothing much of interest is going to happen. That doesn’t mean I always succeeded in being interesting. Sometimes I did and sometimes I didn’t. But not surprisingly, I found that what was stimulating to me came out of trying to relate music to the theater work of Beckett. That would not have happened if I hadn’t been working in the theater.

  RAVI SHANKAR

  DURING MY SECOND YEAR IN PARIS, I BECAME FRIENDLY WITH AN English photographer named David Larcher, a young man with tons of energy and a camera. I can still see him in my mind’s eye, leaning out the back of one of the old buses in Paris with an open back deck, trying to take a picture of himself taking a picture of himself.

  It happened that David got a job with a film producer to do the stills for a movie. That was routinely done to keep a running record of location, scenery, costume, and weather. It was a film being made by a young American, Conrad Rooks, titled Chappaqua—the name of a small town just north of New York City. One day David came to see me, very excited because Conrad had asked him to find a music person to help with the music production. What they really needed was a music producer, but Conrad—himself not much older than me and out to make his first film—didn’t know any better. I must have looked okay to him, and I actually was. My spoken French by then was quite good, I could read and write music, and I knew something about the music that Rooks himself liked. I was hired on the spot.

  The first thing Conrad did was to play an Ornette Coleman score that had already been composed for the film. I thought it was a masterpiece and said so, though I knew it might well mean that I would soon be out of a job. Instead, Conrad insisted that Ornette’s score wasn’t what he wanted. He had settled on Ravi Shankar to be the composer of a new score. It was an excellent choice. Raviji, as he was known to friends and colleagues, was becoming very well-known at that time through his long-term efforts to find a European and American audience. He had a strong working relationship with the outstanding violinist Yehudi Menuhin and was also beginning to work with Jean-Pierre Rampal, the French flutist. Furthermore, his recent friendship with George Harrison of the Beatles was becoming generally known, which led to him being recognized worldwide. Besides being a superb soloist in the great tradition of Indian concert music, he was also known as a composer who worked with both Indian and European musicians. And, finally, he had extensive experience as a composer of film music, though almost entirely of Indian films. However, his participation in the Monterey Pop Festival, the Woodstock Festival, and the Concert for Bangladesh hadn’t happened yet, and the simple fact was that though I knew of him by name only, I had never heard his music or any Indian music—popular, devotional, or concert music—at all.

  It was very common in the 1960s for Western musicians, even composers, to be completely ignorant of global, or world, music. It was certainly not taught in conservatories, though it was considered an interesting subject of study for musicologists—they called it ethno-musicology. Even in as prestigious a school as Juilliard there would not be more than a handful of relevant recordings. In the school’s library there were some books by A. M. Jones, including his studies of African music that were published as early as the 1940s, but I don’t remember anything as well-known as that in the field of Indian music. When I found I would be working with Ravi Shankar, I simply went out and bought a record of his—easy to find in Paris. At my first listening I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. At twenty-nine, I was completely ignorant of any non-Western music.

  Things were moving quickly with the film—Conrad was well past the rough cut, and he needed the music as soon as possible. Straight away I was off to meet Raviji at his hotel. He was forty-five years old, a strong handsome man, not big by Western standards but clearly muscular enough to handle the sitar, the famously demanding principal instrument for concert music in north India. He was bursting with energy and was delighted to meet me. He told me he had met Mlle. Boulanger and was very pleased I was her student. There were endless cups of tea and a lot of talking about music, but no concrete discussion of the score that we were about to record.

  By the end of our first meeting, I learned that there would be no score. Indian film music was never prepared that way. Raviji expected to see a loop of film of each scene that needed music. Then, on the spot, he would compose the music on his sitar. My job would be to notate all the parts for the small ensemble of French musicians who would be sitting there waiting for their completely notated parts. Now, my first encounters with Indian classical music had been very recent and not very encouraging. I heard my first recording of Raviji playing a concert and I had no idea what he had been doing. It could have been a moment of panic, but instead I asked—begged, actually—if perhaps we could start ahead of time. We had a whole week before the first session and I hoped to get a handle on the job before the reality of the actual recording kicked in. Raviji readily agreed and told me to be at his hotel every day at eight a.m. and we would get started.

  I was greatly relieved. But the problem wasn’t resolved because, though I was there every morning at eight, there was a continual stream of friends and admirers, as well as tours and projects that needed his attention. They were lively and entertaining mornings, but nothing was accomplished regarding Chappaqua.

  Finally, with no mornings left, I begged him again if we could get started. He, of course, agreed and asked me to be at the studio an hour early and we would have a little time together. I was there the next morning and Raviji was there, too, and not even very late. He spent the next forty-five minutes coaching me on how to play the tamboura, the stringed drone instrument that would accompany the music. He also assured me that, as he had worked with Western musicians many times before, he would retune his sitar from its customary F-sharp key, down a half step, making it F-natural, and therefore far easier for Western musicians. Soon the musicians arrived and arranged themselves just below the screen on which the film loops would be projected. It was an ensemble of nine players—a small string section and woodwinds. The plan was very straightforward: Raviji would view the segment that needed music, he would then play each instrumental part, one by one, and I would notate the part for each of the players. There would not be a complete orchestral score, only the parts the musicians actually played. I would conduct the players for a first recording while Raviji watched the film at the same time. After the ensemble was recorded, Raviji would record a solo sitar part, accompanied by Alla Rakha, his lon
gtime tabla player (the tabla is a set of two hand drums that underscores all the music and is responsible for its rhythmic structure). I would accompany him on the tamboura. A good plan and it worked fine, once I had understood how to notate the music.

  Alla Rakha was the one who caused me the most anxiety but also, in the end, provided the solution. The “problem” occurred with the very first piece we recorded. Immediately Alla Rakha interrupted the playback, exclaiming very emphatically that the accents in the music were incorrect, to which Raviji quickly agreed. I had already set the metronome to the tempo Raviji wanted and I began writing out the parts again, grouping and regrouping the phrases to get the accents the way they were supposed to be heard, a very tricky business.

  Each time, Alla Rakha would interrupt and, shaking his head, say repeatedly, “All the notes are equal.”

  I then tried moving the bar lines around.

  “All the notes are equal,” he declared again.

  By now the musicians had joined in and the session was becoming chaotic, with the players shouting and playing suggestions to solve the problem. In the midst of all this and in desperation, I simply erased all of the bar lines, thinking I would just start all over again. There before my eyes I saw a stream of notes, grouped into twos and threes. I saw at once what he was trying to tell me.

  I turned to him and said, “All the notes are equal,” and his response was a warm, big smile.

  A few moments later I saw there was a regular sixteen-beat cycle that governed the whole of the music. Later I learned from Alla Rakha that this was called a tal and that this tal in sixteen beats was called tin tal and, finally, the very first beat of the tal was called a sam (downbeat). All this is something any world music class would learn at the beginning of the first class on Indian classical music. But learning it at such a public, high-pressure event gave it a special, unforgettable meaning. I didn’t realize at the time the effect it would have on my own music, but at that moment in the recording studio on the Champs-Élysées, I now had the conceptual tools that were needed to carry out the work.

  The rest of the week went by quickly. I notated all of Raviji’s music for the players accurately, conducted them during their actual sessions and even contributed some wildly dissonant music (just bits and pieces) for places in the film that Conrad wanted to sound incoherent and scary. About a year and a half later, I would study with Alla Rakha in his private percussion class in New York City and come to understand in more detail about how the tal and raga (melodic system) work together, which is very much the way that harmony and melody work in traditional Western concert, popular, and commercial music.

  It was altogether a wonderful and inspiring week with Raviji. During the breaks in the film-scoring work we were engaged in extensive discussions on Western modern concert music. His curiosity was deep and his musical intelligence so highly developed that he easily grasped the principles of harmony, tonality, atonality, and orchestration. In addition to all that, by the end of the week he was so fluent in the solfège system—whereby musicians, especially in France, can verbally and with accurate pitch sing a melody—he then could communicate directly to the players, though I was still needed to write it out in standard—though bar-less—notation.

  I kept in touch with Raviji. Soon after working on the film, I was in London again on one of my short visits, and Raviji was there playing concerts in a club setting, which he didn’t like very much. It was at the beginning of his time with George Harrison, which was very important to him, but there were also parts of the pop culture world that were anathema to him and which he never got used to. The casual drug use by young people particularly upset him. Sometimes he would lecture me about drugs, and I had to remind him that I was drug-free.

  After the concert, I went to visit Raviji in his hotel room. He was sitting cross-legged on his bed and I was in a chair. I asked him the same question I had asked myself when I first began to compose, the question that I had long thought about and was most interested in what the answer would be.

  “Raviji, where does music come from?”

  Without hesitation he turned to a photograph on his bedside table. It was of an elderly Indian gentleman, dressed in traditional clothing and sitting in an armchair. Raviji folded his hands and bowed deeply toward this man.

  “Thanks to the grace of my Guru, the power of his music has come through him into me.”

  It was a stunning moment. The simplicity and directness of the answer made a deep impression on me.

  Over the next decade I spent a lot of time studying and experimenting with the ideas, new to me, that I learned during the time with Raviji. Some things very soon became incorporated into my music. When only a few years later, in 1968, I began writing for my own ensemble, I dropped completely the practice of composing a full score before writing out the individual parts for the players. I could easily keep a composite “sound picture” in my head without having to write it out. So even the longer, complex works composed in the early and mid-1970s were composed as individual parts that I handed out to the players. That included some very long pieces as well, such as Music in Twelve Parts and Einstein on the Beach. As a general practice, as these were all performance works for the ensemble, I would write out my own part first and then compose the other music or individual parts for the players. Later scores were made by other people who made a composite from all the parts. I am not alone in working this way. I suppose that could easily have been a Renaissance and baroque practice as well, though I don’t have any solid information about when and where it might have happened. However, it is well-known that Schubert’s Trout Quintet for piano, violin, viola, cello, and double bass was composed in just that way. It certainly is convenient for the composer, as it eliminates a whole step in the process (composing a “master” score), which may be unnecessary. I thought of the music I was writing in those years as being for performance or, perhaps, recording only. It never occurred to me that someone else would want to look at the score. It wasn’t at all a matter of being overly modest. It seemed to me, as a practical matter, that all the effort of producing a score simply wasn’t worth the time.

  The second thing I brought away from Chappaqua was a new way of looking at possible rhythmic structures in music. I had seen right away that even complex patterns of music could be understood as groupings of 2s and 3s. Virtually any compound pattern can be reduced to a succession of 2-note and 3-note phrases. On reflecting on this recently, I see that Raviji’s 2s and 3s are, in fact, a binary language and identical in structure to the 1s and 0s in a digital language. Not too long ago, I was in Zurich giving a public talk with the Indian tabla player Trilok Gurtu. I suggested to him that the long history of a binary musical language was a part of the tradition of today’s Indian concert music. He understood and quickly accepted the idea.

  NADIA BOULANGER

  I REALIZED FROM MY FIRST MEETING WITH HER IN HER APARTMENT IN THE Rue Ballu that Mademoiselle Boulanger was certainly one of the most remarkable people I had ever met. I would know only two of the rooms in her house, but both had the imprint of who she was—a renowned teacher in the world of concert music, ancient and modern. Her waiting room was a small library with music scores and books lining the walls from floor to ceiling, and when I had the good luck to arrive early I would be free to browse through the music. Among the scores were any number of original manuscripts signed over to her by the composers. Stravinsky was prominent among them, and I remember seeing there the original piano score, written in his hand, of Petrushka. Stravinsky, I knew, had written three of the pieces—The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring—that changed the way a lot of people thought about modern music. He had given the score of Petrushka to her and she had bound it into a book. What I was holding in my hand was the first draft of the ballet that to this day is considered a masterpiece of music. It was a humbling moment.

  There was also an abundance of literature, many in first editions. I noticed, however, that there was not muc
h there that was modern and certainly very little literature that came after André Gide, the renowned writer, or Paul Claudel, the poet. No Beckett and certainly no Céline or Genet. I suppose that would have been true of the music scores as well. She always dressed the same way—floor-length dresses, all handmade for her. She told me once that as a young woman she would submit to whatever was the fashion of the time. Then, in the 1920s, she found the style of clothing that suited her. From then on all her clothes were made especially for her and, frozen in time, never advanced past that period.

  Her music studio was quite large. It had a small pipe organ and a grand piano. On Wednesday afternoon there was a class that was open to all her current students, whose presence was required. In addition, any former students who lived in Paris or happened to be there were welcome. It was customary for the room to hold up to seventy people on most Wednesdays. There would be one topic for the whole year. During the two academic years I was there, we studied all of Bach’s Preludes and Fugues, Book 1, in the first year, and the twenty-seven Mozart piano concertos in the second. We were also expected to learn and be able to perform the “Bach prelude of the week.” Typically the class would begin with Mlle. Boulanger calling out, without as much as looking up, the name of the one chosen to perform that morning. “Paul!” “Charles!” “Philip!” God help you if you weren’t prepared or, even worse, not present. If she was expecting you to be there and you didn’t show up, you probably would just have to leave town. She would say, “I think you should come to the Wednesday class. Of course, it’s voluntary.” But of course, it wasn’t voluntary. You had to be there, and you had a week to get ready.

  “Next week we’ll be playing Concerto no. 21. Please be ready to play the third movement,” she would add, and if someone said, “Mademoiselle Boulanger, I’m not a pianist,” she would say, “It doesn’t matter, play it anyway.” People who were violinists or harpists or whatever would have to sit down and demonstrate that they had learned it. If they couldn’t really play it, if the person didn’t have a piano technique, the notes would still have to be in the right place. It wouldn’t be a good performance by any means, but you were supposed to overcome the difficulties.