Words Without Music

by Philip Glass

  The first day I met Mlle. Boulanger, she ushered me into her music studio and took the handful of compositions I offered her. These were the very best ones out of the forty or fifty I had written in my five years at Juilliard.

  She set them on the music rack of the piano and proceeded to speed-read her way through them, silently without comment—just very quickly working her way through page after page. Finally she paused and, stabbing one measure of music with her long pointed finger, proclaimed triumphantly, “Ah, this was written by a real composer!”

  That was the last compliment I heard from her for the next two years. I left that day with an assignment to write a fugue and return in a few days. We hadn’t practiced composing fugues at Juilliard, but I wrote one anyway, practically overnight. When I returned two days later, she glanced at my poor effort and set a very rigorous agenda for me. I would have one private lesson with her a week and we would begin with first-species counterpoint—that is, the very beginning of the study of counterpoint. Then I would come to the public Wednesday analysis class, another private lesson with her assistant, Mademoiselle Dieudonné (for Renaissance music, sight reading, and solfège) and, finally, every Thursday morning, a class with five or six of her other private students. During the private lesson, when time allowed, she would herself take care of training in figured bass.

  I was expected, within the first month, to master all seven clefs, and thereafter I should be able to transpose music from and to any other key at sight. I accomplished this through brute memorization. I read music using all the clefs over and over again until it seemed easy. Moreover, another weekly exercise was to thoroughly learn a four-part Bach chorale in open score. That involved three or four clefs already, so only three clefs were left to learn from scratch, as it were.

  The lesson in counterpoint also required a high level of preparation. For example, if the lesson was first-species counterpoint—and I was made to begin with that, all my Juilliard years and earned degrees notwithstanding—I was expected to bring in twenty pages of completed exercises for each weekly lesson. First-species would cover “note on note” (two lines of music). Normally, four weeks of exercises would be required before graduating to second-species, which introduced the practice of alternate entrances of lines. Then, you would continue the process with third-species, fourth-species, etc., until you reached eight lines of music, maintaining as much as possible the independence of each line. The baroque period is replete with examples of this kind of composing, Bach’s Art of the Fugue being perhaps the most famous example. As a compositional technique, it continues to be used up to the present day, including the third movement of my own Symphony no. 3.

  Studies in harmony, figured bass, and analysis would be carried out in similar ways, but with special exercises and emphasis depending on the topic. In Mlle. Boulanger’s training there was no disconnect between foundation studies and professional achievement. Through her students, she changed the very way music was taught in the United States. Virgil Thomson had studied with her and famously remarked, “Every town in America has a drugstore and a student of Boulanger.” Indeed, she had thousands of students, though perhaps only a handful became well-known for their music. Her enduring gift to American music must include the many fine teachers she trained, Albert Fine being one of them.

  I would describe it this way: If you wanted to be a carpenter, you would learn how to use a hammer and a saw and how to measure. That would be basic. If someone said, “Here, build a table,” but you had never done it before, you would pick up the tools and maybe you could build a table but it would be shaky and probably a mess. What Mlle. Boulanger taught was how to hold a hammer, how to use a saw, how to measure, how to visualize what you were doing, and how to plan the whole process. And when you had learned all that, you could build a really good table. Now, she never thought the “table” was itself music composition. She thought her training was simply about technique. Basically, when you left her, if you had studied with her diligently, you would end up with a toolbox of shiny, bright tools that you knew how to use. And that was a tremendous thing. You could build a table, you could build a chair, you could put in a window—you could do anything that was needed.

  There were countless other musical chores I was meant to accomplish. For example, I was supposed to “sing” (from the bass up) all the possible cadences in all their inversions from any note. This little exercise, once learned, could take up to twenty minutes to accomplish when going at top speed.

  Her students began coming for their hourly lessons at 7:30 a.m., and she would continue teaching straight through the day until early evening. Mostly Mlle. Boulanger spoke to me in English, which she knew perfectly from having taught in that language for fifty years. When she did speak to me in French, I mostly answered in English, as my French was not yet fluent. The worst lesson time was at 12:30 p.m., her lunchtime, and I had that time slot for a few months, until I found someone innocent enough to trade lesson times with me. The problem was that, even during her lunch break, she didn’t stop teaching. She would balance her plate on the keyboard, which, of course, was in constant danger of crashing to the floor. While pecking at her food she would be reading and correcting the counterpoint exercises on the piano’s music rack. Though she worked at being kind and considerate, the effect was of a powerful musical personality who stayed pretty much in the range between intimidating and terrifying. She was not a tall woman, but to us she seemed tall. She was slight of build but she was physically very strong. Mlle. Dieudonné was quite the opposite: she was a round woman, and a more gentle personality, but relentless in her efforts to improve my skills in score reading, sight reading, and ear training. She gave me things to do and she insisted that I do them. She was very firm about it, but she wouldn’t assault me verbally for being lazy and wasting her time with my lack of attention. I was never scolded by her, but I could definitely be scolded by Mlle. Boulanger.

  For sure, the most difficult class was the Thursday morning encounter (among ourselves, we referred to it as the Black Thursday class). There were six or seven of us expected each Thursday. We were convinced she had assembled both her best students and her worst into one class. The problem was that the pedagogy was so ruthless that we couldn’t tell, any of us, in which group we should be counted. A single example will be enough. We all arrived one Thursday to find a simple melody written out in tenor clef on the piano. It was suggested to us that it was the tenor part of a four-part chorale. We were all familiar with the Bach chorales, having been expected to master one of them each week. That meant being able to sing any one part and play the remaining three. But this exercise was different. The first of us chosen would, looking at the tenor part as a reference, sing an alto part that would fit. Then the next one chosen had to sing the soprano part that fit with the given tenor part and the alto part which had just been sung, but not written down. Finally, the last one chosen had to sing the bass part that fit with the given tenor part and also fit with the alto and soprano parts, both of which had been sung but not written down. Mlle. Boulanger always said, before any of us tackled the bass part, that this was the easy one, since the notes of the other three parts had been already determined. Of course, it was “easy,” provided you remembered, as well, all the other sung parts.

  It goes without saying that all the rules of voice leading applied. No parallel octaves or fifths were allowed, either open or “hidden.” The ultimate objective of counterpoint is to combine different voices in ways that preserve their independence, while at the same time following a strict protocol in terms of interval relationships. Parallel moving octaves or fifths, either open or hidden, are not heard as independent voices, but as functionally identical with each other. That destroys the sense of independence, whereas real counterpoint ensures it.

  There were a seemingly endless series of exercises of this kind waiting for us each Thursday. The three hours set aside for the class never seemed enough. After the class most of us went to the café oppos
ite Mlle. Boulanger’s home for a coffee or beer. The amount of effort we had expended in the class invariably left us shaken and silent.

  Apart from my three classes with Mlle. Boulanger and the one with Mlle. Dieudonné, I had a significant amount of work to do at home. For Mlle. Boulanger that was many, many pages of counterpoint each day, hours of work with figured bass and score analysis. For Mlle. Dieudonné there was sight reading and ear training. If I began at seven in the morning, when it was still dark during the Parisian winters, I would be quite busy until seven in the evening. I found time for the theater work in the evenings. That was also the time of day for going to concerts, films, and theater events. It made for extremely full days.

  It was all the more difficult because of the very high standard by which we were measured. That was made completely clear during my first weeks with Mlle. Boulanger. One afternoon I arrived with my usual stack of counterpoint—at least twenty very dense pages. She put them on the music rack of the piano and began to speed read her way through them. At one point she stopped and caught her breath. She looked at me steadily and calmly asked me how I was feeling.

  “Fine,” I replied.

  “Not sick, no headache, no problems at home?” she continued.

  “No, Mlle. Boulanger, I am really fine.”

  But now I was getting worried.

  “Would you like to see a physician or a psychiatrist? It can be arranged very confidentially.”

  “No, Mlle. Boulanger.”

  She paused for only a moment, then, wheeling around in her chair, she practically screamed at me, while pointing to a passage in my counterpoint, “Then how do you explain this?!”

  And there they were—hidden fifths between an alto and bass part. I was deeply shocked by this whole maneuver. It was then quickly upgraded to a complete denunciation of my character, with special reference to my lack of attention, general distraction, and even my commitment to music. That was the end of my lesson for that day.

  I went home and pondered the problem. What I needed was a method by which errors could be spotted before I got to Rue Ballu. I came up with a system where, when an exercise was completed, beside each “voice,” I listed the intervals in all the parts below and/or above. I began with the bass and worked up to the soprano part. Now it was very easy to see what was going on. Two 5s or 8s in a row meant that there were parallel fifths or octaves. Two 3s, 4s, or 6s were okay. 2s and 7s rarely happened and could be avoided. The next week I went to my lesson with the usual stack of pages. But, besides the usual lines of music, the pages were filled with columns of numbers beside each vertical line of notes. I was very curious to see her reaction. And I was disappointed. She looked through the pages—all the music completed and numbered—and she said . . . nothing. Absolutely nothing. It was as if she had not seen the numeric proof at all. On my side I knew I had a foolproof system to produce a perfectly correct result. It seemed to me that, even in the face of her complete silence on the matter, I had no choice but to continue in that way. And that is what I did for the next two years.

  When I arrived in France at age twenty-seven, I was older than many of her private students. I was aware that she gave me a great deal of work to do and was unrelenting in her demands that I make my very best efforts in her work. Our relationship was very intense. “Il faut faire un effort” (“It is necessary—mandatory—to make an effort”) became her mantra for me and I heard it countless times. I knew that I had come late to her and she had made up her mind, it seemed, that I would come away from her with the best she could offer. It was never spoken, but I accepted nonetheless and worked unfailingly and daily to that end.

  I never studied composition with her. Once I asked her whether that could or would be part of my training and she told me that she had such respect for composers and their vocation that she dared not advise them on their compositions. She was afraid, she said, that she might unintentionally misadvise or otherwise discourage them. So she concentrated on pure technique. Though, personally, I have to say that it was much more than that. Even as I admired her and was often terrified of her, I stubbornly refused some of her demands—those which seemed to me to be irrelevant to the true matters between us. Her younger sister, Lili Boulanger, long deceased, had been a gifted composer and winner of the Prix de Rome—given annually to an up-and-coming composer in France. Mlle. Boulanger produced a concert of Lili Boulanger’s music every year in a church in Paris. All her students were expected to be there. I’m told she would sit at the door, silently counting their attendance. I was not in the least interested in the music of Lili Boulanger and I never attended the concerts. At my next lesson after the concert I said nothing about it at all—no lies, no excuses. And, on her side, she made no comment. There were numerous topics—social, political, religious—we never discussed, and I felt better for that.

  Slowly, over those two years, her teaching began to take root in me and I began to notice a marked difference in the way I could “hear” music. My attention and focus became heightened and I began to hear music in my “inner” ear with a clarity I had never had until then, or even suspected was possible. I became able to have a clear audio image in my head. I could hear it, I knew what it was, and also—something a little bit more difficult than that—in time, I could hear something I hadn’t heard before, and I could find a way to write it down. That is actually quite hard to do and a major accomplishment by itself.

  There were countless times when she brought me to a deeper understanding of music. And, besides, she kept one more surprise for me, which came at the end of my second year. One afternoon in the late spring of 1966 I brought her a fairly long and complicated harmony exercise. She paused at the end of her usual reading and told me that the resolution of the soprano part on the tonic (or root) of the chord was incorrect. By then I knew the rules of harmony top to bottom (or, rather, bottom to top). I insisted it was correct. She reiterated that it was wrong. I persisted. Then, before my eyes, she performed an amazing feat of musical erudition. She reached behind the music rack of the piano, picked up an edition of Mozart’s piano music (which just “happened” to be there). She turned to a middle movement of one of the piano sonatas and pointed to the upper note in the right hand. “Mozart, in the same circumstance, resolved the upper note on the third, not the tonic.” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. After two years of solid application to the rules, they had suddenly been set aside. Well, not exactly. There was actually nothing wrong with my solution. It was just that Mozart’s was better.

  We sat quietly for only a moment and I understood, suddenly, that somewhere along the way, she had changed the point of the exercise. I had thought she was teaching technique—the how you “do” or “not do” in music. But that was over. She had raised the ante. Now we were talking about style. In other words, there could be many correct solutions to a musical problem. Those many correct solutions came under the rubric of technique. However, the particular way a composer solved the problem, or (to put it another way) his or her predilection for one solution over several others, became the audible style of the composer. Almost like a fingerprint. Finally, to sum this all up, a personal style in a composer’s work makes it a simple matter for us to distinguish, almost instantly, one composer from another. So we know without doubt or hesitation the difference between Bach and Bartók, Schubert and Shostakovich. Style is a special case of technique. And then, almost immediately, we know that, beyond a shadow of a doubt, an authentic personal style cannot be achieved without a solid technique at its base. That in a nutshell is what Madame Boulanger was teaching. Not as a theory, because theory can be debated and superseded. She taught it as a practice, a “doing.” The realization came through the work. Her personal method was to just bang it into your head, until one day, hopefully, you got it. That’s how, in the end, I understood my work with her.

  In fact, I was only a handful of years away from realizing a personal style of my own. When it happened, back in New York in the late 1960s (a
nd even before, in Paris, when French colleagues refused to play my music because it was “nonsense”), I was often taken by surprise by the anger over the new music I was writing. I was widely considered a musical idiot. I found this unexpectedly funny. The thing was, I knew what I knew and they didn’t.

  This fixation on me as a kind of musical dunce continued well into the 1970s. Once, in 1971–72, when I was touring with my ensemble, I was playing in an art gallery in Cologne run by a very smart man named Rolf Ricke. There was a radio station in Cologne that was famous as a promoter of modern music—in fact, it was Karlheinz Stockhausen himself who was the guiding force behind the aesthetic principles of its programming—and I went there with a few scores for a hastily arranged meeting with a young music programmer. We were in his office and he sat nervously looking at my scores. Finally, in a gentle and really kind way, he asked me if I had ever considered the possibility of going to music school. Somehow, I wasn’t surprised. I thanked him for his suggestion and time spent with me and left. Some years later I was back in Cologne, again performing with my ensemble, in a beautiful large new concert hall. I met that same music programmer again, but he clearly didn’t remember our first meeting. At least neither of us mentioned it. And he liked the music—this time, very much. That kind of monkey business went on for years.

  After my first year with Mlle. Boulanger, I had not been able to get a renewal for my Fulbright scholarship. As it turned out, Paris was such a sought-after destination that renewals simply were not available in the spring of 1965. In spite of this, Mlle. Boulanger had insisted that I stay on and continue working with her. She actually waived her personal teaching fee, which seemed enormous to me at the time.