Words Without Music

by Philip Glass

  “I won’t be able to pay for the lessons,” I explained.

  “You don’t have to pay for them. You just come and continue your studies with me.”

  “But how can I pay you back?”

  “Someday,” she said, vaguely.

  A little over a year later, in the summer of 1966, my final months in Paris, I went by train every week to Fontainebleau for my lesson with Mlle. Boulanger.

  Paris is very quiet in August and JoAnne and I were busy planning our upcoming India adventure. Before I knew it, early September had arrived and I went to see Mlle. Boulanger to tell her I was leaving. By then I was twenty-nine and really ready to leave my years of training and study behind. I was most eager to return to New York and begin my professional life in earnest. The India trip also had to happen before our return and I knew that leaving Mlle. Boulanger would be a battle, but I was determined not to be swayed.

  She must have thought that I was coming that day for my usual lesson, so when I told her I was coming to say good-bye, she was surprised. I told her simply that it was time for me to go home and start my life again in New York. I didn’t mention my India plans to her.

  She stood up and there we were, face to face. “You have to stay with me for a total of seven years and, if not seven, then five, and if not five, at least three,” she said very forcefully.

  Standing up to her was no easy thing. But I knew what I needed to do. My student days had to be over. I had no intention of being one of those unable to leave, ending up at best teaching counterpoint in some lycée in Paris. I also knew that without her and what I had learned I would have not been able to do anything.

  For years afterward, people would ask how she had influenced me. I had never studied composition with her, only basic musical technique, and that, endlessly. I have always replied to that question that since my studies with her, I have not written a note of music that wasn’t influenced by her. I meant it then, and, even now, so many years later, it strikes me as true.

  But at that very moment in September 1966, facing her in her music studio, I said, quite simply, “I am leaving.”

  Finally, after a long moment, she seemed to physically relax. She had let go.

  To my complete surprise, she embraced me. I was not only shocked but moved. I saw a tear in her eye. Or maybe it was mine. I turned and left.

  THIRTEEN YEARS LATER, IN OCTOBER 1979, I heard that Mlle. Boulanger had died at the age of ninety-two. She had still been teaching, though I am told she was almost blind by then. I had never been able to send her any money for those free lessons she had given me—in 1979 I was only then giving up my day jobs and beginning to work on Satyagraha, and in the intervening years I hadn’t made a nickel from my music.

  I don’t know whether she ever heard any music of mine. In 1971 and 1972 I was back in Paris playing pieces in concert halls—not big halls, but at least I was playing in Paris. I knew she would, if she came, be sitting in the middle of the first row. That was her favorite place to sit, and she would be unavoidably present. When I played in those places, I would look from behind the curtain at the first row to see if she was there, and I never saw her. I understood that she wasn’t there.

  I heard that someone asked her if she knew my music, and she said, “Yes, I know it.”

  It’s hard to know what that means. I hadn’t made the scores available, but I had made recordings by 1971 and 1972, and those recordings were circulating. I remember being in France, and they were being played on Daniel Caux’s radio program on France Culture. So she could have heard it on the radio.

  In the late 1990s, I was at the Maison de Musique, which was then a new venue on the north side of Paris. I had been invited to present La Belle et la Bête, a new opera, and after the performance, a young man came up to me and he said he had something to give to me.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “I have some letters.”

  “What letters?”

  “In the 1960s you applied for a renewal of your Fulbright fellowship and you were denied. There was no chance to get a renewal, but your teacher tried to get you one. Her name was Nadia Boulanger and she wrote a couple of letters and I have the letters.”

  “How did you get the letters?”

  He mentioned something about working in the cultural division at the U.S. embassy.

  “Can I see the letters?”

  “Yes, I have them right here.”

  I looked, and I said, “These are the original letters. These aren’t Xeroxes.”

  “No, you have the original letters. I made copies and put the copies back in the file. They’re still there, but you have the originals.”

  I opened them then and there and read them. They weren’t long. Nadia Boulanger was a very important and very famous person and they didn’t need to be long.

  What she had written so many years ago astonished me:

  “I’ve been working with Mr. Philip Glass on music technique. My impression is that he is a very unusual person, and I believe that someday he will do something very important in the world of music.”

  I was completely shocked. I had no idea. Of the many students she had at the time, I was convinced I was among the less gifted. She had given me so much work to do that I thought, Surely my case must be almost hopeless, and I can only be saved by a tremendous amount of hard work. True though that may have been, it was not what she said in the letters.

  There were countless moments during my years in Paris when Mlle. Boulanger or Raviji passed on to me insights about music in particular and life in general. It was if I had two angels on my shoulders, one on the right and one on the left, both whispering in my ears. One taught through love and the other through fear. For sure, these were the two who brought my years of music training to its formal close. The informal close has never happened. Without both of them, I would not have been able to compose the music for which I am known today. The implementation and maturing of their music teaching has been the subtext of what I have done.

  And, between teaching with love and teaching with fear, I have to say the benefit of each is about the same.

  JOURNEY TO THE EAST

  ON A TYPICALLY DAMP LONDON EVENING IN THE WINTER OF 1965–66, I found myself stuck without enough British pounds to pay for the train and ferry ticket back to France. The money exchanges had already closed, so I went to my friend David Larcher’s flat near Notting Hill Gate to see if he could change some francs into pounds for me. David was happy to help and asked me to wait in his library for a few minutes while he got the cash together.

  I still remember sitting on a couch in a room filled with books. I reached behind me and, without looking at the title, picked one off the shelves. When I opened it, I found myself looking at an astonishing image. The book was The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation and the image was a painting (thangka) that was meant to illustrate some of the more esoteric passages of the book. What I saw was so powerful and beautiful that, in that moment, I knew I would have to learn everything I could about the painting and go wherever it might lead me.

  “David, what does this painting mean?” I asked.

  “Take the book home with you and read it,” he replied.

  The book turned out to be the last of four books published by Oxford University Press based on a translation by Lama Kazi Dawa Samdup, a Tibetan monk who made a living teaching English to children in a Sikkimese grade school. All four books were edited by Walter Evans-Wentz, an American anthropologist and early pioneer in the study of Tibetan Buddhism who was responsible for the 1927 publication in English of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. When I left London that evening I had borrowed the Book of the Great Liberation and two other titles from that series—Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines and a biography, Tibet’s Great Yogi Milarepa. I made arrangements with David to have additional books related to the subject in a general way sent to me from London, and I also asked David for any other titles on the subject of Tibet that might interest me. David was pleased to
help as he himself was most interested in anything related to the Buddhism of Tibet.

  Even before this encounter, I had made up my mind to go to India. While I was working with Conrad Rooks, I had met the well-known and widely respected yoga teacher and spiritual master Swami Satchidananda, who, along with Vishnudevananda, was among the better-known students of Sivananda, the Hindu spiritual teacher who had founded the Divine Life Society in India in 1936 and the Yoga-Vedanta Forest Academy in 1948. By then I had eight years of Yogi Vithaldas’s practice behind me, and I quickly added Satchidananda’s program to that. He was Conrad’s personal teacher and was happy to give me lessons, and I wanted to continue studying with him. When Swami Satchidananda invited me to join him at his ashram in Kandy, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), I made a plan to visit India briefly and then continue on to Ceylon.

  I had previously read books about all kinds of Indian yogis, including Ramakrishna, the Bengali saint (his teachings can be found in The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna), and Swami Vivekananda, Ramakrishna’s student. Now added to that were the books on the subject of Tibet available at that time, including works by Marco Pallis (Peaks and Lamas; The Way and the Mountain); Alexandra David-Neel (Magic and Mystery in Tibet); Lama Govinda (The Way of the White Clouds); Giuseppe Tucci (The Theory and Practice of the Mandala); and Theos Bernard (Penthouse of the Gods; Heaven Lies Within Us), whom I became especially interested in.

  Bernard was an American, born in 1908 in Tombstone, Arizona. He mastered hatha yoga while still living in the States and then in the mid-1930s traveled to India to further develop his practice. In Kalimpong, a town near India’s borders with Sikkim, Bhutan, and Tibet, he made contact with the publisher of the Tibetan Mirror Press, a Tibetan named Reverend Gegen Tharchin. Finally, after an intense period of study of the Tibetan language, he managed, with Tharchin as his guide and friend, to get all the way to Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. When I first came across his name, he had four books in print and David managed to find all four.

  After my years-long actual exposure to yoga and once I read these books about Tibetan Buddhist practices, I expected that the kinds of esoteric traditions I was interested in would still be alive in India and in Tibet. I knew intuitively, or for reasons beyond that, that there were things to be learned in those places. JoAnne was up for the adventure, which would involve traveling across most of Europe and Central Asia. We knew that our eventual return to New York would involve, for both of us, a big investment of our time. We were in complete agreement about making our personal and professional lives in New York—we never considered anything else. In addition, we both knew that we would be starting a family soon and, if we didn’t go now, a trip to India might not happen for a long time. The idea was to leave for India in the fall of 1966 and return to France the following April, at which point I could pick up my return ticket to New York and we would only have to buy one ticket for JoAnne.

  Of course, there was no internet available in the 1960s, so for much of our planning we had to rely on information learned from recently returned travelers. For financial reasons and, more important, out of simple curiosity combined with a taste for adventure, we decided to take the overland route through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The crossing between Pakistan and India, we were informed, would be the trickiest part. In reality, that turned out not to be the case, though it would require a bit of waiting time once we arrived at the border.

  Our informants on the best route and means of transportation were mainly young Australians. It was not uncommon for them, after their college graduation, to take a year off and travel to London. They would leave by boat from Perth, the westernmost Australian port, and find passage to Colombo, Ceylon, often on a commercial ship that could only accommodate a handful of travelers. From there they would make the short trip across the Gulf of Mannar to south India. Some of these Australian travelers would then go straight north to Nepal, where the hashish was almost black, pungent, and dirt-cheap. From there they could travel by bus and rail back to New Delhi, for a quick trip to Agra to see the Taj Mahal; then on to Bombay if they were continuing by ship (the Messageries Maritimes, for example) through the Arabian Sea; then up the Red Sea and through the Suez Canal, passing by Alexandria and landing in Marseille. That was the most traveled route from Australia, though not everyone wanted to go to Nepal, and it could easily be dropped from the itinerary.

  We found out a lot from these travelers about travel conditions and possible problematic passages. For example, the Iranians were known for having a fear of long hair (this was the sixties, remember). Actually, it was more like a severe case of Beatle-phobia. This was still in the days of the Shah who was often chided for being too “progressive.” When we left France in September, I had a new short, short haircut. Also, I didn’t have a backpack, but carried a small suitcase. JoAnne was also dressed as much like a tourist as believable. Sure enough, when we did get to the Turkish-Iranian border, we were waved through. For the other young people entering Iran, there was a barber waiting for them. They either submitted to a haircut or were turned back.

  Before leaving Paris, we went to the American Hospital in Neuilly, on the edge of the Sixteenth Arrondissement. We drove there on a small motorcycle that we had bought a few months earlier for a few dollars from an American student going home. It had been a great way to spend our last months in Paris. We passed by all the métro stops that we knew only as names on a map, and the city of Paris, having its glorious autumn, seemed to be showing off the best of itself. A long and sweet farewell. At the hospital, we got all the shots—tetanus, hepatitis, and so forth. In fact, we had so many I felt quite dizzy driving back with JoAnne behind me on the passenger seat.

  I made only one significant purchase before leaving Europe—a small, inexpensive transistor radio. I planned to listen to music all the way across Central Asia and into India. This was soon after my work with Ravi Shankar, and my ears were, quite suddenly, wide open for whatever “new” sounds came my way. In fact, that was an extraordinary experience in and of itself. Starting in Europe, passing through Greece, and on the whole passage thereafter, I was forever tuning into whatever I could find on local radio stations. It seemed that every hundred kilometers or so, I could detect a change of some kind in the music that people there were listening to on a daily basis. The changes were slow but ongoing, providing a musical passage to accompany the local culture that we were passing through. It was all new to me, and all highly exotic.

  First, we went down to Spain because the boat we were going to take would be leaving from Barcelona. We hitchhiked because we were saving for India and we weren’t going to spend any money in Europe. To start off, we took the métro to the outskirts of Paris and stood on the highway that led to Bordeaux. It was very common for young people to travel that way, and we got picked up a lot by truckers. In those days, hitchhiking wasn’t considered a dangerous thing to do. The consensus was that these were just young people who were trying to go home or go someplace else, so it wasn’t difficult.

  We would go as far as we could go and in the evening we would stop at a hotel. The hotels could cost as little as twenty francs—in those days, about five francs to a dollar—so four or five dollars. These were not particularly clean hotels. You’d hear doors opening, slamming, and shutting all night long. They were basically bordellos of one kind or another. During our time in Europe we had spent quite a few nights in places that were servicing a nocturnal crowd like that, so it didn’t particularly bother us. But it didn’t make for very good sleeping.

  After two days on the road, hitchhiking all the way, we arrived in Barcelona. Although it was mid-September, it was still warm. We had just enough time to find the ticket office and buy our tickets for the boat to Turkey.

  The ship on which we took deck passage traveled at night and anchored for the day at ports between Barcelona and Istanbul—Marseille, Genoa, Naples, Brindisi, and Piraeus. Deck passage was unbelievably cheap—about thirty-five dollars for the whole journey. It a
lso allowed for a day in each port to get off the ship and spend eight to ten hours sightseeing. The ticket did not include any meals, so we would in any case have had to leave the ship in the daytime to buy food. The nights on deck were pleasant, and I loved approaching the ports each morning, seeing Genoa and the various other stops along the way from the sea for the first time.

  On our days in these port cities we mostly went to see the places you didn’t have to pay to enter, like cemeteries and cathedrals. The architecture in the Italian cemeteries was remarkable. Living in Paris we had visited the cemeteries like Montparnasse and Père Lachaise, with all the famous people buried there—chess masters, poets, musicians—but in Italy, it got even more flamboyant. Some of the tombs looked almost like chateaux on top of the plots of ground, with whole families buried in and under them. We would get off the boat and eat breakfast at a café, then have a late lunch in another café, then bring bread and cheese to eat and water and wine to drink for the night ride, returning to the boat at six or seven. At eight the boat would embark and we’d eat, go to sleep on the deck, wake up in the morning and be in the next city. It was comfortable. It was still summertime and the Mediterranean doesn’t have big swells. We were traveling with other young people, most of whom were going home to Turkey, Pakistan, or India.

  When we stopped in Piraeus, we traveled into Athens to see the Parthenon, and we also went to the theater at the base of the Acropolis where I later would play many concerts. We were in the land of Homer and it was, for me, absolutely thrilling to be there. We knew the history of Greece because we had studied it, so we had an academic’s memory of these places, which were literally the cradle of Western civilization. We felt we had inherited more from the Greeks than from the Romans, though, in fact, I discovered later, when I was working on the opera Akhnaten, how much the Greeks had borrowed from Egypt. But that wasn’t emphasized very much in my education. I learned that from my own reading.