Words Without Music

by Philip Glass

  KATHAKALI AND SATYAGRAHA

  THE FREQUENT TRIPS TO INDIA LASTED UNTIL 2001, WHEN MY SECOND family of children, my sons Cameron and Marlowe, began to arrive and brought a temporary end to the journeys that had taken me all over the country. My first visit to south India had come in 1973 at the invitation of David Reck, an American composer living and studying in India, who took me to the state of Kerala to see the Kathakali, the classical Indian dance/theater. The highlight was an all-night performance of three plays from the Ramayana, an epic text that consists of fables and historical stories of the gods and the philosophy of ancient India. It was the first time I attended a play that began at six or seven o’clock at night and ended at seven o’clock in the morning. The next time I saw an all-night performance would be when the Brooklyn Academy of Music presented Robert Wilson’s The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin in December of the same year—perhaps just a strange, if unlikely, coincidence.

  Kathakali is what we would call multimedia theater: it is music, it is dance, it is storytelling. It is performed in several ways: one performer sings and tells the story, accompanied by a musical ensemble, and at the same time the dance company acts out the story as it’s being told.

  The theaters themselves were humble beyond belief. They presented the play outdoors, in the courtyard of a temple, on a wooden platform. The curtain was held up by two men holding the ends of a piece of rope. When the cast was ready, they just dropped the rope and then the performers would be seen on the stage. By the time I got to see the performances, they had electrical lighting, some of which was just neon light. It was not the most beautiful lighting—often there were people holding lights—but it was lit. There were also all kinds of torches that would give light onto the stage. The costumes were extremely colorful. They looked like paintings of traditional images of the Hindu princes and gods. To do costume changes, they would raise the curtain. Every night they told three stories, each lasting roughly three to four hours, with hardly a break between them. The show began when it got dark and would go on until morning.

  In the early 1970s, there were very few Westerners present. Mostly it was village people. Everyone in the village would sit on the ground to watch the play. They didn’t pay much attention to us. If you had to take a nap, you would go into the bushes and sleep for a few hours. When you came back, the performance would still be going on. We were told in advance what the stories would be. From the reading I had done in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, I already knew a lot of the stories. But there were far too many of them, and I rarely knew beforehand the ones I would see on stage. Still, I could understand much of it. The best place to see the performances was in the Kathakali Kalamandalam’s (the Kathakali academy) home village of Cheruthuruthy, which I would visit on three separate occasions over the next twenty years, staying each time for several days.

  While the Kathakali Kalamandalam is a professional theater company, its members are drawn from the people in the countryside—it’s hard to imagine somebody growing up in a city like New Delhi and then going to become a Kathakali singer. When you see the traditional Kathakali in India, you realize that the people who live there get their knowledge of their history through this theater: that is where it’s taught, in the stories that are told and acted out, and it remains very alive to them.

  When I asked if I could see how the children were taught, I was invited to go to the music lessons. The morning after one of the performances, I went to a clearing—virtually in the jungle—and I saw twelve or fifteen kids, all little boys, sitting down in a row. In front of each was a big stone, and each had a stick, and they were learning to keep the rhythm by hitting the stone. The teacher had a stick and a stone as well, and he was teaching these very young kids—four, five, six years old—to play the rhythms very regularly, until they got the beat. I watched them closely for quite a while. Some of those boys would become part of the company and would eventually learn to play the drums, sing, or dance.

  Ah, this is where it starts, I thought. The fabric of the music is strongly percussive, with drums playing all the time, and the rhythm is very intricate. It has to start somewhere, so they start with that. I never saw any music lesson more arresting than those little boys with their sticks and stones.

  The Kathakali traditionally has the same four elements found in Western opera—text, image, movement, and music, just like Rigoletto. It becomes very clear how theater and opera must have evolved—by telling religious stories in front of people, as an historical spectacle. In this way, the tradition and lineage of these stories has been kept alive. Every generation performs them and perpetuates them, but they do them, inevitably, with variations.

  In India, the characters in the stories of the Kathakali theater might be Arjuna and Krishna. In villages in the mountains of Mexico, where the Wixárika people do not speak Spanish—only Indian languages are spoken there—they present spectacles in which they tell the stories of their gods and spirits. The storyteller, the marakame, is accompanied by people playing violin and guitar as he sings and acts out the stories with his hands. Certain groups of people are designated to wear ritual clothing—very colorful wide-brimmed hats with all kinds of feathers and white clothes with flowers. They make all the clothes themselves. In a country like Mexico, where fire is such an important element, the storytelling takes place around a fire, with the fire almost acting as the stage. There might be two or three hundred people sitting within a fairly small area, and there might be four or five people telling different stories at the same time, dancing around different fires in a kind of stylized folk dancing. Like the Kathakali, it goes on all night, until sunrise.

  Once you see how these performances are done in India or in Mexico, you understand that you are close to a tradition that has been handed down from generation to generation. We are talking about hundreds, more likely thousands of years.

  MY SECOND VISIT TO KALIMPONG, IN 1969, had enormous implications for me. During my morning walks on Ten Mile Road, on my way to see Tharchin or Geshe Rimpoche, I had begun to notice a small rug shop with its owner at the door. Soon we were nodding to each other, then exchanging greetings, and finally, he invited me into his shop for tea. His name was Mr. Sarup and we struck up an easy friendship, not once referring to the rugs that were hanging down from the ceiling of his store.

  One morning Mr. Sarup asked me if I had a little time for him, that he had something to show me. Our conversation had been very general about life in our two countries, and the state of the world—that sort of thing. I had no idea what he had in mind, but I agreed to come by his shop the next day in the late afternoon. When I arrived, he led me a few streets away to the local movie house. It was not very big, containing perhaps one hundred seats, and showed a film only on the weekends. Mr. Sarup told me he had arranged a special showing for me, which turned out to be a newsreel, a short piece in which a small skinny older man dressed only in a dhoti—a simple linen covering that men wore from the waist down with its ends tucked in at the waist—walked with a wooden staff toward the ocean. A huge crowd surrounded him. He waded into the ocean and dipped the ends of his dhoti into the water, then held it up for all to see. His energy and concentration were electrifying. I knew, even with his simple gestures, that something monumental was taking place.

  “That’s Mahatma Gandhi,” Mr. Sarup said, “and this is a newsreel from the Salt March, also known as the Salt Satyagraha, in 1930. By harvesting the salt from the sea and refusing to pay the salt tax to the British raj, Gandhi was demonstrating his nonviolent protest.”

  I was stunned by what I saw. I was in awe of the man. Suddenly I needed to know everything I could about him. By this time I was beginning to know my way around India, so I went back to New Delhi and began my study of Gandhi at the National Gandhi Museum and Library. Over the next ten years I visited various ashrams in India where he had lived and worked, including the most well-known, Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. While in Ahmedabad I was the guest of the Sarabhai fa
mily, who at one time had been the owners of the Sarabhai Textile Mills and, at that moment in time, were Gandhi’s adversaries in disputes over workers’ rights while remaining supporters of his ashram. I came to know them through their interest in American avant-garde dance and music, learning that Merce Cunningham and John Cage had been guests as well.

  On a subsequent visit, I went to Gandhi’s ashram in Wigram, near Hyderabad. During that ten-year period, I was actively seeking out persons who had known him and been with him during his marches and Satyagraha activities. I managed to find one of his staunchest supporters and co-workers, Vinoba Bhave, who was then living in south India. I wanted to meet him and went to see him. He was then in his late seventies, still very alert, and most kind and helpful. It was still possible in the 1970s to meet quite a few people who had known Gandhi and who had been close to his work.

  At the time it never occurred to me that I might one day turn my hand to an operatic work about Gandhi, but from 1967 until I wrote Satyagraha in 1979, I was in India every other year, and on every trip, there was a Gandhi element. This total immersion in Gandhi’s personal history was a great help in making the opera, for which I had been, consciously and unconsciously, preparing. Almost all the details that would appear on stage could be traced back to my research over the years since I saw the film clip with Mr. Sarup. I think the fire that was lit that day had begun much earlier, with what I learned from my mother about social responsibility. I would guess that a hint of it also came from the Quakers, when I lived with them in the summer at their camp in Maine. I wasn’t a Quaker, in fact, I never went to a Quaker meeting, but I knew them as highly moral people—I don’t know any other word for it.

  The power of morality is not something that is talked about much these days, especially among contemporary people. But when we look at it from the point of view of commitments, and when we see how the Buddhists treat making and keeping commitments as a form of morality, then we can come to a better understanding of Gandhi’s work and how it continues to reverberate with us.

  FOUR PATHS

  OVER A PERIOD OF ALMOST SIXTY YEARS, I HAVE TAKEN UP the study and practice of four traditions: hatha yoga, following Patanjali’s system; Tibetan Mahayana Buddhism; Taoist qigong and tai chi; and the Toltec tradition of central Mexico. All of these work with the idea of “the other world,” the world that is normally unseen, the premise being that the unseen world can be brought into view. Though their actual strategies and practices are vastly different, these are brother and sister traditions, which reflect a common goal.

  To some degree, some things can be understood, if not learned, by reading texts and memoirs of traditional practitioners. However, these uncommon kinds of studies and practices have proven to be best guided and stimulated by a direct encounter with knowledgeable and skilled teachers. In fact, developing in music follows the same pattern. Great teachers in music—and I can list personally four: Nadia Boulanger, Mlle. Dieudonné, Ravi Shankar, and Alla Rakha—teach in an identical way, that is, one-on-one sessions with their students who then have to master techniques a step at a time through intensive personal application.

  It would not be until the 1980s that I would meet another yogi, Swami Bua, who in retrospect was the finest yoga teacher I have known. I’m not sure what his lineage was, though I did see a photo of him in his studio, a portrait of him and Sivananda taken in 1924, when Swami Bua was about thirty. It was my son Zack, when he was barely more than thirteen, who took me to Swami Bua’s yoga class in his small apartment near Columbus Circle in New York City. As we walked into his living room studio, Swami was sitting cross-legged on the far side of the room.

  “Ah, sir, you have brought your son to me,” he said. “Don’t worry, I will take good care of him.”

  “No, Swami,” I said. “My son is bringing me to you, and I would like you to take good care of me!”

  Swami was in his nineties when I met him, still giving two classes a day. By then I was in my late forties and I had no problem jumping into his program. However, it was highly developed and personal with many details that were new to me. He was always lively, though sometimes as he was nearing the one-hundred-year mark, he would doze off during a class. Ultimately, his program became the base of the yoga practice I continue to follow on a daily basis.

  Swami Bua was himself a strict vegetarian. Sometimes during a class he would begin a fierce tirade on meat eating. Since he was shorter than any of us, perhaps five foot one or two, he would raise his hand with a finger in your face and very heatedly say “You’re turning your body into a cemetery!”

  On one occasion I was receiving the brunt of the lecture with exactly that line about the cemetery.

  “But, Swami,” I protested, “I’ve been a vegetarian for thirty years.”

  His face and voice softened immediately. He reached up and tapped me on the head.

  “Ah, God has blessed you!”

  The clearest direct link between my work with these Eastern traditions and the music work that I was doing at the same time is in the pieces that have been based on those traditions. One major work based on Indian sources is, of course, Satyagraha. Another is The Passion of Ramakrishna—an oratorio for chorus, soloists, and orchestra composed in 2006. Though sung in English, the work is based on the biography of Ramakrishna written in the late nineteenth century by one of his disciples. Besides these two, there were several other selections from Indian religious texts that appear in my Symphony no. 5 (1999). From my involvement with Tibetan Buddhism has come the music for Kundun, the Martin Scorsese film about the life of the Dalai Lama, and “Songs of Milarepa” (1997), a piece for soloists and orchestra based on the poems of Milarepa, the Tibetan yogi and poet who lived almost one thousand years ago.

  These works never could have been imagined, let alone written, without the kind of in-depth study and practice that came from my direct experiences with India’s and Tibet’s traditions. I haven’t been back to India in some time, but my search and quest for the esoteric or transcendent in ordinary life has continued, and in several other directions.

  I TOOK UP QIGONG, THE THIRD TRADITION I mentioned, with the Taoist teacher Sat Hon. Born in China, Sat Hon came to the United States with his family to live in New York’s Chinatown, and then, after graduating from Princeton University, returned to China to complete his study of Chinese medicine.

  In 1996, I began a qigong program, which is quite different from hatha yoga. It is the parent study to tai chi, which is probably more widely known. When I entered into lessons with him, Sat told me I would be learning “longevity practice.” I continued with the qigong for a good fifteen years before he began to teach me tai chi. He seemed to think I would have time to practice: the matter was urgent, but no rush was necessary. He has told me that though I came to him at fifty-nine years old, my forty years of yoga and thirty years of Mahayana Buddhist studies had made it possible to begin studying with him without any major mental or physical deficit.

  It was at least ten years before Sat even mentioned the word “Taoist” to me, at first with a few books, then with his translations from ancient Chinese poems. Recently he has added sword and staff training and now tai chi. I know very little about classical Taoism, but the training continued and expanded in its detail and precision, and I have gone into it conscientiously and as deeply as I could. It’s hard to say what I have learned from all this, but I have noticed a certain ease I have begun to experience in my daily life. This extends not only to living but to the subject of dying as well. More than that I am unable to say.

  There have been several music collaborations with Sat as choreographer. The first was Chaotic Harmony, a work for flute and dancer, and a second, recently completed work, Taiji on 23rd Street, is a film featuring Sat Hon as performer.

  MY MOST RECENT ENCOUNTER with an esoteric tradition was completely unexpected and moreover the most surprising. And it has the special quality of being wholly born in North and Central America.

  Brows
ing through the Eastern philosophy section of the St. Mark’s Bookshop sometime in 1996, I came across The Toltecs of the New Millennium by Victor Sanchez. It was a story of a young man who had gone on a pilgrimage with a group of Wixárika Indians from the mountains of central Mexico. The book was a revelation. At the bottom of the last page the author had printed his e-mail address.

  This was close to my sixtieth birthday, and Orly Beigel, my friend and Mexican concert producer, had arranged a big party and some concerts for me at the main concert hall in Mexico City, Palacio de Bellas Artes for the year coming up, 1997. I wrote to Victor Sanchez, telling him I enjoyed his book and suggesting, if he lived in Mexico City, that we have lunch together. He wrote back that yes, he did live in Mexico City and would be happy to meet me, and by the way was I the composer by the same name? I was totally surprised that he had heard of me at all. But there it was, all arranged. Soon after, we had lunch together in Mexico City every day I had a concert, which made it five days in a row.

  Victor had been a student of anthropology, but he describes himself as an anti-anthropologist. He believed that the only way to learn about an indigenous culture was to be immersed in the culture itself. Of course this was anathema to an academic, scientific point of view. The normal way of working for an anthropologist at that time was for the scientist to keep a distance between himself and the subject. But Victor instinctively rejected the idea and therefore had to leave the university, freeing him to find the tools and knowledge he was drawn to on his own. He spent quite a lot of time after that with the Wixárika people, and the book I read was a report on his work.

  There was no other way to learn about this tradition than through personal involvement. It is a culture with an oral tradition but not a written one. Knowledge for the Wixárika people will not be found and read in a book. The desert and mountains are their encyclopedia. The Poderíos—the Powers: the sun, moon, fire, earth, wind, ocean, the Blue Deer and the “little” Blue Deer—are the teachers. The Wixárika people are the students. They have learned to listen to Grandfather Fire, and they have found the voice with which they can speak to him. There is no practice like yoga asanas or Buddhist texts or Taoist poetry. There is the desert, the mountains, and the Poderíos. However there is a little more than that, too. There is a path of discovery, a kind of technology and procedure—in this sense, meaning literally “how things are done”—that, if not exactly practiced, still has to be experienced. Along with that comes, on the one hand, a development of attention, and on the other hand, an almost Buddhist “not-doing” that is known and cultivated.