Words Without Music

by Philip Glass

  FIRST CONCERTS

  IN THE FALL OF 1967 I MET JONAS MEKAS, THE DIRECTOR OF THE FILM-Makers’ Cinematheque, who later went on to found Anthology Film Archives. I asked Jonas right away whether I could present a concert at the Cinematheque on Wooster Street in SoHo. Jonas could not possibly have heard a note of my music, yet his reply was to smile and say, “Of course. When would you like to make your concert?”

  We settled the date on the spot, arranging the concert for May 1968. I managed to book several more concerts with similar programs around the same time, including one at Queens College a month earlier, in April. Between moving furniture, composing, and rehearsing, I would be pretty busy for the next six months, and that turned out to be a good template for the next ten years. Once the Philip Glass Ensemble began working, there were always concerts to play, and my life got progressively more intense. The cycle of music, family, my personal disciplines, and especially the day jobs was pretty much the way it would be. There was no way of getting around the constant problem of money until that moment arrived by itself.

  The first concert pieces came right out of my working experiences with Raviji and my private lessons with Alla Rakha. The music, to my ear, was strongly rhythmic and with a melodic dimension that was becoming more defined. These first New York compositions were solo pieces and duets, so I needed only a handful of players for my first New York City concerts. I called Dorothy Pixley-Rothschild, my old friend from Juilliard. As a student, Dorothy had played a violin concerto of mine and a couple of string quartets. She was very happy to hear from me.

  “Do you have any new music?” she asked.

  “You bet I do,” I replied, and she went for it right away.

  A recent acquaintance, Jon Gibson, who was also a composer, joined us on saxophone and flute while I played keyboard and flute.

  One of the early pieces, “How Now,” for solo piano, was pretty much like the string quartet I’d written in Paris, with six or eight “panels” of sound, each one an intensely repeated structure that then interfaced with the others. “Strung Out,” a violin solo for Dorothy, and Gradus, a solo saxophone piece for Jon, were straightforward pieces based on repetition and change. I was working with a language that, in the beginning, was simple but because of the perspective I brought, it became surprisingly interesting. In pieces like “In Again Out Again,” “How Now,” and “Strung Out,” I was already using additive processes and subtractive processes in the course of my playing, but they were done more instinctively.

  “Head On”—a trio for Dorothy on violin, myself on piano, and a cellist—was first played for a group of Dorothy’s friends at a party at her house. It was really obsessive music, seven minutes long, which began with the players playing different melodies. With each development of the piece, the differences started to become eliminated, so that by the time we came to the end, everyone was playing together. At the very end of the piece, there was a collision of all this music—that’s why it was called “Head On”—simplifying itself until it became a single melody.

  Dorothy’s husband, Joel Rothschild, a very nice man, must have thought I was insane, because Dorothy would come home with music that probably sounded like the needle was stuck in the groove—that’s what people used to say. He loved his wife, and he loved music, but I think this pretty much tested his love of music. Still, he was always most interested and supportive. Dorothy was a first-class player who was already very well-known in the world of chamber music and would later become the concertmistress of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra at Lincoln Center. But she had this goofy friend—that was me—who wrote this weird music, which she continued to perform.

  In composing these pieces, I made the musical language the center of the piece. By “language,” I mean the moment-to-moment decision made when a note of music is composed. To make that work, I had to find a music that would hold your attention. I began to use process instead of “story,” and the process was based on repetition and change. This made the language easier to understand, because the listener would have time to contemplate it at the same time as it was moving so quickly. It was a way of paying attention to the music, rather than to the story the music might be telling. In Steve Reich’s early pieces, he did this with “phasing,” and I did it with additive structure. In this case, when process replaced narrative, the technique of repetition became the basis of the language.

  There is a psychology of listening involved in this. One of the most common misunderstandings of the music was that the music just repeated all the time. Actually, it never repeated all the time, for if it had, it would have been unlistenable. What made it listenable were precisely the changes. There was a composer who was describing my music to someone else, and he said, “Here’s what it is: if you take a C-major chord and just play it over and over again, that’s what Philip Glass does.”

  Well, that’s exactly what I don’t do. He completely missed the point. In order to make it listenable, you had to change the face of the music—one-two, one-two-three—so that the ear could never be sure of what it was going to hear. If you look at “Music in Similar Motion” or any of the other earlier pieces, what is interesting about them is how they don’t repeat. To miss that point is like going to a play and falling asleep but waking up for the intermissions. You miss everything if all you hear is the intermissions. You’ve got to hear what the piece is actually doing, and unfortunately, at first, not everyone was able to do that.

  Why could we hear something, while the people who screamed, “The needle is stuck!” could not? Because we were paying attention to the changes. The mechanics of perception and attention tied you to the flow of the music in a way that was compelling and that made the story irrelevant.

  When you get to that level of attention, two things happen: one, the structure (form) and the content become identical; two, the listener experiences an emotional buoyancy. Once we let go of the narrative and allow ourselves to enter the flow of the music, the buoyancy that we experience is both addictive and attractive and attains a high emotional level.

  MY MOTHER ARRIVED BY TRAIN from Baltimore for my first concert at Queens College on April 13, 1968. During my travels to and inside India, I had barely been in touch with my family. Their reaction to my marriage to JoAnne had been surprising. I had never expected such a complete rejection. When I arrived in New York, I had called my sister and brother, so Ida and Ben knew through them that I had returned. My father and I were still not speaking, but my mother was in contact. She wasn’t able to have me come to her home, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t talk to me or see me. The rejection had come from Ben, not Ida, but it turned out that she was the one who was being punished. She had learned about the concert at Queens College and said she was going to attend. I was surprised, but I met her at Penn Station and she rode out with us to Queens in a rented car. She didn’t say anything about the rift in our family, and neither did I.

  I must have been a big worry to her and Ben. They weren’t happy about my marriage to JoAnne, and my choice of a vocation—composing music—had never made them happy either. Once I had left for Chicago in 1952, I never again needed their permission. I didn’t ask for it, and I never got it. We just left it at that.

  Though the concert was beautifully played and very rewarding for Dorothy, Jon, and myself, the fact of the matter was that there were only six (six!) people in the audience—one being my mother, Ida Glass herself. I don’t believe that she, unlike my dad, had any ear for music, but she could count, and the number of heads that made up the extremely small audience must have seemed a disaster. It had been an afternoon concert, and since Ida had never planned on spending the night in New York, I accompanied her back to Penn Station. The only comment she made was that my hair was too long.

  It would be over eight years before Ida came back to New York, in November 1976, when Einstein on the Beach was at the Metropolitan Opera. This time there was an audience of almost four thousand people—all the seats plus standing r
oom were sold. She sat with Bob Wilson’s father in a box. I gather that they were both mystified, but at least it must have seemed real to her. I always wondered what she thought of such a great change of fortune in such a short time. From that moment on, she took my occupation very seriously, and she was concerned that I was handling the business part of it properly. By then, she knew I was always going to be a musician, but now her concern shifted over to the likelihood that supporting my family would always be a struggle.

  Ida was a very interesting woman. She treated each of her children differently. She had always saved every nickel she could, and she used to buy AT&T stock with it. All her savings were in AT&T stock, and it turned out to be a very smart thing to do, as it was an investment that just got better and better. When she died, in 1983, her various assets were distributed among her children according to how she perceived what kind of help she could be. For example, she had bought the building that my brother’s business was in, and when she died, it turned out that he inherited the building. My sister received the securities Ida had accumulated. Her reasoning may have been something like, “A woman alone in the world will need the money.” My sister wasn’t alone, she’d been happily married to the same man for a long time, but Ida felt—and there were no grounds for this whatsoever—that she wanted Sheppie to have some cash just in case something happened to her family. In my case, Ida thought I would never have two nickels to rub together, that I would never have any money whatsoever, so she gave me half of her teacher’s pension, which was possible in the state of Maryland. When a teacher received her pension, she could take it at a lower rate, and then pass it along to one family member. This passed-along pension was good for one generation, and I’m still getting that money. She got half for her lifetime, and I got the other half for mine.

  After her retirement and my father’s death, my mother moved to Florida with her sister Marcela and her husband, Uncle Henry the drummer. They had apartments in the same condominium complex. Ida had what we called hardening of the arteries (technically, atherosclerosis). The fat would build up, the flow of the blood would be constricted, and her limbs wouldn’t get enough blood. She had a series of amputations, and it was really quite awful. Basically they cut until there was nothing left to cut. I don’t know why anyone would think that’s a good idea, but that’s what was done then.

  As her condition worsened, Marty, Sheppie, and I took turns going down to Florida. We worked it out so that there would always be someone there for a weekend, so every third weekend, I would be there for three or four days. This went on for a while. I remember once I was there with my brother and we were standing by the window. Ida’s bed was across the room. She was in a coma—she was in and out of a coma for all of the last few weeks, I would say—and I was talking to my brother, and I said, “Do you think she can hear us?”

  A voice on the other side of the room said, “Certainly!”

  We were so shocked we almost jumped out of the window. I came to understand that people in comas can hear things. You have to be careful what you say, and also, you can talk to them. Later on, I got used to talking to people that were dying, because that’s one of the things that life is about. Death becomes familiar. It doesn’t become a secret ritual. It becomes something that happens to your friends and your family.

  On these final trips—her life was winding down now, and if you went there, you might only hope to have a few words with her—I would simply stay in the hospital, have lunch in the cafeteria, and then come back to her room. On one of those visits, she was conscious as I was sitting with her. She motioned for me to come over.

  “Yes, Mama. Yes, I’m here.”

  She nodded her head, and she motioned for me to lean down so she could talk to me.

  “The copyrights!” she whispered.

  “What?”

  “The copyrights.”

  I understood that she was worried about the copyrights, that my music had taken on some value. She had come to the conclusion somewhere along the way—I suppose she had seen enough progress—that they were worth something, and she wanted to make sure I still owned the work.

  I understood what she meant. I leaned down to her and said, “It’s all taken care of, Mom.”

  She nodded.

  “I’ve registered them all, and they belong to my company.”

  She nodded her head again. That was the last thing we said to each other. Right to the end, she was on top of everything. Not that she listened to the music, but she understood that I had reached a turning point in my life—I was forty-six, so not only had I written Einstein but also Satyagraha. By some impossible maneuver, I had risen from obscurity in the music world into somebody who had compositions that had monetary value. She just wanted to make sure I was taking care of it.

  In the end, it was my brother, Marty, who brought her back from the hospital in Florida to Baltimore, where she spent her very last days in a nursing home.

  I doubt whether Ida knew much about music. We have a cousin in Baltimore, Beverly Gural, whom I would see from time to time. In fact, to this day, she keeps in touch. Beverly had been to Peabody Conservatory as a young pianist. Later she belonged to the Baltimore Choral Society, and she sang some of my music. I think it was through Beverly that Ida had found out about my music, from the reviews that were starting to come out. The reviews were terrible, but that didn’t matter. I would get letters from relatives saying, “Congratulations—hope you didn’t miss this review,” and there would be a review in a Chicago paper or wherever I had relatives, and it would be a terrible, scathing review. But they didn’t care about that—the point was that it had been noticed by the newspapers. It wasn’t sarcasm. They really meant “So you’re now part of the music world.” I had achieved a kind of fame. Even a bad review was fame, among my family.

  BY THE TIME THE CONCERT AT THE CINEMATHEQUE came around in May, just a month later, there was more music ready for performance. This turned out to be a full-length concert. On the program was a duet for Jon and myself: “Piece in the Shape of a Square” (a pun on Erik Satie’s Trois Morceaux en Forme de Poire—Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear); another duet, “In Again Out Again,” for one piano four hands, for myself and Steve Reich, a friend and fellow composition student from our Juilliard days who already was making a name for himself as a composer; “How Now,” for me on solo piano; and Dorothy playing “Strung Out,” for solo violin. As can be seen from the titles it was a “geometric” setting, the music stands and music making shapes in the performing space.

  With these works I was making pieces that had a visual as well as a musical structure. For “Piece in the Shape of a Square,” the sheet music was set on twenty-four music stands arranged in the shape of a square, with six stands per side. In addition, there was another square of twenty-four music stands with sheet music on the inside, so that there was a square inside a square, with two sets of music and no space between the two squares. The two flute players, Jon and I, began facing each other, one on the outside, and the other inside. While playing, each of us started moving to the right, so that as I was going in one direction, Jon was going in the other. We would meet halfway around the square, and meet again when we finally arrived at our starting places.

  For the unfolding of the music I was still using additive and subtractive processes, but instead of repeating one note or a group of notes, the music continued to add notes to an ascending or descending scale until a complete scale was reached. When we were both halfway around the square, the music we were playing began to do a retrograde (going backward), repeating itself in reverse. It’s as if you counted to ten, and then counted back from ten to one again. In the extreme parts of the piece, the music was at its most diverse, and as Jon and I began to approach each other toward the end, the music became more similar, arriving finally, in this way, at its beginning.

  “In Again Out Again,” the duet for one piano with four hands, had the same structure as “Piece in the Shape of a Square,” except th
at Steve and I were sitting at the same piano. The upper part and the lower part of the music were reflections of each other, just as it was for the two flutes. In the middle, the piece could sound very wild, because both parts were extreme, but as it returned to the beginning, again, the parts became increasingly similar. The music went in and out and then back in, as described in the title.

  With “Strung Out,” the sheet music was taped to the wall, “strung out” in the shape of an L. Dorothy began to play while facing the wall, with her back to the audience. As she read the music, she walked along, and when the sheets made a right-hand turn down the side wall, Dorothy turned, too, following the L formed by the two walls.

  By this time, I had become good friends with the “minimalist” sculptors, among them Sol LeWitt and Donald Judd. They were older than me, and in fact, they were the people for whom the word “minimalism” was invented. It wasn’t invented for musicians like La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, or me. It was applied to LeWitt, Judd, Robert Morris and Carl Andre, among others. The term “minimalist music” was simply transferred to us, in spite of the fact that it referred to a generation that was, roughly speaking, eight to ten years older than us, which at that age was the difference between being twenty-eight and thirty-eight—the difference between being someone who had an established career and someone who was still loading trucks on Twelfth Avenue.

  The second important part of the presentation that evening was the use of amplification. The intention was to separate the geometric shapes from the source of the sound, so that as Dorothy was walking and playing in one place, the sound of the music would come out of a speaker in another place. That was how I began working with amplified music. Those pieces didn’t really need to be amplified, but I liked the quality it produced. In other words, the sound itself was amplified, but the amplification itself had nothing to do with the necessities of the piece.