Words Without Music

by Philip Glass

  When I played at the Cinematheque, Richard Serra and my other art friends loaded the truck and we moved in all our equipment. If it weren’t for the painters and sculptors who were my friends, we wouldn’t have had the manpower to even set up the concert. Soon thereafter, I played in Don Judd’s loft. In time, I would present concerts in museums, and in this way my music became part of the art world. My friends who were painters would go to the galleries and say, “You have to put on a concert of Philip’s.”

  “When am I supposed to do it?” the gallerists would reply.

  “On Saturday, when everybody’s there.”

  Not only did Leo Castelli, for one, agree to that, but he agreed to pay us. We were playing in the galleries first, and then we were playing museums. It was as if the artists were saying, “This is our music, too.” My music had found a home, and the art world became its beachhead.

  What I wanted was a high-concept music that was aligned with a high-concept theater, art, dance, and painting. My generation of people—Terry Riley, Steve Reich, La Monte Young, Meredith Monk, Jon Gibson, and another dozen or so composers—were writing and playing music for the dance and theater world. It seemed to us that for the first time, a music world that was equivalent to the world of painting, theater, and dance began to emerge. The music world now could say, “This is the music that goes with the art.”

  When I speak about the basics of music being the language of music, that in itself is abstract. The high concept of art is language—I mean specifically that. When La Monte Young was working with sound, he was working with the idea of a kind of sound—how it would work, how the overtones worked, and how it affected you emotionally. I was working with rhythmic structures and with the kind of epiphany that is associated with that music, as opposed to the Doors singing “Light My Fire.” Most people prefer “Light My Fire.” But, on the other hand, there are composers writing music that stands on its own. They make a base for themselves in terms of language, form, content, and process. These are all concepts, but are they concepts that are independent of feelings? No, I think they are the concepts that make transcendent feelings possible and understandable. I emphasize transcendence and epiphany because these experiences go together with language. To say you could have one without the other would be to say you could have a fire without logs and a match.

  WHEN I HAD RETURNED TO NEW YORK IN 1967, I had discovered that the people around me at the time—painters and sculptors like Bob Rauschenberg, Sol LeWitt, and Richard Serra—all listened to rock ’n’ roll. They did not listen to modern music. It was not in their record collections.

  When I asked them, “Do you listen to modern music?” I found they weren’t interested at all. None of them listened to modern music: Stockhausen, Boulez, or Milton Babbitt—forget it. You’d never find that music there. There was more of a connection, for example, between artists and writers. What Ginsberg was doing in poetry and what Burroughs was doing in literature were not that different from what was going on in the art world.

  “Why is there a disconnect here?” I asked myself.

  Consciously, or to some degree unconsciously, I was looking for the music that should be in their record collections. If Rauschenberg and Johns were looking at painting and saying, “What could go into a painting and what goes on in a painting?” I asked myself, “What is the music that goes with that art?”

  I started going to the Fillmore East, then the current hip rock-’n’-roll venue on Second Avenue near Sixth Street (only a few steps away from where I would be living in 1984). The place was full of kids, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three. I was thirty years old and felt like an old man going in. The place was packed, and it was loud, and it was juicy. I loved it. I heard big bands like Jefferson Airplane and Frank Zappa at the Fillmore, and I was totally enamored with the sight and sound of a wall of speakers vibrating and blasting out high-volume, rhythmically driven music. I knew that music. I had grown up with it. I had liked it when I was a kid, and when I heard it coming out of my own speakers, I said, “This is good.” Yet I also knew that rock ’n’ roll was anathema to classical music people. They would never accept music that was amplified and with the kind of bass lines I was running. I knew that was going to make a lot of people angry, and I didn’t care.

  Look at it from my point of view: there I was, living downtown. I’d come from Paris, where I’d been working with Ravi Shankar. There were other composers like myself in New York, and I met them soon after. But when I first came, the biggest thing I heard was amplified music at the Fillmore East. It had the same rhythmic intensity that I had heard in Ravi Shankar’s concert music. That became a formal model, and I would say that the technology became an emotional model. It seemed like a completely natural progression to me, coming from Boulanger and Raviji and Alla Rakha, then returning to the United States and meeting rock ’n’ roll head-on.

  In terms of the image of the sound, the fact that no one was doing it in experimental concert music not only didn’t bother me, it interested me. In Europe, what was being presented as new music at that time was intellectual—abstract, quite beautiful, but with very little emotional punch to it. I wanted music that would be the opposite of that.

  The early music I composed was inspired more by artists and by rock ’n’ roll. Amplification added a content to the music that may have seemed alien to some people. Almost no one was going into the world of amplified music, or into the world of structural music. On top of that, amplification was a style of presentation that immediately set the music apart. If you look back, even pieces like “Music in Fifths” and “Music in Similar Motion,” which I wrote in 1968, are well articulated. They work through a process of additive and subtractive music laid out almost as clearly as if in a textbook. However, a major part of the impact of the music comes through the amplification itself, which raises the threshold experience to a higher level.

  Now that I was back, I was surrounded by new ideas coming from a new generation of young performers and artists. Moreover, there was the environment that I lived in: hearing Allen Ginsberg reading Kaddish, or being around “weird” artists like Ray Johnson, for instance. These kinds of ideas were boiling over, pulling the downtown artistic community in a multitude of directions. Without planning or necessarily trying, my work naturally became a part of it.

  AT THE SAME TIME AS I WAS MAKING NEW MUSIC, I was looking for some other kind of work to bring in money. My cousin Jene had already moved into construction, and there was a lot of building going on in SoHo, where industrial lofts were being changed into living spaces and studios for artists.

  The first jobs I started with Jene were putting up walls with sheet rock. This was heavy work. Then Jene and I began to do some plumbing, which neither of us knew very much about. There was a plumbing supply store on Eighth Avenue near Eighteenth Street, where we would go for supplies and advice. The guys behind the counter thought it was a joke. We’d come in and say, “Look, I have this part here—it goes into a sink, right?”

  “Ah, okay,” they’d say. And then they would go and get me the new part and hand it to me. They’d look at me, just laughing.

  “Now what do I do?” I’d say.

  “Well, you take this out, and you gotta get some washers to fit here and there, and then you put this in . . .”

  They would talk us through it. I would take the part back to the sink we were putting it in, and I’d try and make it work.

  We taught ourselves basic bathroom plumbing in this way. Very basic. Basins, toilets, showers, and tubs. Soon we learned to sweat pipes and hook up hot water heaters. We did whatever the guys who sold the parts could tell us. We bought pipe cutters, because in those days we were using galvanized pipe, so we actually had to cut the threads into the pipes. We spent a couple hundred dollars on a pipe cutter where we would hold the pipe and put a ratchet on the end that had a blade in it. We turned the ratchet on the pipe by hand and literally cut the threads in. If we’d had more money, we would have bought an e
lectric pipe cutter, but that would have cost three or four hundred dollars.

  We weren’t good at first, but it wasn’t that complicated, either. Later, with the switch over to copper pipes, it became much easier, except that the copper pipes had a tendency to leak more than the old galvanized pipes. Most people would not pay for brass pipes, which are softer and easier to work. The galvanized pipes would only last nine years—after that they would become so encrusted inside that problems with the water pressure would develop. The brass would last up to twenty years, and with the copper, there was no limit. But the copper was more delicate. If it wasn’t unrolled properly, it could end up with a dent, and the damaged part would have to be removed. There were ways of getting around that, but basically it took a higher level of skill. The next thing that came along was PVC plastic, but by then I was done with plumbing.

  There was a young man, Sandy Rheingold, who had a little storefront on Prince Street right off West Broadway. He was friendly enough and sat outside his place in jeans and a T-shirt. He wasn’t an artist, just a young fellow who was doing plumbing. Strictly speaking, Jene and I should have been apprenticed to a licensed plumber, spent six or eight years working for him, and then he would bring us to the union and introduce us. We would be allowed to take the test and we’d be entered into the union and we would become licensed plumbers. That would have been about an eight- to ten-year process for most people. We weren’t ready to do that at all.

  One day Sandy saw us walking down the street carrying our pipes and said, “Hey, you guys, you do plumbing?”

  “Yeah, we do.”

  Of course, that was only partly true.

  “I’ve got a plumbing place here. You want some work?”

  So we went to work for Sandy. I worked for him for about three years, and that’s where I learned how to handle lead, which became useful later on, when I started working for Richard Serra.

  Sandy taught us how to melt lead and how to set up a lead bend and install a toilet. The lead bend was a tube with a right angle. The bottom of the lead bend, which ran horizontally under the floor, fit into a four-inch cast-iron pipe. There would be a little bit of a hub where the four-inch pipe overlapped the lead bend, and within that hub, you would pack in a good amount of oakum (a fibrous material commonly used to caulk wooden ships) using a hammer and a wedge. Next you needed the snake, a rope made out of asbestos, which you would wrap around the lead bend where it fit into the cast-iron hub.

  If you did it right, you would end up with a little bit of an opening there at the top of the asbestos snake. Then you would take a ladle and dip it into the pot of molten lead you had sitting nearby on top of a small propane burner, and you would pour the lead into the opening left by the snake. The lead would run around it, and the snake would keep it from dripping out of the hub. When you had gotten enough lead in there, you stopped and let it cool down. Then you would take off the snake and take your hammer and a smaller wedge, and pack the lead in all the way around. You did that about three times, until you had packed a solid lead collar around the pipe, which would give you a watertight connection.

  Next, you had to connect the top of the lead bend, the vertical part, to the metal flange to which the base of the toilet would eventually be bolted. To do this, you had to trim the top of the lead bend and flatten it down over the flange. To make a solid connection to the flange, at this point, hot lead, as I learned, had to be “wiped” onto the flange itself.

  Traditionally, brown paper was used for wiping, the reason being that plumbers in the 1950s and ’60s would go to work with their lunch in a brown paper bag. When they got to work, the first thing they would do was to eat their lunch, at eight thirty in the morning, no less. They did that so they would have a brown paper bag with which to wipe the lead. You absolutely had to do it this way, using the brown paper bag, or you were considered a complete sissy, and even a fraud.

  In short, you held the paper up and you dipped it into the lead. The lead was hot, so this all had to be done very quickly. You wiped the lead around the lip of the flange, let it cool, and then placed over it a wax gasket that would provide a seal between the flange and the base of the toilet. We never used gloves, asbestos or otherwise, to do the wiping. Maybe they sold them, but I never saw anyone use them. The brown paper bag was all that protected your hands. In the beginning, Sandy sent an older plumber out with us to teach us how to wipe the lead, but after we did a few toilets with him, we could do it ourselves.

  Because Jene and I knew a lot of artists, and because Sandy lived there, we were mostly working in SoHo. One fellow wanted a big, oversized walk-in shower made completely out of lead. It was quite awkward, but we did the whole thing by wiping lead pieces together. We also connected pipes to the big water tanks that held the water on top of the buildings. But mostly we put in hot water heaters or basins. Kitchens, I learned, were easy: we would frame the kitchens, put up the walls, run the water lines from the wall risers, and run the waste lines into the four-inch drains. You could put a kitchen together in about six to eight days. I was working for a lot of people in those days who knew I was a musician, but no one held it against me.

  My day jobs would continue for another twelve years, until I was forty-one. I never considered academic or conservatory work. The commitment of time and probable relocation to a far less interesting place than New York completely ruled out a teaching job. Of course, I was never offered a job anyway, and when I finally had a conversation about it, not even an offer, I was already seventy-two years old and unwilling to consider it at all.

  IN THE SPRING OF 1968, JOANNE WAS PREGNANT, and she and I began attending Lamaze classes. For her first experience of childbirth, she wanted a natural childbirth, but she wasn’t prepared to do it at home, so we went for months to the training sessions to develop the breathing technique. The idea was that if you did the Lamaze method, the child would be born without having to give the mother an anesthetic that would get into the child’s bloodstream.

  In October, JoAnne’s contractions began fairly close to her due date. We were told to wait until the contractions were within two-hour periods, and that took a while. First there was a contraction, and then another one, and then maybe she didn’t have another for four or five hours. There were a number of days like that, but we knew it was coming.

  At that time there were not that many hospitals that would allow the husband to come into the delivery room, but we did some research and found one that would. When the contractions were coming regularly and close enough together, we went to the hospital. I had to be disinfected and dressed up like a doctor from head to toe. I stood beside JoAnne, and we began doing the breathing exercises together. By that time the contractions were coming maybe every ten minutes, but then things slowed down. We started off with no anesthetic, but as the hours went by, it was clear that the birth wasn’t going to happen soon, and at some point the anesthetic was used. In the early morning the baby came out, a girl with a lot of hair on her head. JoAnne stayed in the hospital for a couple of days.

  One of those mornings I came into the room and JoAnne said, “I’ve got the name.” She’d been reading Shakespeare, and the name was Juliet. We took baby Juliet back home to West Twenty-Third Street.

  Juliet was the first baby born in the Mabou Mines troupe. It goes without saying that there was a lot of excitement in the house. Not long after, Ruth and Lee had Clove, and on our first tour a couple of years later, we took both girls along, staying in peoples’ homes because there was no money for hotels. It worked out fine, because the kind of people who would invite a theater group like ours to perform were equally capable of inviting us to stay with them. In 1976, when we toured Europe with Einstein on the Beach, both Juliet and our son, Zack, came on tour with us.

  By the time Zack was born three years later, in 1971, it had become common for the father to be in the delivery room. This time we didn’t do the Lamaze classes, as JoAnne wasn’t so convinced that it had been that helpful. We also did n
ot have the time. I was working full-time and so was JoAnne, who had both theater and housecleaning jobs to do. If JoAnne wasn’t available, because of having a rehearsal, I would be her substitute. The pay wasn’t bad, you could get maybe thirty-five or forty dollars for cleaning an apartment, and if you did two jobs in a day, it would be about eighty dollars, paid in cash. It wasn’t a lot of money, but we didn’t need a lot of money, either. A quart of milk was thirty cents, and if you smoked, a pack of cigarettes cost about the same.

  We knew the second child was going to be a boy, and we named him Wolfe Zachary Glass, Wolfe coming from my uncle Willie Gouline, the same uncle who paid for my trip to Paris when I was seventeen and sent me bits of money during my years at Juilliard. Uncle Willie’s Yiddish name was Wolfe, with Willie being an Anglicization of that.

  While Zack’s birth was not the same process as Juliet’s, it was no less extraordinary. The beginning of a life and the end of a life are both huge transitions. There’s nothing greater. I didn’t know much about the ending of lives at that time, but I learned about beginnings with my children.

  THE PHILIP GLASS ENSEMBLE, as it would come to be known, began to take shape because I needed musicians who were willing and able to play my music. No doubt I had been inspired by Ravi Shankar, who was the ultimate composer-performer. When I came back to New York, I began by calling up friends from my Juilliard days, first Arthur Murphy, and then Steve Reich. Both were composers. Arthur had come out of a twelve-tone and jazz background, and Steve, from what I knew of his recent concerts, was “phasing” musical phrases against themselves and producing extraordinary and beautiful music. He had begun working with tape machines, playing the same music on two different tape recorders. Since the recorders were playing at slightly different speeds they began drifting, and Steve heard new patterns of music emerging. Most people wouldn’t have noticed, but Steve understood that something new was happening. The development of that idea became the basis of his early pieces. He did a piano phase and a reed phase. He went to Africa, and when he came back he began working with drumming. By then he was fully equipped to develop a whole body of original work.