Words Without Music

by Philip Glass

  Jon Gibson, who had played in my first concerts, was also one of the founding members of the ensemble. So now I had Jon playing saxophone and Arthur and Steve and myself playing piano. Almost immediately we were joined by Dickie Landry, another saxophonist, who arrived from Cecilia, Louisiana. A year later, Joan La Barbara, a singer with a beautiful voice, added her talents to the ensemble. Richard Peck, a friend of Dickie’s, yet another Cajun from Louisiana, came up from the South. He became the third saxophonist and stayed with us for the next forty years. Michael Riesman, who began with us in 1974, became the music director in 1976. From then on, he was responsible for rehearsals, auditions of new players, and, in recent years, many of the arrangements of music that were taken from other works of mine. Significant additions to the ensemble over the years have included singers Iris Hiskey and Dora Ohrenstein, Mick Rossi, Martin Goldray and Eleanor Sandresky on keyboards, Andrew Sterman, Jack Kripl, and David Crowell on winds, and Lisa Bielawa, singer and keyboards. Lisa expanded the role of the “lead singer” to include chorale preparation for the 2012 production of Einstein on the Beach that was produced by Linda Brumbach and her Pomegranate Arts company. Over the years Linda has taken on responsibility for booking live performances and many new productions. All the players in the ensemble have been composers in their own right. Dan Dryden, who has been mixing live concerts for the last thirty years, became the archivist of the ensemble’s many concerts and recordings. Steve Erb served as stage mixer.

  From the outset, the ensemble rehearsed one night a week, using the top floor of the Twenty-Third Street building as our rehearsal room. I had a very simple rule: the ensemble was dedicated to the music that I was writing. I would play the music of other composers in the group if they organized a rehearsal of their own. But any time they came to my house, there was only one music we were going to play, and that was my own. That was a very radical idea at the time. What normally happened was that three or four composers would get together and form a composers’ group, and every time they did a concert, everyone had a piece on the program. To me, this was a prescription for disaster. The programs would always be the same, and there would always be hidden agendas. I was not interested in investing any time in anything like that.

  With the ensemble, I realized there was a music problem I needed to address immediately: finding a concise solution to notating pieces of music of fairly long duration with as few page turns as possible. As long as I was playing by myself, it didn’t matter, since I routinely memorized the music. But with an ensemble of four or five people, I needed a system of notation where the structure of the music could be represented in a more condensed way.

  I solved the problem by inventing an additive, progressive system. If I had a phrase that was five notes long, I could add a multiplier—for example, ×5—next to it. Whenever the phrase was changed, either by adding or subtracting a note, I would then add a new multiplier as needed. This notational device made it possible to reduce a sixty-page piece to five or six pages. That “eureka” moment had come about because of the necessity of compressing the notation.

  It proved to be a tremendous breakthrough that made it possible to compose two new pieces, “Two Pages” and “1 + 1,” which were pivotal in the development of a repertory for the newly formed ensemble. “Two Pages” was an eighteen-minute work in which a line of music was pulled in and out of shape through adding and subtracting notes from an original theme, thereby determining the overall shape of the music. This was the first piece where the multiplier system was used, and therefore it was given the title “Two Pages.” “1 + 1” was a mathematical expression of the idea of incremental changes through addition and subtraction.

  I was doing two things at once: with “Two Pages” I was synthesizing new ideas about music; with “1 + 1,” I was applying an analytic point of view by which I could extract and express a process. I always made the synthesis the beginning point and the analysis as the afterthought. This method came out of performance and intuition and the physicality of playing. This, in turn, encouraged me to develop as a performer, and that activity led automatically to further ideas of structure and process.

  With three keyboards and two saxophones, and soon a singer, we needed a sound system we could all plug into. The ensemble’s original four-channel sound system was put together with two University twelve-inch speakers and two Dyno-kit amplifiers that I had built for me from kits that came with instructions. We used Y connectors to fit the eight channels we needed into the four channels we had. I picked up three Farfisa electric organs for two hundred dollars each from the Buy-Lines. This kind of used keyboard was easy to come by. Usually a few weeks after Christmas they could be found for sale. I always found them, without exception, in a knotty-pine paneled basement in Queens. This gave me a total sound system for less than one thousand dollars. It was a stretch, but I couldn’t get along without it. It just meant more moving jobs or plumbing work. Not all that hard to manage.

  What was missing was an actual sound-mixing person. That turned up very soon, but for the first concerts with works like “Music in Fifths,” “Music in Contrary Motion,” and “Music in Similar Motion,” we had the charmingly naïve practice of allowing members of the ensemble simply to get up and rebalance the mixes themselves during the concert. Since we didn’t have individual monitoring speakers, it would only be a few minutes before another ensemble member got up and remixed the whole thing again. A few concerts like that and civil war would have broken out. Before that happened, a friend sent a young man, Kurt Munkacsi to hear us play. He saw the problem right away, including my homemade system. When I asked him if he could help, he answered, rather modestly, “Oh yes, I think I can.”

  Kurt had been a botanist at college and left science for rock ’n’ roll. He brought with him an aptitude for sound, electronics, and a pair of fine rock-’n’-roll ears. He was very interested in electronics and sound and had begun working at a place called Guitar Lab, where at one point he actually worked for John Lennon. I asked him if he would be the sound engineer for us. His ideas about music were developing very rapidly in those days. In fact, he was interested in almost anything that involved amplification. Since amplification had become such an important part of my music, it gave him a chance to develop. Mixing was something that we didn’t know very much about, so he brought a certain level of expertise to what we were doing that hadn’t existed before. I was delighted to be as far away as possible from the world of modern music with its wildly dissonant but overly polite veneer. The acquisition of a technique based both on Western and Eastern traditions gave me the confidence to imagine a music that needed no explanations or excuses.

  Right after the Cinematheque concert in May 1968, I began writing three new pieces, which were completed between June and December—the aforementioned “Music in Similar Motion,” “Music in Contrary Motion,” and “Music in Fifths.” I was able to compose each piece in a two- or three-week period. It then took the ensemble three or four weeks of rehearsal to achieve a reasonable command of the music. These were radical pieces. There was a grunginess to them that came out of the technology that was available at the time—the electric pianos and the big, oversized boom-box speakers. The pieces were loud and they were fast, and they didn’t stop. “Music in Similar Motion” is a string of eighth notes that goes on for fifteen minutes or so. It’s unrelenting. You could get high from it, and people did. That music had to be mixed and amplified. This was the technology that provided the emotional punch I had been looking for. Listening to this music was like standing in a very strong, cold wind and feeling the hail and the sleet and the snow pounding your flesh. It was definitely bracing. The music had the feeling of a force of nature. I had somehow stumbled onto a state of feeling that you can describe that way. It was not meant to be mindless, but to be organic and powerful, and mindful, too. If you listened to the structure, you could hear the phrases changing constantly, even though the stream of music was so constant that it might feel like it
wasn’t changing. The trick of that music was that it allowed the attention to form around a series of successive events that became almost unnoticeable—around the function of listening to something that seemed as if it were not changing, but was actually changing all the time.

  In terms of the new dimension added to the music by amplification, it might best be described as a simple question of form and content, or surface and structure, from a sculptural point of view. The structure was there in the rhythmic phrases, and the surface would have been the sound. These ideas of form and content/surface and structure were at that time very much current in the world of art and performance.

  With the third of the three pieces, “Music in Similar Motion,” I discovered a completely different kind of development that provided a new compositional opening. “Music in Similar Motion” proceeded very much like “Music in Fifths” and “Music in Contrary Motion,” with the difference that when the line of music reached its greatest length, it then began to shorten, phrase by phrase, until it arrived at the original length. At that point, by fragmenting the original phrase and using only a small part to build a new musical structure, based, as before, on an additive process, a new development could take place.

  Effectively, I now had two systems: a closed system and an open system. “Music in Contrary Motion” represented the closed system, in which the compositional process reached a point where it was unable to offer any new musical development. This is like having a table filled with glasses and at a certain point, there would be no room for any more glasses. The open system, represented by “Music in Similar Motion,” would be like adding a new table when the first table is filled.

  Interestingly, this description of open and closed systems does not exist in any book on theory that I’ve ever seen. In this way, it became evident to me that I was working with a new language of structure. This new strategy would become an important underpinning for the works that immediately followed—Music with Changing Parts and Music in Twelve Parts. Furthermore, it would become the common practice of the additive music composed for Einstein on the Beach.

  My first big public concert in a big museum occurred in January 1970 at the Guggenheim Museum. It consisted of those three pieces—“Music in Fifths,” “Music in Contrary Motion,” and “Music in Similar Motion”—which we played in the 120-seat recital hall. Almost the entire audience was made up of my friends, who were naturally enthusiastic. Each piece was close to twenty minutes long, so we would play a piece and then take a break. The music was amplified, but there wasn’t very much to mix because the music was still very transparent. It was a very good program because the pieces were related, and it was the first time that the ensemble could really show off its highly developed style of playing.

  ART AND MUSIC

  SINCE RETURNING TO NEW YORK, I HAD SPENT SOME FREE EVENINGS with Richard Serra helping him at his studio. He couldn’t really afford a studio assistant, so when I got home from my day job, I would help him with his work whenever additional manpower was required.

  Sometime after the Cinematheque concert, in the winter of 1968–69, I had a call from Richard. Leo Castelli, who was recruiting a whole generation of up-and-coming artists for his gallery, had put him on a stipend and invited him to make a one-man show in Castelli’s uptown warehouse. Richard was already known for doing floor pieces as well as for working with neon, rubber, and whatever of interest could be found in the streets of lower Manhattan. There was expectation and interest among art critics and people in the art world to see what he would do next.

  Richard asked me to help him get ready for the show as his studio assistant. I always liked working in Richard’s studio, but I also was making a decent salary at the time working for Sandy Rheingold. I remember telling Richard, “I’d love to do it, but I’m making two hundred dollars a week now working for a plumber.”

  Richard said that the money was no problem, but that we needed to start right away. That was fine with me and I began practically the next day. I worked full-time with Richard for almost three years. I enjoyed the work and it was a great parallel activity to my composing for the ensemble, not to mention the theater work that I was also doing with Mabou Mines. There was enough flexibility in his schedule so that I could still tour with the ensemble and perform in and around New York as the opportunity arose.

  The first big job was to get ready for the warehouse show, which would take months of preparation. Much of the show would be Richard’s early prop pieces, yet to be made. Also, there would be some rolled-lead pieces and even at least one freestanding piece, The House of Cards. This was very new work that few people had seen. As I came to understand, there were two elements that would have to come together—the materials and the process. I had no training in sculpture or art, apart from the occasional evenings spent with Richard in his studio. However, I had a good layperson’s understanding of contemporary art, and I soon began picking up what Richard was doing. In fact, from the beginning he took over my art education quite seriously. He realized right away that for me to be useful he needed to talk to me and I had to understand what he was talking about. He would give me books to read and study, and we often went on museum and gallery visits that sometimes took up a whole day. In fact, I never knew what we would be doing on any day, because, apart from the mornings, there were no typical days.

  The days began with coffee and breakfast at a cafeteria in Tribeca on West Broadway just above Chambers Street. Working artists live very regular lives, rising early and working all day—a fact almost completely unknown to most people. The cafeteria, in an area with a high density of artists’ lofts nearby, was frequented by many of our friends—Susan Rothenberg, Richard Nonas, Chuck Close, Keith Sonnier, and Joel Shapiro, to mention only the first few that come to mind—a group of young people who were becoming very successful very quickly and who, almost overnight it seemed, became the leaders of a new art movement focused on working with materials and process.

  These breakfasts were not leisurely meetings. Everybody was off and running very quickly. For Richard and for me, the beginning of the day offered three possibilities. Either we went out looking for materials to work with—found on the street or bought in different kinds of supply houses; or we went right to work in his studio nearby on Washington Street; or as mentioned, we spent the day in museums and galleries. A lot of these museum and gallery visits were for the benefit of my education, though Richard clearly enjoyed them himself. He was a born teacher, and he knew and thoroughly understood art history and practice. Richard likes to discuss things and analyze them, and he does so logically and intuitively. That is part of his dialectic method, so that he always has a chance of bringing in something new, something surprising. He has a well-educated sense of history, a highly developed sense of quality and what constitutes innovation in the arts, and he also has a great sensitivity to the difficulties of comprehension and the kind of complex world we live in.

  During one of our working days together, I said to Richard, “You know, Richard, I wish I could draw. I can’t even draw a tree.”

  “I can help you with that.”

  “Really? How?”

  “I’ll teach you to ‘see’ and then you will be able to draw.”

  I was completely stunned by his suggestion. Straightaway I had the following thought: Drawing is about seeing, dancing is about moving, writing (narrative and especially poetry) is about speaking, and music is about hearing. I next realized that music training was absolutely about learning to hear—going completely past everyday listening. And that was, for Mlle. Boulanger and Mlle. Dieudonné, the core of their training.

  I never did get my “seeing” lessons from Richard, so I never did learn to draw. We were always busy with seeing his work, which I learned to do quite well. But the ability to see creatively, the way a visual artist could, always remained beyond my abilities. However, my future work in opera—using text, movement, image, and music—would place me in an active relationship with other “s
eers” and became a great source of growth and satisfaction.

  ONE DAY, RICHARD SAID, “By the way, Chuck is taking pictures of people and painting their portraits. Will you let him take your picture?”

  I had first met Chuck Close when I was living in Paris and he was on a Fulbright grant to Vienna. Now Chuck had a studio in the building next to Richard’s.

  “Sure,” I said.

  We went next door to Chuck’s. It wasn’t a very elaborate setup. There was a camera and a chair to sit in—like getting your passport picture taken. He might have clicked the shutter more than once, but it seemed I sat for him for less than a minute and it was done.

  Chuck told me, “You know, in the past, portraits were paid for by patrons. They were very famous people, and this was how they had their likenesses done. There was no other way to do it. They were usually dukes or kings or queens or whatever they were. I’m taking pictures of people who are completely unknown.” Ironically, it turned out that almost everyone whom Chuck took a picture of that day would become famous, something we would joke about.

  In fact, what Chuck was actually doing was something much more radical: he was making portraits in which the process of painting became more important than the subject. He was able to do that through his highly developed technique as a painter.

  Chuck had gone to Yale, as had a lot of other very good painters—Brice Marden and Richard Serra among them. They were all at Yale at the same time, and they all became very well-known. The painting of me was later sold to the Whitney Museum. When my daughter, Juliet, was seven or eight years old, she was taken to the Whitney with her class from school one day, and when she saw my picture on the wall she said to someone, “That’s my daddy.”