Words Without Music

by Philip Glass

  I SAVED WHATEVER CLIPPINGS, PROGRAMS, and announcements I had gathered from the European tour with Richard and, after getting back to New York, began sending out letters to schools, art galleries, and museums. “I will be with my ensemble in your area, and I would be happy to present a concert,” said my letter, written so that it could be used for any recipient, the idea being to communicate that I could do the concert at a very low price because I would be already on the road. In my mind, I figured the fee they would offer would be five hundred dollars, but I never asked for that.

  I sent out 120 letters with copies of all my programs up until then: I had programs from the Cinematheque and the Guggenheim Museum in New York and from Europe, but I didn’t have any reviews that I could show to anybody. I received nine replies and organized a twenty-day tour for the ensemble and myself, renting a van for three hundred dollars from Lee Breuer. Two of us drove the van, and the rest followed in a beat-up station wagon I’d bought. All of our sound equipment would be in the back of the van, along with our personal baggage.

  This first real tour in the spring of 1972 began at the University of California at Irvine and continued through Pasadena and Valencia, California; Portland, Oregon; Vancouver, British Columbia; Seattle and Bellingham, Washington; Minneapolis (two concerts); and St. Louis. The promoters had to provide housing, usually in the homes of music supporters. I believe I paid the ensemble members six hundred dollars each for the whole tour. When I got home I was in debt for a couple of grand, which took me several months to pay back. However, within a few years of this initial touring, there were enough performances for the ensemble each year to allow me to pay the players a minimum of twenty paychecks per year. By registering the ensemble as a company, filing the necessary paperwork, and paying the employer’s share of the premium, the players qualified for unemployment insurance for the weeks when we had no performances. With the financial basis of employment stabilized in this way, it guaranteed a consistent membership in the ensemble, which in turn allowed us to reach an amazingly high level of performance. Most of the players have remained with us for periods of between fifteen and forty years.

  I traveled without any money whatsoever for promotion or advertising, but I had LPs with me, and not just to sell at concerts (though we did that, too). There was, I soon discovered, especially in the States, a network of college radio stations operating everywhere. There was always some bleary-eyed college kid with an all-night radio program. It was dead easy to get on the program, especially with a new LP, which they were always happy to play in its entirety. One such young man I met in that way was Tim Page, who had an all-night radio program on Columbia University’s WKCR. Tim would grow up to be a highly respected new music radio personality, a well-known critic, a writer, and a lifelong friend. I was also quickly learning how to talk about music, art, and travel. Without the usual “new music” institutional support, which I never had, I was really on my own, touring and making records. For the next few years and really up to Einstein in 1976 I was inventing the tools I would need to make a place for myself in the music world.

  WHEN I LOOK BACK, THE BIGGEST INFLUENCE on my music has been in fact the energy system known as New York City. The city is in the music, especially the early ensemble music. The concerts that I did at the Guggenheim Museum, Music in Twelve Parts, Music with Changing Parts, and even Einstein—all of them right up until 1976—come right out of the guts of New York City. I had grown up in Baltimore, but New York is a 24/7 city. Paris goes to sleep at night—the métro shuts down, the sidewalks are rolled up—but New York never goes to sleep. That’s why I came here.

  The artists I knew and worked with weren’t part of the entertainment world, but were all part of the New York experimental art world, often very experimental. You would see Jack Smith walking down the street in the East Village and you might think he was a homeless person. Or you might meet someone like Moondog (whose real name was Louis Hardin), a very funny and completely unconventional grown-up.

  My friend Michel Zeltzman had first met Moondog where he hung out on the corner of Fifty-Fourth Street and Sixth Avenue. “C’mon, I want you to meet somebody,” Michel told me one day. He took me to see Moondog, who was about six foot three or four, blind, and dressed like a Viking, with a big helmet with horns that came to a point and made him look like he was seven feet tall. He wore robes and boots he had made himself and walked with a spear. If you bought a poem from him for twenty-five cents, he would sing and play a little music on drums that he had built himself.

  I got to know Moondog a little bit, and when I read in the paper that he was looking for a place to live and sleep, I went up to see him.

  “Moondog, I’ve got a house down on Twenty-Third Street. If you want to, you can room in one of the upper floors.”

  “That’s very kind. Can I come and visit you?”

  “Yes, come any time.”

  “Tell me the address,” he said. “I’ll come and see you.”

  A week later I was looking out the window when I saw a Viking walking down Ninth Avenue. It was Moondog, moving very confidently and fast, crossing Twenty-Sixth Street, then Twenty-Fifth Street, then Twenty-Fourth. As he reached each corner, he stopped to wait for the light to change before crossing the street. When he arrived I asked him, “Moondog, how did you know when to stop for the light?”

  “That’s easy. I stand where the light is, and I can hear the electricity when the light changes, and I can feel the traffic. If it’s going to the right, it’s going across town. If it’s going downtown, I can tell. I wait until after it’s gone, then I hear a click, and then I walk.”

  I took him upstairs up to the big room on the top floor and I said, “This could be your room, if you like it.”

  “Where are the walls?” He was trying to reach out and touch the walls.

  “Well, it’s kind of a big room.”

  “No, no, no. Do you have a small room?”

  “Right next to it there’s a small room.”

  “Take me to the small room.”

  I led him there, and when he reached out toward the walls, he easily could touch them.

  “I’ll take the small room. If I get the big room, I’ll lose things in it. In the small room, I can figure out where everything is.”

  As it turned out, Moondog stayed with us for a year. The biggest problem—and there were several problems—was that he would always eat takeout, usually from Kentucky Fried Chicken or something similar, and he would put the trash down on the floor, forget it was there, and never pick it up. He simply didn’t know where it was. I discovered this right away, so I would go upstairs once he had left for the day, clean up after him, and take the trash out.

  At that time, the ensemble was having rehearsals at my place once a week, and before too long Steve Reich and Jon Gibson and I began playing with Moondog, rehearsing together once a week as well. The four of us sang his songs, usually in the form of a round. Jon and I occasionally played flute, with Moondog on the drums. Steve recorded five or six of the songs on his Revox tape machine and held on to those tapes for a long time. Recently, a book was written about Moondog, and those recordings were included with the book.

  After a year, Moondog was given a small property somewhere in the Catskills and was ready to move on. He was a modern Pied Piper of sorts, often surrounded by young people, and a number of them went with him to the country to help build his new home. He was still staying with me while the construction was going on, and I asked him what his house was going to look like. From his description, I understood there was one central room, small enough that he could touch all its walls with his arms extended. Five long hallways, each of which led to another small room, extended out from the central room. From above, it must have looked like a five-legged spider. Strange perhaps, but perfect for a blind man.

  Moondog had a contract at one point with Epic Records and made a couple of records with them. He was an artist, and a very individual one. He told me that he had lost h
is sight when he was sixteen, in a Fourth of July accident when some blasting caps blew up in his face.

  After that, he said, “I was sent to a jerk-water conservatory to become a piano tuner.” He never did become a piano tuner—by that time, he had acquired his Viking persona, and he would cross the country playing music. He showed me his scrapbook, which was filled with articles about him. He became famous, and he came to New York and took up his place at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Fifty-Fourth Street, near the entrance of the Warwick Hotel.

  Moondog could write counterpoint, and he could sing, but he especially liked classical music. Listening to my music, he said, “You know, I like your music, it’s interesting. But you have to spend more time with Bach and Beethoven. Those are the two I learned from.”

  When I asked him, “What did you learn?” that was when he told me, as I mentioned earlier, “I really was trying to follow in their footsteps, but they were such giants, that to follow in their footsteps I had to leap after them.”

  That was Moondog, a giant Viking of a man so typical of some of the great characters who haunted New York in that era, leaping from footstep to footstep after Bach and Beethoven.

  I STILL THINK OF NEW YORK CITY as a powerhouse of a place in which human energy, imagination, and spirit are nourished. The work of artists who live here is inextricably bound up with the city. I think this was true for me at least until my fifties or sixties.

  “What does your music sound like?” I’m often asked.

  “It sounds like New York to me,” I say.

  It is alchemy that takes the sounds of the city and turns them into music. If you’ve lived here, you know that.

  In the 1970s and ’80s, when I went to Paris or London, or Rotterdam or Rome, people’s eyes would pop open when they heard my music, because they were hearing something that they wouldn’t have heard from Europeans. The music that I was playing and writing in those early years, that I was importing to Europe, was quintessentially New York music in a way that I always hoped it would be. I wanted my concert music to be as distinctive as Zappa at the Fillmore East, and I think I ended up doing that.

  In this very same way, I was drawn to the jazz of Ornette Coleman’s and Lennie Tristano’s music, as well as to the sound of Bud Powell and Charlie Parker. During my last years at Juilliard, on many nights I would go to hear John Coltrane at the Village Vanguard. If he wasn’t there, I’d go over to the Five Spot and hear Thelonious Monk and Ornette. I considered all of them to be fellow alchemists, taking the energy of New York and transforming it into music.

  There was a huge explosion going on in New York in the 1960s when the art world, the theater world, the dance world, and the music world all came together. It was a party that never stopped, and I felt like I was in the middle of it.

  CAPE BRETON

  DURING THE TIME WHEN JOANNE WAS PREGNANT WITH JULIET, the idea of finding a place outside the city to spend the summer months began to occupy me. In those days, concert work was still so sporadic that I could really take two months off. All I had to do was have enough money to eat, so I was looking for a place to go for July and August, since concerts happened mainly in the fall, winter, and spring, the opposite of today with summer festivals dominating everyone’s schedule.

  My partner in this search was my friend Rudy Wurlitzer, whom I had met in 1954 in Paris. We had been friends from his days at Columbia University and mine at Juilliard. Rudy was one of the first writers I knew who had a successful book. His first novel, Nog, had just been published and he was writing a new one and also doing some work in film. He, too, wanted to find a place to work and get away from New York.

  I’m sure the idyllic summers I spent at camp in Maine influenced me to head north, but the coast of Maine, or any part of the United States east coast, for that matter, was already too expensive. So on our first trip north, in the fall of 1968, Rudy and I drove into Canada, just south of Halifax, but we didn’t find anything we liked. The next spring, I was doing some plumbing work for the photographer Peter Moore—putting in an air pressure system so that he could clean his negatives before he printed them—in exchange for publicity photographs. When I asked Peter if he knew of any place where we could go, he said, “A friend of mine has a place up in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. It sounds to me that’s what you’re looking for.”

  Cape Breton had been an unattached island until the 1950s, when a short one-mile causeway was built to connect it to the mainland of Canada. This little causeway turned into one road that followed the entire coast of the island. To me, that meant one thing: there would be very few people actually living there, and that would make it affordable for us.

  So in the summer of 1969, JoAnne and I drove up to Cape Breton with Juliet, who was about eight months old. Once there, we rented a house with no heat or running water for eighty dollars for the whole summer. I wasn’t working that much, but I did write some music, and JoAnne was reading Beckett and thinking about his plays, and both of us picked and ate blueberries, which were everywhere nearby. That was the summer that Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. JoAnne and I were lying on a blanket with Juliet outside our cabin, looking straight up at the moon, listening to the CBC broadcast on a transistor radio as Armstrong said his famous line, “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” It was completely surreal.

  “JoAnne, he’s up there,” I said. We just couldn’t believe it.

  Going around Cape Breton, looking for property, talking to people, I met a man named Dan Huey MacIsaac who told me, “There’s a place down on the other side of Inverness, an old campsite, but no one’s been there for a while.”

  Dan Huey had been one of the carpenters who built the camp—fifty acres with a big main house and eleven A-frame cabins, right on the shore. There had been a dispute between the American owner and some local people about the property, and the American shut the place down. The following spring, I persuaded Rudy to come with me to check it out, and we agreed to make an offer. I had some cash from a small share of a property I inherited from Uncle Willie, who had recently died, and Rudy had some cash from a film job, so when we found out the owner of the camp, Mr. Coulter, was actually in New York, we drove back home, met with him, and made the whole transaction for twenty-five thousand dollars right there in his office across from Grand Central Station.

  We would spend our first summer on the new property in 1970. The whole Mabou Mines theater company came up to rehearse The Red Horse Animation, and I was able to finish composing Music with Changing Parts. It was the first of many productive summers. Along about June every year I would buy a used station wagon, usually a Ford Falcon (preferably white), which almost always was good enough for the road trip from New York City to Cape Breton and back. That first year it was just JoAnne, Juliet, and myself. The next year we had Zack with us, plus a border collie named Joe.

  Right away our artist friends began to visit. We had taken down three of the eleven A-frames and put them back together at one end of the land for Rudy’s house, still leaving eight for guest housing. Over the next few years, the video artist Joan Jonas, the painters Robert Moskowitz and Hermine Ford, the writer Steve Katz, and Richard Serra all came to visit us, and within a few years they all had places of their own nearby. The photographers Robert Frank and June Leaf found a house a little farther away near the town of Mabou, and Peter Moore’s friend Geoff Hendricks, the artist from the Fluxus movement who had preceded us there by several years, was nearby on Collingdale Road. There were enough of us for a poker game or a beach party and, at the same time, we were separated enough so we could be left perfectly alone to work as we pleased.

  Cape Breton, for those who are open to it, is a somewhat austere but deeply beautiful place. There, you are truly in the north. That little finger of land reaches up and above the greater mass of North America, pointing almost directly toward the North Pole. It is not unusual to see the northern lights on a summer evening, and the sky is still light until well after ten p.
m. The nights can be cool and the days never more than warm.

  Inverness, our nearest town, had a co-op grocery store, a post office, a few gas stations, several churches, a high school, a pharmacy, a drugstore, and a racetrack for harness racing every Sunday afternoon and Wednesday evening. It also had a waterfront lined with boats and lobster traps. It was home to two or three thousand people and eventually had a hospital as well. After a number of summers there, when I first arrived at the co-op to go shopping after being away for nine or ten months, the townspeople, who by then were used to seeing my family and me, would say, “Welcome home, Philip.”

  One of the best things about Cape Breton was my neighbors. John Dan MacPherson had the farm on the main road, just behind our place. In fact our fifty acres had been part of his farm before he sold it to the people who were thinking of it as a home and campsite for tourists. It had never had a real season, however. The place had been shut down for eight years until Rudy and I came along and bought it.

  John Dan, I believe, was happy when we came along, thinking that perhaps the campgrounds would finally open, bringing instant prosperity to the little parish named Dunvegan. That didn’t happen but, as it turned out, he liked us pretty well anyway. It wasn’t long before I got to know his life story. He came from a big family, a dozen or so brothers and sisters—quite common in that part of the world. As one of the youngest, he left home early. He told me that he had traveled all over the world, working from place to place. At the age of fifty, he returned to Cape Breton to marry, settle down, and have a family, and over the next thirty years he had twenty-one children. I met him when he was in his midseventies and several new ones came along after that. He made his living fishing, farming, and cutting trees for pulp, and in the course of a long lifetime he had accumulated an astonishing amount of knowledge and wisdom.