Words Without Music

by Philip Glass

  I saw him quite often working in the woods between our two houses. One day he was pinning a tree he had cut down to the ground with wooden pegs. He had taken off all the limbs, but it still had all its bark. He was getting ready to build Rudy’s house, he said, and needed some poles, which he called “round lumber.”

  “What are you doing, John Dan?” I asked.

  “Getting ready for the full moon. That will be in a couple of days.”

  He answered all my questions with the soft Scottish-inflected accent common in Cape Breton.

  “What does the full moon have to do with the trees?”

  “I need to take the bark off to make the pole clean all around. When the moon is full, it will pull all the sap in the tree to the surface and I can pull the bark right off.”

  I tried to get there to see him when he would next be working again, but I missed that moment. When I got back to that spot a few days later, I found six to eight poles stacked there, all free of bark and ready for use.

  Another time, walking with him in the woods, I had a question: “Tell me something, John Dan. I’ve been coming up here for a number of years now, and I notice that on the twenty-second or twenty-third of every August there will be a big storm. Why is that?”

  “That’s the day the sun crosses the line.”

  “The line?”

  “Yes, the line. That’s when fall begins.”

  I now understood that he was referring to the equinox and the “line” must be the equator. From that far north, the sun would appear to move toward the equator a little earlier than we’re used to farther south in New York.

  “And?”

  “That’s the day the sun begins to get weak and will allow a corruption to come in from the southeast.”

  Apart from the natural poetry of his language, I would ask myself, Are these the kinds of things that grown-ups are supposed to know? I knew none of them.

  Again, one day we were walking in the woods. We came to a big tree with a sizable trunk and branches reaching up through the natural canopy. We stopped there for a moment of silence. Then he said, “Now that tree there. A millionaire could come up from New York and try to buy that tree. But he would never have enough money.”

  He paused for a moment as we contemplated his thought.

  “And those children of yours. They’re little now, but it will seem like tomorrow when, one day, they will be driving up here in a big car,” and then with a sweep of his hand which took in our surroundings, “and all this will be just a dream.”

  With that he turned and walked off into the woods, leaving me standing there alone and speechless.

  John Dan wasn’t the only one I hung out with. Father Stanley MacDonald was my immediate neighbor. Angus MacClellan had about one hundred acres next to me and had given one acre to Stanley, where he built a small house, right on the water. It was a beautiful spot and Stanley, in the days before he retired from the Church, would manage to be there every week. He was a great reader and had by far the best library on the road, and that included Rudy’s library and my own. He had taken up an interest in Jung and had even gone to the Jung Institute in Switzerland for a summer course. The archbishop in Halifax didn’t care for him much. Probably he was too much of a freethinker.

  Stanley was from around there, but the family had moved to Sydney, on the other side of Cape Breton, where his dad had opened a bakery and where all his kids—a baker’s dozen or so—had worked. Stanley had been the priest of St. Margaret’s Church just up the road from us, at Broad Cove. He had been there for years and knew everyone on the road for miles around. The archbishop couldn’t get rid of him, but he assigned him to a very small parish in North Sydney, about ninety miles away, and it was there that, at his invitation, I visited him one Sunday morning. There were only ten or twelve people present, and they were sitting in small groups up and down the center aisle. I was somewhere in the back. After the regular service, Father Stanley gave his homily (sermon). It was very simple and straightforward. The theme was the pervasive suffering of life from which no one escapes. He began speaking (and not from notes) at the small pulpit in front of and below the altar. Leaving the pulpit, he began to walk down the aisle, stopping in front of each of his parishioners, pausing in his movement but not in his speech. He spoke to each one of them in turn, then, reaching the end of the aisle, he turned around, and continued talking, pausing, and speaking until he arrived back at the pulpit. His timing was exquisite and he ended his homily exactly at the moment he finally turned to again face his entire congregation.

  Stanley recently retired from the Church and is working part-time as a Jungian therapist, as well as spending the coldest part of the winter as a chaplain to a convent near Antigonish, about one hundred miles away on the road to Halifax.

  I also became very friendly with Ashley MacIsaac, who, because of his name, always has maintained that he is from the lost “Jewish clan.” Ashley is an astonishingly talented fiddler in the Celtic tradition, with an encyclopedic memory of Cape Breton and Scottish fiddle tunes. At dances and concerts he can easily play three or four hours at a time, accompanied only by a piano. In those concerts, often in barns and pubs in Cape Breton, he is as hot as a pistol. I’ve often seen a barn full of people just stop dancing and gather around him while he played. JoAnne discovered him before me, in the summer of 1990, and wanted to bring him to New York City to perform in a production of Woyzeck she was directing at the Public Theater. I was the composer of the music and, accordingly, met him at my house in Dunvegan. His father, Angus, brought him over to meet me. He was seventeen years old at the time and, after hearing him for only a few minutes, I accepted him on the spot to be one of our musicians. Shortly after, he came to New York and stayed at my house during the rehearsals and the entire run of the play. Later, from time to time, he was on tour with my ensemble. He also became very friendly with my son Zack, who is himself a gifted singer and songwriter. They are the same age, in their early forties now, and these days Ashley comes to New York and plays in Zack’s concerts and records with him as well.

  After all these years, more than forty now, I have deep friendships in Cape Breton. The people there have a remarkable and deep connection to the sun, moon, stars, ocean, and land. On my side, I have composed many—for me—significant pieces and parts of symphonies and operas and concertos there. I was even featured one year as a “resident” composer at an annual music festival that takes place in Halifax.

  Having a home in Cape Breton has meant that the kids and I could be outside of New York for a whole summer, in a place where I could have real writing time. Along the way, Cape Breton has become an irreplaceable part of my life.

  NEW YORK’S EAST VILLAGE

  ON SUNDAY AFTERNOONS MY ENSEMBLE BEGAN OPEN rehearsals at a loft I rented in 1971 for $150 a month from Alanna Heiss’s Idea Warehouse, a program that was partially supported by New York City. It was on the top floor at 10 Elizabeth Street, right at the corner of Bleecker, and for a time we played there every week on Sunday afternoons. I had found some old theater seats that I used to line the perimeter of the loft, and there were rugs covering the floor, collected from the sidewalks of New York on the Sanitation Department’s rug collection day—Thursday nights. The advertising was done with leaflets taped to the walls and doorways in SoHo.

  Mainly, our audiences were lying on the floor. They could have been sleeping for all I knew, but, at any rate, their bodies were there—maybe twenty, thirty, forty people at those early rehearsals. Over time, people began to be aware that I was developing a long-form piece, which was Music in Twelve Parts. I was writing at the rate of about one part every three months, three or four parts a year, and in three years, I had written the complete piece. I was aiming to get people curious about what was going to happen next, so on the days of the concerts when I was going to play a new part, such as Part 6, I would put flyers around SoHo—“Premiere of Part 6, Music in Twelve Parts, by Philip Glass, this Sunday at 3 o’clock at 10 Elizabet
h Street”—and there would be a build around those days when we did the premieres. I was attracting a following, very slowly, but had only a vague idea of who the audience was.

  The origin of this piece was a single page of music that I composed and called Music in Twelve Parts, referring to the vertical stack of twelve lines of music—twelve music staves. Four keyboard players could play eight of the parts, plus three winds and one singer playing the other four, making a total of twelve parts.

  I took a recording of this first piece to a friend, Eliane Radigue, a French composer of electronic music.

  “I have a new piece,” I said. “It’s called Music in Twelve Parts. Would you like to hear it?”

  “Of course,” she said.

  Afterward I asked her, “How did you like it?”

  “I liked it very much,” she said. “What do the other eleven parts sound like?”

  She basically had misunderstood the title, but as soon as she said that, the plan to make eleven more parts occurred to me. I knew about collections of pieces—when I studied with Boulanger, we had done the first set of the twenty-four preludes and fugues of Bach—so now I had to write eleven more parts.

  “I’ll keep working on it,” I told her.

  In this way, Music in Twelve Parts came into being, made up of twelve pieces each about twenty minutes long. Professionally, I was in the midst of an extended period of experimentation in which my ultimate goal was to integrate all three elements of music—melody, harmony, and rhythm—into one overall structure. This had gone on from 1967 to 1974, and Music in Twelve Parts was the culmination of this exercise. By the time it was complete, it was an encyclopedic work.

  After the driving rhythms of “Music in Similar Motion,” I felt the need to do something new, so in writing Part 1 of Music in Twelve Parts, I had composed a slow, stately adagio. It’s not a waltz, not being in three-quarter time, but a slow, stately waltz would give you a feeling of the music.

  Part 1 turned out to be a long prelude to Part 2, which quickly picks up speed and presents the idea of cyclic music—short phrases of three or more notes that repeat until a new note is added or subtracted. This series of cycles, played over a steady six-note cycle—the kind of cyclic rhythms I learned from working with Ravi Shankar and Alla Rakha—is sometimes described as “wheels within wheels,” which gives a good idea of what it sounds like. With Part 3, I began using pulsating rhythms—a kind of musical Morse code. In addition, in the middle of the piece, the listener hears a “drop” where the dominant keyboard’s left hand—a deep bass sound—suddenly appears, an effect that had appeared first in “Music in Similar Motion.”

  Further musical exploration led, in Part 4, to the development of psycho-acoustical phenomena (notes that no one is playing, but that arise from the activity and density of the music). In Part 5, a two-note melody swings through numerous addition and subtraction of beats in the cycle, producing a constantly changing melodic/rhythmic shape. Part 6 continues the processes of Part 5, but now using a three-note phrase, producing something resembling a true, recognizable melody. With Part 7, there is a return to the process of Part 4, but instead of reinforcing one note at a time, whole phrases of three, four, and five notes begin to “pop up” out of the rhythmic-harmonic stew, which itself is constantly changing.

  Halfway through Part 8, the whole edifice of “minimalism” gives way, as the ascending and descending scales shift to a superfast foxtrot-tango-samba. Any way you want to describe it, it comes down to a fast, stomping dance piece. In Part 9, I combined alternating ascending and descending diatonic (seven-note) and chromatic (twelve-note) scales in an indirect but explicit reference to the practice common to Indian ragas (melodies), but here resembling the sound of a thundering waterfall.

  By the end of Part 10, which basically is an everyman’s introduction to ornamentation—it contains most of the baroque options, including trills—I had really completely covered the review of the music processes that had occupied me since my time in Paris. However, I had unexpectedly discovered a new musical issue: it turned out that the breaks between one part and the next were highly dramatic moments. The shifts that occurred between two adjoining sections revealed an exquisite intensity that I had simply not anticipated until Parts 1 through 10 had actually been composed and performed. I had left these features of adjoining tonalities, rhythms, and texture entirely unprepared in the compositional process. On reflection, I seem to have understood that these joining moments between adjacent parts would be best left bare, so that the new musical-dramatic events would be heightened, rather than hidden. Therefore, I used the idea of these dramatic transitions as the entire basis of the composition of Part 11, which also served to introduce the strategy of “root movement” (or “harmonic movement”) to the previous techniques.

  In the final piece, Part 12, I used everything in the previous eleven parts, with even a twelve-note tone row embedded in an ever-expanding transitional middle section, in this way summing up the melodic option in one sweep that provides a concluding wild ride.

  For the first complete performance of Music in Twelve Parts I rented Town Hall, a concert venue on Forty-Third Street near Sixth Avenue. It probably cost me seven or eight thousand dollars, but I didn’t pay all the money up front. I was counting on selling tickets, since I was responsible for the rental fee. Town Hall holds somewhat more than fourteen hundred seats, and I had never seen more than forty or fifty people in my loft on any particular Sunday afternoon. The biggest audience I had ever drawn at a gallery or museum was one hundred and fifty, and at a college or university concert maybe three or four hundred.

  Yet, somehow, we sold out the concert, the last ticket being sold the day of the show. I had no idea how it happened. I think we might have taken out one or two small ads, and I got some help with listings in The Village Voice, but there must have been a lot of word of mouth. Somehow, over those three years, the idea had begun to grow that there was a piece of music being made, and that on June 1, 1974, there would be a world premiere of that music—the complete Music in Twelve Parts.

  The concert was a four-and-one-half-hour marathon, with a short break after Part 3, an intermission after Part 6, and another short break after Part 9. People were wildly enthusiastic, because no one had heard anything like it. They’d heard parts of it at a time, maybe three parts, but no one had heard the whole piece. The idea that all the parts would make up a whole piece was kind of astonishing. It had a musical trajectory of its own, and the audience was experiencing this trajectory as the architecture of music that revealed itself over a period of four and a half hours. If you were paying attention, you would hear how it worked, and evidently some people were paying attention. It was, I would say, pretty much of an unprecedented event to make a piece that long with an ensemble of seven players playing together with amplified sound equipment. It actually looked like we knew what we were doing, and we did. We had been practicing it for three years, part by part, adding it together, until finally, for the first time, we played the entire work.

  I LOVED WORKING FOR RICHARD SERRA, but in my midthirties, I wanted more time for my children and for my composing and performing. I was looking for some kind of work that gave me the independence I would need, would not be physically too tiring, and would keep my hands in a “safer” environment. So, after my long association with Richard, I began taxi driving.

  Driving a cab was never a problem for me. I liked driving in New York and I got to know the city very well. In the course of one night I easily drove a hundred miles: in Harlem, up to the Bronx, out to Queens, all over Brooklyn, and of course mostly in Manhattan. I never found New York boring when I was driving. I unfailingly saw the city as entertaining. The passengers could be exasperating—the variety of people and the outrageous kinds of behavior that happen in taxis are known only to people who have to spend a hundred miles a night in a taxicab three or four times a week. The good thing was I didn’t have to work that many hours, because in three or four nights I
could make enough money to live on. That was in the days where the cabdriver made 49 percent of the meter, paid in a check every two weeks, and kept all of the tips (maybe thirty dollars on forty to fifty rides a night). We didn’t pay for insurance, gas, or tires. I remember many nights making a hundred or one hundred twenty dollars, and in the 1970s that was good money. If I worked three nights a week, I had enough to pay my rent and living expenses.

  I worked out of the Dover Garage on Charles and Hudson Streets in Greenwich Village. On a typical day I would get there around 3:00 p.m. Sometimes my painter friend Robert Moskowitz and I would hang out with some other drivers we knew. At a time when a lot of artists, writers, and musicians still drove cabs, Dover was known as an artists’ taxi garage. We’d throw our hack licenses in to the dispatcher—literally, you’d throw them into a little tray under a glass window—and theoretically they were put in the order in which the dispatcher had received them. We suspected that the dispatcher would arrange them in any way he liked. If the dispatcher liked you, you could get a car by 4:30, but if he didn’t like you, you might not get out until 6:00 or 6:30, at the end of the day-shift change. It was very hard to butter up the dispatchers, because they didn’t seem to care. They’d call out your name—“Glass! Moskowitz!”—and you’d better be there. If you weren’t there, you went to the bottom of the pile and you might not get out. It could happen that they ran out of cars and you didn’t go out, but this never happened to me.

  You wanted to get your car as soon as possible, because the earlier you got on the street, the earlier you could come home. If I had to wait until five or six o’clock to get my car, I’d be out on the street until 3:00 a.m., and that wasn’t so good, because I hated to pick up the drunks, who were really a problem: they got sick in the car, they didn’t remember where they were going, they couldn’t find their money. I didn’t want to work with drunks, so that meant I had to be off the street by 1:30 or 2:00.