Words Without Music

by Philip Glass

  Usually, when I got home at 1:30, I would write music until 5:30 or 6:00, so I would be up all night, then take the kids to school. After that, I would sleep until two in the afternoon and get over to the garage by three. A lot of Einstein on the Beach was written at night after driving a cab. The days when I didn’t have to drive I had time to write music in the daytime and also to clean up the house and attend to business, such as trying to arrange tours.

  Back then, not all the cabs had protective partitions between the driver and the back seat, and that could be dangerous. I was almost killed a couple of times. Once, I was taking a woman up to 110th Street on the East Side, a dodgy area at that time, with numerous abandoned and burned-out buildings. I’d picked her up downtown on First Avenue, and that was a good fare because in the evening you could go up First Avenue and get almost the whole way there without hitting a red light. But I was a little worried about a woman alone going up there, and I was a little worried for myself.

  When she gave me the address, I asked, “Do you know where you’re going?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “It’s okay, there’s no problem.”

  “I’ll take you to this address, but do you know anybody there?” I was really concerned about leaving her in that area. I didn’t want to be there either, but at that moment, I was thinking about her.

  I drove to the street she was going to, keeping my eyes open for any sign of trouble. At that time, in the early seventies, drivers were regularly getting killed in their cabs. I would say five to ten cabbies got killed every year. One thing that could happen was that if you pulled up and stopped behind a double-parked car, another car could come up and park behind you, trapping you. That was a death trap, and I knew that.

  The street looked empty, but as soon as I stopped in front of the address she had given me, out of nowhere four guys leaped at the car, two on the front doors and two on the back doors. Luckily, right before I had picked up my passenger, I had stopped to get a coffee, and when I came back to the cab, I had remembered to lock the front doors, which you always mean to do but sometimes might forget. This time I hadn’t forgotten, and the front doors held, but the back doors flew open. The girl ran out, I floored it, and I was a block away within seconds. I don’t doubt that if they had gotten me—if they had opened the door and pulled me out—that I would’ve been dead. That was what was going on then. Some people thought cabs were banks on wheels.

  But not all experiences were so scary. The fact was, you never knew what an evening behind the wheel would bring. One night, for example, I picked up Salvador Dalí on Fifty-Seventh Street and took him to the St. Regis Hotel, not that far away. It was really him, moustache pointing straight up—the whole picture-perfect Dalí. I was flabbergasted. I only had him for a few blocks, and I was dying to say something to him, but I was completely tongue-tied. He paid me, tipped me, and a doorman came to sweep him away.

  The trouble with cab driving was that you never knew what was going to happen. Strictly speaking, you have to take anybody who gets in the cab anywhere in the city they want to go. In New York that’s the law. The worst part was that adrenaline rush when you thought this would be your last night alive—and the rush occurred almost every night. But the other parts I liked. I liked driving the streets of the city, and the conditions of the work were perfect for me—I needed temporary work where I could just go in and do a day’s work and get cash at the end of the day. The job didn’t require steady employment. There was no commitment. You could go in three or four days a week, you could go in twice a week, you could miss three weeks and no one noticed. At that time I was touring about every six weeks, so I’d go out on tour for three weeks, and then come back. I always lost a little bit of money. I didn’t get paid on those tours in the early years but I paid the players, so the first thing I had to do when I got back to New York was to pay off the debts of the tour. In about three or four weeks I could pay off what I owed.

  When I came back after three weeks away, I would throw in my hack license and the dispatcher would say, “Hey, Glass, where ya been?”

  “I’ve been busy taking care of my mother.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,” he’d say, and it was left at that.

  We had some real strange people working there. There was one driver who was the spitting image of Jesus Christ. We don’t know what Jesus Christ looked like, but he must’ve looked like this guy: skinny, with long hair, a beard, and a kind of astonished look in his eyes all the time. He was writing a book called Seven Years Behind the Wheel, and he said he was there getting material for the book. Of course, he was like the rest of us: he was there getting a pretty good piece of day work.

  After five years, I finally quit driving a cab in 1978 when the commission to write Satyagraha for the Netherlands Opera came through. In a gesture that I hoped carried some finality, I gave all my cab-driving equipment—the clipboard that I used to hold the Taxi and Limousine Commission sheet where I had to write down the time and location of every pickup and drop-off; the cardboard Dutch Masters cigar box that sat on the front seat next to me and held the coins and dollar bills to make change (the big bills were always stuffed into your pants pocket safely out of reach—not kept in your shirt pocket, where someone could reach in and snatch them on summer nights when it was too hot to have your driver’s side window rolled up); and my old-fashioned windup pocket watch, which was attached by a string to the clipboard—to my writer friend Stokes Howell, who was just beginning his ten-year stint of driving at Dover.

  “Here,” I said. “Take these. Maybe if I give them to you, I’ll never have to do this again.”

  And I never did.

  BY 1973, OUR PROFESSIONAL LIVES HAD TAKEN ROOT. JoAnne was working full-time with the theater and doing her other work part-time, while I was also occupied full-time, what with driving a cab and composing and touring. We had moved to the East Village to an apartment at Fourteenth Street and Second Avenue that was much closer to where we worked. The Mabou Mines company was still at La MaMa and I was busy also with my ensemble performances and composing music to keep up with my objective of having a new concert program every year.

  The children were a constant source of enjoyment and amazement and despair—if you put it all together, that’s what being a parent with little kids is about. It’s joyous, it’s amazing, and sometimes despairing because there’s no time to do anything anymore. You’re constantly up in the middle of the night taking care of the children and having to work in the daytime. If you were in the traditional wife-at-home-with-the-kids family, maybe that wasn’t a problem. Daddy went off to work, Mommy stayed home and took care of the kids, then Daddy came home and he still wanted dinner at seven o’clock. That model was still very common then.

  In our world—the world of experimental art, music, theater, and culture—that was not an acceptable model, and we wouldn’t do it that way. What we did was the following: we got together with ten or twelve other families and rented a storefront on Avenue B, right by Tompkins Square Park. We hired a young man full-time, with an assistant, and we could leave our children there and go to work. We went to one of the child care agencies in the city and said, “We have a day care center, it’s called Children’s Liberation.” Actually, of course, parents’ liberation is what it was. The children were already liberated. We needed to be liberated. I think we were one of the first groups that got funded by the city.

  One parent per family had to spend one day a week there, so JoAnne and I would take turns. There would be two parents there at a time, from two different families. We as parents had meetings very often and we talked about everything: what the diet should be (some people wanted there to be a vegetarian diet); what kind of language should be used (good language, no vulgar language); what kind of behavior would be allowed (some people asked, “Can they take their clothes off?”) and so on. It was a whole grab bag. I went to all those meetings, and sometimes I was the only man there. On the whole, it was a women’s group that had empower
ed themselves as women, and they were really angry at the men, and they were angry at me.

  “Wait a second,” I said. “I’m the only man here. It’s those other guys you need to be mad at.” I insisted on going to the meetings because I wanted to know what was happening with the kids, but I didn’t like that aspect of it. I thought that that was very unfair.

  At a certain point, JoAnne and I began living in separate but nearby apartments, sharing the care of the children on a fifty-fifty basis. Our lives had begun taking on different directions. We continued working together—and our working relationship and friendship has continued for the next forty years—but our home life had become difficult. In a situation that is fragile already, when you throw in another person, like a young man or young woman, the apple cart just goes down. In this case, it was a young woman. I wanted to pursue that relationship, which didn’t last very long, but that was enough. That became the sufficient cause for my marriage to end.

  So when it was my days to have the children, I would be home with them. On driving days when I was in the neighborhood I would stop by JoAnne’s house and take them for a ride in the taxi. I found out many years later that those night rides in my cab frightened them. Juliet was sure that I had stolen the cab and that we were all going to be arrested.

  Apart from such misunderstandings, we all seemed to be doing okay with our family arrangements. JoAnne had found a house on Houston Street near Avenue A, and I kept the place on Fourteeenth Street, where I framed up a two-story bed for Juliet and Zack out of plywood and two-by-fours, and built the kitchen counter where we took our meals and where I worked when I wrote music. I myself slept on the floor on padded moving mats, and we had wooden crates for our clothes. I didn’t have any furniture, but I didn’t think I needed any. I actually thought I was living the proverbial life of Riley. I had formed an ensemble, I was giving concerts, and I thought I was doing really well. I thought I was a successful composer because I had time to write, I had musicians happy to play the music, and I had an audience. I could go to Europe sometimes and I went on small tours everywhere. I didn’t make any money, but there were people who liked the music, and I had fans, people who were waiting for the next piece to come out. Music in Twelve Parts was like a cliff-hanger for them: every two or three months, a new part.

  I had confidence about what I was doing. I didn’t have to teach school. I didn’t have to talk to anybody I didn’t want to. I never got any money from grants—once I got three thousand dollars from the New York State Council on the Arts, but when they found out I was working, they asked for it back, so I never applied for any grants after that. I lived on my cab earnings, plus occasionally Ellen Stewart would send me some money, or Richard Serra or Sol LeWitt as well. Sol was nine years older than me, a successful artist who was making money already at that time. An extremely generous man, he began buying scores from composers—a way, actually, of giving us money. Eventually the scores ended up in the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum in Hartford, Connecticut.

  Still, my perception was that I always did well. I never thought I was doing poorly. I thought, I’ve got a nice, two-bedroom rent-controlled apartment on Fourteenth Street and Second Avenue. I have two kids and they have food to eat. They have clothes. I’ve got a day job and a night job. I have a band, an audience, and a record company. I thought we were doing great, though my children were aware that they were living a different kind of life than most of their friends. I was never embarrassed by our circumstances.

  My first consideration was to put the kids into a good school. I made just enough money to get them into Friends Seminary at Sixteenth Street just off Second Avenue. At that time the tuition was about three thousand dollars a year, and I somehow had enough. I wasn’t making any money from music at all, so it was all day jobs. The Quakers had had a strong influence on education when I was in Baltimore, so I enrolled Juliet and Zachary at Friends Seminary with complete confidence that their educational, social, and emotional needs would be taken care of. The split week worked out well: when the children were with me, I could give them my complete attention, and when they were with JoAnne, I devoted myself to cab driving and music.

  I had a little trouble with the school at first. They wanted me to take out a special “school loan” from a local bank. That way, the school got paid upfront and I would hopefully pay the bank back on a monthly basis. The trouble was none of the banks I spoke to would have anything to do with me, not even the bank that had dreamed up the whole deal with the finance people at the school. I had to go back to the school and see the bursar.

  “Joe,” I said, “they won’t give me the loan.”

  Joe at first was shocked, but, thinking it over, he came around to understanding their viewpoint. After all, I hadn’t had a “regular” job in years and, worst of all, whenever I would identify my occupation—itinerant musician and composer—to bankers or real estate people, their first reaction would be hoots of laughter. Thinking it over, Joe suggested I just come by the school at the end of every week and give him whatever cash I could spare, and that’s what I did. I loved that man.

  Once returning from Holland I came by Joe’s office with one thousand guilders.

  “That’s it, no more foreign money!” he pleaded.

  I never asked for a scholarship, and not out of pride. I just thought that I could probably manage it myself and scholarship money should be for people who really had no alternative. Now, here is a remarkable fact. Of course, every year the tuition would increase, and, miraculously, my income increased at exactly the same rate. By the time Juliet went off to college at Reed College some twelve years later, I was earning enough to pay her tuition there, too, at 1987 rates. Moreover, I was living on music earnings alone by then.

  IN THE SPRING OF 1984, I HAD JUST FINISHED writing Akhnaten and I was getting ready for a double opening at the Houston Grand Opera and at the Stuttgart Opera. I had already used up all the commission money to pay for the preparation of the conductor’s score and the piano reduction used by the singers for rehearsals. In addition, I had to pay for copying the parts from which the musicians in the orchestra would play, and for that I needed about fifteen thousand dollars. Before computers, this work, an intense amount of labor, had to be done by hand, requiring three or four copyists. Out of the blue I got an offer to do a print ad for Cutty Sark, and, miraculously, they offered me fifteen thousand dollars. I was overjoyed and didn’t hesitate. A photograph was taken of me holding a glass of Scotch whisky with musical notes floating in it. I took the money and had the parts done for the opera.

  I thought that was a pretty good deal, but some people, even “downtown” people, called it selling out. I called it “selling in,” because the money went into my work. I thought this selling-out idea was a bizarre notion. It seemed to me that people who didn’t have to sell out, or in, must have had rich parents. Or they taught music, which I also wasn’t willing or able to do. Otherwise, how did they do it? When someone said they didn’t do commercial work, I just thought these were people who somehow already had money.

  I never had any trouble with the idea of selling music. When my brother was twelve and I was eleven, we were already working for Ben selling records. From an early age, I saw that a customer would hand him five dollars and he would hand them a record. I saw that exchange innumerable times: money—music, music—money. It seemed normal to me. Oh, that’s how the world works, I thought. It never occurred to me that there was anything wrong with it.

  EINSTEIN ON THE BEACH

  SUE WEIL, WHOM I KNEW FROM HER DAYS AS THE DIRECTOR OF the Performing Arts Program at Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center, invited me to go with her one evening in 1973 to see a new work at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where Harvey Lichtenstein was starting to bring big, ambitious pieces. This was before BAM’s groundbreaking Next Wave Festival had begun, and there was real speculation about whether people from Manhattan would make the long trek out to Brooklyn at all.

  Sue would later become direct
or of the dance program at the National Endowment for the Arts, and after that she worked with the great Russian dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov at the White Oak Dance Project, but this night we were going to see Bob Wilson’s The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin. Bob had already been making a stir in the theater world, but this would be the first of his works I had seen. It was to be an all-night event, starting at about seven p.m. and running almost twelve hours. I was already very interested in “extended time” in concert pieces—Music with Changing Parts had been a work that had the potential of lasting for hours, which in some cases it actually did, and Music in Twelve Parts, in a complete performance, could not be performed in fewer than four and a half hours—but Bob’s work was more than an extension of “normal” theater duration. It was intensely visual and completely caught up with movement of all kinds.

  To see it for the first time was an unexpected and exhilarating experience. If Stalin was on stage, I missed him, though from the outset I hadn’t expected to see him. With dawn breaking over the city the next morning, we, the audience, followed Bob back to the Byrd Hoffman rehearsal space on Spring Street in Manhattan. There had not been a full house that night, with perhaps two hundred people in attendance, and it looked like a fair number of the audience was at this post-performance party.

  I met Bob that morning and we got along from the first moment. On my side, I already had a strong premonition that there was work for us waiting to be done. We agreed to have lunch at a little restaurant on MacDougal Street. We had no real agenda for that meeting or for the next few that followed. We were just getting to know each other, our backgrounds, mutual friendships, and interests.

  Bob is a tall, handsome man who is always gentle in his speech and kind in his attention. When you talk to him, he leans in and listens to you and he looks at you. Sometimes, if he’s not looking at you, he might be drawing at the same time. It’s very common to be speaking with Bob and, before you know it, he’s doing some drawing that may have something to do with what you’re saying, or it may not. Overall, though, I was drawn to him by the quality of his attention.