Words Without Music

by Philip Glass

  We began meeting regularly, every Thursday for a year, whenever we were both in the city. What I saw from the beginning was that Bob understood how events worked in time. It was very clear that we were working in parallel ways. We both had very strong connections to the dance world, Bob through choreographers Merce Cunningham, George Balanchine, and Jerome Robbins, and I also through Merce as well as John Cage. Bob knew the artists that I knew, so we were clearly living in the same world and had been nourished by the same generation of people that had preceded us.

  There were other similarities. Neither Bob nor I were from New York. He was from Waco, Texas, and I was from Baltimore. We were people who had come to New York to find a world of high culture and the kind of stimulating people who belonged to it. We’d both had our training in New York, Bob at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and I at Juilliard, and both of us were working in the theater. I was the musical version of what he was doing, and he was the theater version of what I was doing.

  Soon after these initial meetings, we began to talk about a music-theater work that we would undertake together. It had no name at first, but that soon came. One early suggestion from Bob was to work with Hitler as a theme—Bob had already done Stalin, so this was not a far-fetched idea. My memories of World War II were more vivid than Bob’s, I being four years older, so I had countered with Gandhi, which meant little to Bob. He came back with Einstein, to which I readily agreed.

  As a boy I had been caught up in the Einstein craze that followed the end of World War II. I had read many books about him and even one (for laymen) written by Einstein himself. Science had always been a boyhood hobby of mine in a general way and I had developed a taste—though not such a sophisticated one—for mathematics and astronomy. I had even been part of an astronomy club at a very young age—ten or eleven—where the members built telescopes, including grinding a concave six-inch mirror for a reflecting telescope. From that age and until now, music and science have been my great loves. I see scientists as visionaries, as poets. In having composed operas about Kepler, Galileo, and Einstein—three outstanding scientists—I’ve probably written more operas about science than any other composer. I’ve also written music for a film about Stephen Hawking, and collaborated on a theater piece with the famous string theorist Brian Greene.

  What interests me is how similar these visionaries’ way of seeing is to that of an artist. Einstein clearly visualized his work. In one of his books on relativity, trying to explain it to people, he wrote that he imagined himself sitting on a beam of light, and the beam of light was traveling through the universe at 186,000 miles per second. What he saw was himself sitting still and the world flashing by him at a really high speed. His conclusion was that all he had to do—as if it were a minor matter—was to invent the mathematics to describe what he had seen.

  What I have to do when I compose is not that different. All I have to do after I have the vision is to find the language of music to describe what I have heard, which can take a certain amount of time. I’ve been working in the language of music all my life, and it’s within that language that I’ve learned how ideas can unfold.

  I was immediately thrilled with our Einstein project. The original title, which I have on the cover of a book of drawings that Bob gave me, was Einstein on the Beach on Wall Street. Somewhere along the way the “on Wall Street” was dropped, but neither Bob nor I remember when. “On the Beach” referred to the Nevil Shute novel from the 1950s, which takes place in Australia, when the world has experienced a World War III nuclear apocalypse. In the penultimate scene of Einstein on the Beach, there is a spaceship and a huge explosion that Bob wanted, and I wrote a piece of music to go with it. We were aiming for a big finale that was apocalyptic, which, by the way, is followed immediately by a love story written by Mr. Samuel Johnson, the actor who played a judge and also the bus driver at the end. Bob juxtaposed the most horrible thing you could think about, the annihilation that happens with a nuclear holocaust, with love—the cure, you could say, for the problems of humanity.

  Of course, from the outset it was clear that Bob would be the image maker. When we talked he always had paper and pencil. His thinking automatically became pictorial. On my side, I was good at structure. We both were comfortable in a “time-binding” medium that takes place on a stage, but Bob liked to feel time in his body, whereas I like to measure and map it. I’ve seen Bob countless times at auditions ask a dancer or actor to just walk across the stage. Bob would gaze intently at them during this exercise. I came to understand that he could see something that I would never see. He could “see” them moving through time and space. It would only take a few minutes and he would know, decisively, whether he could work with that person.

  My abilities worked in different ways. For example, once Bob had decided on his three “visual” themes—the Train/Spaceship; the Trial; and two Dances in a field—he handed them to me and asked me to organize them into four acts. With barely a pause I wrote down the structure of the work. Using the letters A, B, and C for the three themes, it would follow this pattern: A-B for Act 1, C-A for Act 2, B-C for Act 3, and A-B-C for Act 4. Bob looked at the scheme and immediately added five knee plays—short, connecting pieces that came at the beginning and the end and in between each of the four acts. Oddly, but precisely, Bob had indicated the same “interstices” that, a few years later, Beckett would point out as the places for which I would then compose music in the production of Company, which Fred Neumann, working with Beckett, would direct and produce at the Public Theater. I don’t remember ever mentioning this coincidence to Bob. At this point, after maybe six months of verbal exchanges, we didn’t speak much about Einstein. We were beginning to work very closely and things began to fall into place.

  Time would be the common material with which we would be working. The first thing we did was talk about lengths of time. Each act would take about one hour. The knee plays would be six minutes each, as they were little interludes (the knee being a connecting section between two larger parts). There would be a chorus throughout; a dance company for the dance sections; two judges—an old man and a young boy—for the trials; two additional performers for the knee plays; and a violinist (Einstein) who would be sitting on a small platform midway between the stage and the orchestra pit, where my ensemble, with Michael Riesman conducting, would be set. It had taken quite a while to get to this point, I would guess more than half a year.

  During that first year, 1974, when the blueprint of the work was evolving, Bob brought Christopher Knowles to lunch. I grew to like him very much, but he took some getting used to. He was an autistic boy whose education Bob had taken on with the encouragement and blessings of the Knowles family. At our first lunch meeting, I barely understood anything he said. He could as easily, in those days, take a plate of food and try to balance it on his head as to eat from it. However, in the end, with two notable exceptions, he became the writer of the texts we hear spoken throughout Einstein. One exception is the love story mentioned above that ends the opera, and the equally brilliant text that our judge, Mr. Johnson, delivers at the end of the trial scene. The other speech was Lucinda Childs’s “supermarket” speech, which she delivers during the second trial scene. Lucinda became one of the two women in the knee plays, as well as the choreographer for her “diagonal” dance in Act 1, scene 1 (the “Train”). Sheryl Sutton became the second woman in the knee plays—the only actor from Bob’s previous work who was in Einstein. Paul Mann, at the age of nine, was the little boy judge, and Bob Brown, fully costumed and wigged, was our violinist playing Einstein. The chorus of twelve came from open call auditions and, besides singing, eight of them also had to be the dancers in Dances 1 and 2. That was it. It was conceived and the cast settled by the spring of 1975. I started composing the music to Bob’s drawings and my “time outline” that summer in Cape Breton. When I came back to New York after Labor Day in September, I had already made a good beginning.

  After the completion of Music in Twelve Parts I
had begun right away with the series Another Look at Harmony, Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4, which was meant as a straightforward announcement that I was beginning the second “phase” of this extended cycle of work wherein the remaining element—harmony—would finally be addressed. Einstein on the Beach, if you look at it scene by scene, is a very clear presentation of a melodic-rhythmic cycle interacting with a harmonic progression—first one chord, then two, then three, and so on as the piece progresses. The spaceship at the end represents the culmination of this “unified field” of harmony, melody, and rhythm, and itself ends with a cascade of chromatic descending and ascending scales by way of a final gesture.

  Another Look at Harmony, Parts 1 and 2 became the source for two important thematic units of the work I was doing for Einstein on the Beach. Using them, I was able to compose all the music for “Train 1” (that would be our A section) and “Dance 1” (that would be our C section). Through writing Einstein—but beginning with writing Another Look at Harmony—I continued the integration of rhythmic and harmonic and cyclic music into one coherent system.

  I was looking at a reconciliation of harmonic movement and rhythmic cycles. It can be heard right after “Knee Play 1,” in the “Train” music in Act 1. It became, in my mind, a unified theory, and the whole writing of Einstein was dedicated to that end.

  In classical music, there are allegros and prestos in all kinds of pieces, but they were usually presented as contrast to other parts. There would be slow music, then fast music. I have done that myself many times, in string quartets. But with Einstein, the idea of an unstoppable energy was all there was. There was no need for a slow movement. Even in the scenes like the two “Trials,” the push of the music remains, slowed down somewhat, but if you listen, there’s a forward push that’s always there. Same with the “Bed” in Act 4.

  Part of our music rehearsals were given over to teaching and memorizing the music by our chorus of twelve singers (six women and six men.) Only a few of them could actually read music, so learning the music and memorizing it happened at the same time. Here I borrowed a teaching method from Alla Rakha, and used it with our singers with great success. The method was to take a three- or four-note phrase and repeat it with the whole chorus until they had it by heart. Then I began with a second phrase, which they also had to memorize. Next, phrases 1 and 2 were performed together, which now had become fairly easy for them to do. We practiced this first combined phrase until it was solid, and then added a third phrase following the same system, ending up with a combination of 1, 2, and 3. This was the basis upon which more extended music could be memorized—for example, in the Knee Plays, which were six minutes long.

  For variety, I used two kinds of lyrics. One was based on numbers— 1, 2, 3, 4, and so on, up to 8. This outlined the rhythm and became another mnemonic device. The second was based on the solfège system of “do-re-mi-fa-so-la-si-do,” which are the names of the notes they were singing and which therefore aided in memorizing the melody.

  One morning Bob came by to hear the chorus and was listening to one of the Knee Plays. By then the singers were doing quite well with the numbers and the solfège. At a moment when we were taking a break, Bob asked, “Are those the words they will be singing during the performance?”

  That hadn’t been my intention at all, but with only the slightest pause I replied, “Yes.” And that is how the lyrics for the choral music in Einstein came to be.

  The music for the five Knee Plays was actually composed last. They are all based on the same music, the seeds of which were in the other parts of the opera. By extracting the salient points and using them for the Knee Plays, they, and the larger segments of Einstein, were organically combined.

  THE FINANCIAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE STRUCTURE for the Einstein production began to take shape during the winter of 1975–76. I was working with Performing Artservices, a not-for-profit organization formed by Mimi Johnson, Jane Yockel, and Margaret Wood, which was dedicated to the work of emerging performance art and had a solid background by that time in managing music tours with my ensemble. They were in turn linked to Benedict Pesle’s company, Arts Services, our European office in Paris. Bob had an experienced team with the Byrd Hoffman Foundation, which had helped him build and produce his early body of work, already a substantial undertaking. But between us, we still didn’t have real experience in touring a large music-theater production.

  Einstein should have had a traveling opera company, which—especially for work like this, which would be highly progressive and avant-garde—as yet didn’t really exist in the theater world. There were large-scale models operating at that time with Peter Brook, the Poor Theater of Grotowski, and the Living Theater. But what Bob and I were doing in music-theater was deeply ambitious and the earlier models would not be of much help. When Peter Brook did something like his stage version of The Mahabarata, what was missing was a driving musical idea that would carry you through the piece. Something I have known from the beginning of my work in theater is that music is the unifying force that will take the viewer-spectator from the start through to the end, whether in opera, theater, dance, or film. This force doesn’t come from images, movement, or words. If you watch television and put on different records, with different music, the same images will look different. Now, try it the other way around. Keep the music the same and change the channels. The integrity of the energy remains in the music and changing the image doesn’t alter that fact. People in the theater very rarely understand that, but Bob Wilson does. Both of us had a keen appreciation of the power of music to lift up a work. Any good theater piece, even one from Shakespeare or Beckett that wouldn’t seem to need much lifting, would benefit from a good score.

  Bob and I were two authors representing either side of the music-theater equation. We were mature enough—both of us in our mid- to late thirties—to have developed independently our own personal language. As I think about it now, it was that fact—that each of us had years of experience perfecting an easily recognizable and highly personal “style”—that set Einstein apart from other ambitious work. I had a well-trained team of technicians who came with me and he had the same from the theater side. I believe it was this equality that each of us brought to Einstein that allowed us to move forward together so comfortably. We had tremendous confidence in ourselves and in each other—a strong statement to be sure, but not in any way overstated.

  The trickiest part, and it is always true of new performance work, was finding the money to make the work—that is rehearsing, building the décor and costumes and developing the lighting, and, in the case of Einstein, the sound design. It’s traditionally one of those chicken-and-egg problems. The work cannot earn money to finally pay for itself (which is always a big question) until the piece is built, and you can’t build the piece with money that has not yet been earned. This is where the “angels” and backers come in. Though we didn’t have anything like a Broadway show with commercial potential, we effectively had the same problem. However, we did have friends with the means to help, including various members of the de Menil family. Christophe and François de Menil stepped forward to help. Then there were credit cards that we used shamelessly to buy plane tickets and whatever else that “plastic” could buy. The financial side was a little shaky, but good enough for us to get started.

  I was still in the cab-driving phase of my day jobs, and from then until the spring of 1976, when we began rehearsing, I was finishing the music, mainly working at night after my nine-hour driving stint was complete. But when the rehearsals began in earnest in March 1976, in Bob’s studio on Spring Street, I put the day jobs aside. We divided the day into three rehearsal periods of three hours each. We would begin with a vocal rehearsal at nine a.m. After the noon break, we had a dance rehearsal, and after a midafternoon break we had a staging rehearsal. I was the rehearsal pianist all through the day, and also the vocal coach for the morning rehearsal. I could see, therefore, how the music was working throughout. I could, as well, help the chorus who,
in many cases, were also the dancers, form a solid basis for memorizing the music—not at all an easy task. Andy de Groat was, in this first production, the choreographer for the big dance pieces, and Lucinda Childs made all her own solo dances herself. Bob Brown also began playing some of the violin parts at this stage. Bob Wilson and I were asking a lot of our company. In later years we had a separate corps de ballet and chorus, which made it far easier. By then, Lucinda was responsible for all the dance choreography. The texts by Christopher, Mr. Johnson, and Lucinda would appear during these early staging rehearsals in the late afternoon. These texts have remained through all subsequent productions.

  We put the whole thing together in about a two-month period and had a run-through performance at the Video Exchange Theater in Westbeth, a building fronting the Hudson River in the West Village that had been set aside for artist housing and rehearsals. It was done as a partially staged work but without any of the sets and drops that Bob had designed. Not all the music was ready for the ensemble, but there was enough for that early run-through. It was really our first glimpse of the work. It was rough in one way, but the Einstein energy was already beginning to surface, even in this partial version.

  It was a “friends only” showing with our support team and a few older colleagues as well. Virgil Thomson, then the only American composer of opera whom Bob and I took seriously, was there, and our friendship began at that time. He had made a wonderful piece, Four Saints in Three Acts, with the texts of Gertrude Stein. Several generations before us, he had experimented with the idea that opera could once again become a popular art form, as it had been in the nineteenth century. Four Saints in Three Acts actually ran on Broadway, so Virgil knew something about the theater. Jerome Robbins, already a good friend and confidant of Bob’s, was there as well. Jerry, known to the general public from his choreography for West Side Story, was a major choreographer for the New York City Ballet, and as one of the elder statesmen of the dance world, he understood the theater, and was very interested in what Bob did. Eight years later, in 1984, Jerry would choreograph his ballet Glass Pieces for the New York City Ballet to music from my 1982 album Glassworks, as well as the opening funeral music from Akhnaten.