Words Without Music

by Philip Glass

  When I got back about four that afternoon, Doris was sitting up reading a newspaper.

  “Doris, did you get through those books?”

  “Oh yes. Read them all. Some pretty good stuff in there!”

  The premiere of The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 took place at the Houston Grand Opera in 1988, and Doris stayed in Houston for quite a lot of the rehearsal period. The local Jaguar dealer had lent me a white convertible, and after rehearsals Doris and I would load it up with as many cast members as possible and head out to look for local Tex-Mex food. We ended up in some rough neighborhoods, but I think our Jaguar somehow afforded an unexpected protection. No tourists would be dumb enough to travel around Houston the way we did, so we must have seemed very smart, well connected, or both.

  At some point during the rehearsal, real friction began developing between the opera director and our designer, Eiko Ishioko, whom I had worked with only a few years before on the Paul Schrader film Mishima. I told Doris during one rehearsal that I was very concerned that these difficulties were getting in the way of their work.

  After not making any comment for some time, Doris said, “Can’t you see what’s going on?”

  “No. What do you mean?”

  “Those two are having a lovers’ quarrel.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The director and the designer, of course. They are obviously coming to the end of a romance, and Eiko will not be pushed around by him.”

  “No, no, Doris, you’re making that all up.”

  “Oh, you can’t see anything!”

  “No, you’re making it up, just as if it were happening in one of your books.”

  “You’re hopeless!” she countered.

  I never found out whether Doris’s suspicions were correct, but in any case things got worse before they got better.

  Doris and I would work on two operas together, based on her novels The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 and The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five. She loved spending time in the theater, and, as long as she was able to travel she came to as many rehearsals and opening nights as she could. That could also include auditions and discussions with designers. She didn’t say much about the music, though I do think she liked it, and she trusted me to work with her words. In 2008, when she was in her nineties and wasn’t leaving her house much, she came out to the English National Opera to see Satyagraha. She was still getting around by herself then and even refused to let me leave the theater to help her get a cab to take her home.

  I saw Doris for the last time not long after that, and then in 2013, she died. Because I met Doris the day my mother died, she is, in my mind, still somehow connected to Ida, though I don’t have the words or insight to unravel that connection.

  During the almost thirty years of knowing Doris, besides the two operas we had completed, we had begun talking about a third based on Memoirs of a Survivor. The main character of the story, an older woman living alone in postapocalyptic London, was perhaps a little too close to her. Still, we were slowly moving ahead. Up to this point, however, it appears that these words are my “Memoir” and I have become “the Survivor.”

  AS MENTIONED EARLIER, the elements of music-theater and opera are music, image, movement, and text. These are the earth, air, fire, and water of performances, all of which will have some of the four. But only in music-theater, film, and opera do all four exist in a more or less equal way. Over the past forty years I have now written twenty-five operas, among them: Mattogrosso (1989), by director-writer Gerald Thomas, with designer Daniela Thomas; The Voyage (1992), commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera for the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus reaching the Americas, directed by David Pountney, with a libretto by David Henry Hwang; and Waiting for the Barbarians (2005), directed by Guy Montavon, with a libretto by Christopher Hampton.

  The joy of working in the world of opera is impossible for many composers to put aside, and I am no different.

  MUSIC AND FILM

  IN THE MIDDLE OF WORKING ON THE SCORE FOR SATYAGRAHA, I GOT A phone call from a filmmaker named Godfrey Reggio.

  “Hello, Philip. I’m a friend of Rudy Wurlitzer’s. I’m calling you about a film I’m working on. I’ve spent the last year listening to all kinds of music and I’ve decided that I need your music in my film.”

  “Thanks, Godfrey. I would be happy to meet you, but I don’t write film music.”

  That was true, with the exception of the film about Mark di Suvero, which I had recently completed, in 1977.

  The next day I got a call from Rudy himself.

  “Phil, this guy has come here from Santa Fe and he’s not going to leave New York until you look at his reel. So just go look at it, say no, and he’ll go back home. Besides, I’m sure you’ll like him.”

  A day or two later I met Godfrey at Jonas Mekas’s Cinematheque on Wooster Street. Godfrey had a film montage about ten minutes long that would eventually become the opening of his film, Koyaanisqatsi. He told me that he had made two versions, one with an electronic score from Japan (he didn’t mention the composer’s name) and the second with my music. After viewing both reels he said, “As you can see, your music works much better with the picture than the electronic score.”

  I agreed with him that my music worked better with the film, not realizing at that moment that I had tacitly accepted the assignment.

  Rudy was right. I liked Godfrey right away. He’s quite a tall man, six foot seven, with a gentle demeanor and a soft voice. I found out later that he had lived in a Catholic monastery in the Cajun country of Louisiana, starting as a fourteen-year-old boy and remaining there until he was twenty-eight. It looked to me as if the combination of strength, focus, and reserve, which one could easily associate with the contemplative life of a monastic, had never left him.

  What appealed to me from the beginning were the two major themes of the work. The first was a series of beautifully photographed moving images of the natural world. The film began with an opening part Godfrey called “The Organic”—from the American West and, in particular, the area known as the Four Corners, where Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico meet near Monument Valley, with its enormous landscape sculptures that were made by Mother Nature herself. Then, toward the end of the film, in the fifth reel, we would see “The Grid,” the hyperactive life in our big cities—in this case New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. The oversimplified interpretation of the film is that technology run amok is the perpetrator and the natural world is the victim. Godfrey himself has never accepted this black-and-white interpretation, but he does use “Life Out of Balance” as a descriptive subtitle for Koyaanisqatsi, a word in the Hopi language. Living in Santa Fe, Godfrey had gone to a Hopi settlement nearby for inspiration and wisdom and had become close to some of the elders of the tribe. The ideas he picked up from them became the place where he began.

  The second theme of the film is embodied in a series of film “portraits” of ordinary people in which the camera does a very long shot coming in very close on their faces. The perspective he brings to his subjects is intense and moving and is as powerful as the images of nature.

  During our work on the film, I often met with Godfrey to hear directly from him how his ideas were developing. He has described this process as a dialogue between us and has credited it that way in the films we have done together: Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi, Anima Mundi, Naqoyqatsi, and, most recently, Visitors. The truth is clear and simple. Godfrey would talk to me about his ideas for the films and about the context of the films themselves, and I would listen. Godfrey’s views were powerful and, though they are generally known now, were unique at the time of their conception. They are far from the formulaic version that technology is bad and indigenous life is good, though he is constantly reflecting on the interaction between modern technology and “traditional” ways of living. In fact, I find his work much more free of judgmental posturing than most of us are capable of in matters of this k
ind.

  In my film work, I continued, to the degree it was permitted, the collaborative approach I had arrived at in my theater and opera work. I made a point of being present through the entire process of making a film, and that included extensive visits on location as well as many hours watching the editing process. My overall strategy was to set aside as much as possible the “normal” role of the composer in the traditional filmmaking process, where the music is considered part of post-production and one of the very last ingredients to be added before the work is completed. In fact, through the 1980s and ’90s, I was experimenting with the role of the composer in the overall work scheme. Godfrey was especially interested in this kind of innovative thinking and he welcomed all suggestions.

  For the beginning of the film, Godfrey decided that he wanted to use NASA footage of a rocket launch.

  “What kind of music do you think we should use there?” he asked.

  “Look,” I said. “You’re going to be showing this film in big movie theaters. The history of film is also the history of theater, and the history of theater comes from the cathedrals. That’s where theater began, with the mystery plays. Let’s go back to the idea that when you go into the theater, you’re entering a huge temple, and the instrument you would hear in there would be an organ. Maybe it’s no coincidence that when theaters were built for silent movies, organs were installed and ready to be played.”

  The opening music begins as a classic baroque passacaglia in which the theme is stated in the deep pedal tones of the organ. The counterpoint is then filled out by the two upper keyboards, and we hear one deep voice singing the name of the film—“Koyaanisqatsi.” The idea of the piece was to prepare people for a performance that would be similar to what they would see in a mystery play. I went to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where I knew Dean Morton, the administrative head, and I asked, “Can you arrange for me to play the cathedral organ?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I’ll get someone to open it up for you.”

  I went there and, in a few hours, I wrote the piece right on the organ.

  As the opening music ends, there is a moment of silence, and then a long, low tone slowly appears. The very next image, filling the screen, is Monument Valley, with the big sky and open landscape, in a very slow pan—a pristine, untouched environment. If what we are seeing is the beginning of landscape, what we are hearing is the beginning of music.

  There are two ways that I could have composed the music: to comment on the image, or to make the music identical with the image. I chose the latter. Apart from a sustained pitch, which increases and decreases in volume, the music hardly changes for a minute and a half. Then the saxophones begin playing one note on an off-beat rhythm, suggesting that we are going back to the beginning of time, to something very ancient. As the music begins to build and the landscape begins to change, we are clearly no longer in the church.

  The post-production work on Koyaanisqatsi took place in Venice, California, and, as I was New York–based, the kind of participation I was looking for was only partially realized. The next four films I would work on—Powaqqatsi, Anima Mundi, Naqoyqatsi, and most recently, Visitors—were edited in New York City, often within walking distance of my own studio. I had seen very quickly that the earlier the music came into the film, the more it would help to determine the work process. Godfrey was very encouraging and allowed that to happen.

  Some of my proposals, according to traditional filmmaking practices, were really radical. Powaqqatsi, the second film in the trilogy, begins in the Serra Pelada gold mine in northern Brazil. Godfrey had some film footage previously shot by Jacques Cousteau. Using that as a reference, I composed a short ten-minute piece of highly rhythmic music for brass and percussion. Then I traveled with Godfrey and his film crew to Brazil to Serra Pelada itself, an open-pit gold mine that at its high point had ten thousand miners working side by side. By the time we arrived in 1986, it was down to about four thousand miners.

  This was quite a bizarre place. It could easily have been mistaken for a prison set in a jungle, but in fact it was a startling display of capitalism at work. Every man there was an owner of part of a six-by-nine-foot plot. They all belonged to the cooperativo and, though there were soldiers and wire fences all around the site, the miners were, in fact, all owners of the mine. When we got there, Godfrey immediately began walking down into the pit, a huge crater that was the work of six or seven years of miners digging straight down into the earth. When we got to the bottom, we just sat down and watched the men digging and hauling bags of earth up bamboo ladders to the surface. Once there, they would dump the earth into a large wooden sluice that was fed by a rivulet of water from a nearby stream. The water carried away the dirt, leaving behind gold nuggets.

  I had been traveling to Brazil for several years for a winter composing retreat in Rio de Janeiro and could manage to speak Portuguese reasonably well with the workers. Down below I talked to the men. They were consumed by gold fever. I had never before seen anything like it. Moreover, I realized how young they really were. I guess none was older than his early twenties and some were younger still.

  “Hey man, what are you doing here?” I asked.

  “We’re here finding gold.”

  “Where is it?”

  “There’s gold everywhere, all over here”—this with a broad sweep of his arm all around the horizon.

  “So how are you doing?”

  “I’ve been finding a few nuggets. But when I get a good big one, I’ll cash it in and go home.” In fact, there was a Banco de Brasil at the top, right next to the pit.

  “Where are you from?”

  “A small town near Belém” (275 miles to the north).

  “And what will you do when you get home?”

  “I’ll either open a restaurant with my family or maybe buy a VW dealership and sell cars.”

  What they really did, when they found a nugget—the nugget could be worth five or six thousand dollars—was to sell it to the bank, take a plane to Manaus, and in one weekend, spend all the money. Then they would come back to work. There was one fellow who had a little restaurant there, just a tent and some tables and a fire. He said, “I don’t know what I’m doing making food here. This place is probably right over gold. I could dig right down here and find gold.”

  The people there were obsessed with gold. They were convinced they were going to make a fortune, and some of them did, but they also spent it. Every morning when you woke up and walked outside, you saw a line of men in front of the Banco de Brasil, trading gold dust for cruzeiros, the Brazilian currency at that time. They were making money every day.

  A little while later Godfrey and I climbed up the bamboo ladders to the surface. It was a good five hundred feet up and the ladders were only about twenty feet long. When you came to a ledge cut into the wall, you had to change over to another ladder, and once you got in the line moving up there was no stopping—the men behind you just pushed right on up. They were thirty years younger than us—tough, strong, and in a hurry.

  We began filming that afternoon. The music I composed was on a cassette and Leo Zoudoumis, our cinematographer, was set up with headphones to hear it on a Walkman while he was filming. The filming got started and went on for a while. Finally, one of the miners noticed the headphones and asked, “What are you listening to?”

  “The music is for here. You want to hear it?”

  Of course they did, and, for a while, the Walkman and headphones were passed among the small circle that had formed around us.

  “Muito bom! Muito bom!”—“Very good!”—was always the response.

  The music for Serra Pelada is driven by highly percussive drumming. By this time I had listened to the baterias (drummers) in Rio de Janeiro often during Carnaval, where you would hear two or three hundred players playing different drums in synchronization with one another. It was a tremendously powerful sound. If you were lucky, and you were sitting in the right place,
it would take eight or ten minutes for that group of people to parade past you, and you would hear nothing but this drumming. There were some cross-rhythms, maybe some twos against threes, threes against fours, but most of it was just straight-on drumming that you hear in a marching band, except that it was like a marching band on steroids. It was really loud and fast and that’s what I put into the score, along with shrill, strident whistles that fit in perfectly in that piece.

  When I came back to New York, I played this music for some of the people working on the film. They watched the footage, and they were shocked.

  “Is that the right music?” they asked.

  “Yes, it’s the right music.”

  “But is that what it was like for those people?”

  I said to one of them, “Did you think I should have done a piece like ‘Yo-ho-heave-ho’? Is that what you think was going on there?”

  Later, when I was actually making the film score, I added the voices of a children’s choir to the brass and percussion already there, in order to capture the childlike energy and enthusiasm of the miners. To me, they were children, and I wanted to evoke that feeling with the children’s choir in the score. That became a memorable musical moment.

  Godfrey and I went to all the venues together, whether they were in South America, Africa, or somewhere else. I went because he wanted me to be a part of the work and he urged me to come with him. The reason the music came out the way it did was that I had been there. I could have made it up, but I would have definitely missed something. If I hadn’t seen what it was like, not just on film but actually seen it for myself, I wouldn’t have known to put the children in. I was trying to make a sound track that lived in the muscle and blood of the people who were there.

  In this case, I had managed to completely change the traditional order of filmmaking. Instead of waiting for the music to be added at the end, during post-production, I had moved it up to the front, before the cinematographer had even shot the film. I wasn’t out to prove anything, except that the “normal” conventions of filmmaking were just that—conventions. Over the next ten years, I made all kinds of experiments of this kind. I was, in a few rare instances, even able to carry over some of my procedures into commercial film work. The main problem is that filmmakers already think they know how to make a film, so changing their procedures would almost always be out of their reach.