Words Without Music

by Philip Glass

  When I work with Godfrey, I don’t spend a lot of time looking at the image. I look at it once. Maybe twice, but not more than twice. Then I depend on the inaccuracy of my memory to create the appropriate distance between the music and the image. I knew right away that the image and the music could not be on top of each other, because then there would be no room for the spectators to invent a place for themselves. Of course, in commercials and propaganda films, the producers don’t want to leave a space: the strategy of propaganda is not to leave a space, not to leave any question. Commercials are propaganda tools in which image and music are locked together in order to make an explicit point, like “Buy these shoes” or “Go to this casino.”

  The strategy of art is precisely the opposite. I would describe it this way: When you listen to a piece of music and you look at an image at the same time, you are metaphorically making a journey to that image. It’s a metaphorical distance, but it’s a real one all the same, and it’s in that journey that the spectator forms a relationship to the music and the image. Without that, it’s all made for us and we don’t have to invent anything. In works like Godfrey’s, and in works, for that matter, like Bob Wilson’s, the spectators are supposed to invent something. They are supposed to tell the story of Einstein. In Godfrey’s movies Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi, the words in the title are the only words there are. The journey that we make from the armchair to the image is the process by which we make the image and the music our own. Without that, we have no personal connection. The idea of a personal interpretation comes about through traversing that distance.

  ACCORDING TO GODFREY, in the Hopi language, powaqqatsi is a conjunctive word: the word powaqa, which refers to “a negative sorcerer who lives at the expense of others,” and qatsi, which means “life.” Most of the film was shot in South America and Africa, and one of the ideas of the film is that the Northern Hemisphere is consuming the Southern Hemisphere. At a certain point, much of the Southern Hemisphere has become industrialized like the Northern Hemisphere. It has become a mirror of it.

  When we were in Peru, twelve thousand feet up near Lake Titicaca, we walked toward the mountains of Bolivia, where we were told there was a ceremony going on. After hiking for a mile in the high desert, we came to a church that faced a walled courtyard, twenty-five yards square. It was the time of year that the statue of the Black Virgin was being taken from the altar, carried around, and put back, followed by a crowd of perhaps two hundred people. In two diagonally opposite corners of the courtyard there were two bands playing, each trying to outplay the other. I stood in the middle, listening.

  The musicians were village people from that area. Some of them had come back from the army, and they had brought instruments back with them. There were trumpets with some of the pistons not working, or maybe clarinets that didn’t have all the notes, and drums with only one side of the drum left. Basically, these were broken instruments that had been thrown out by the army and taken back to the villages by young men who then formed small bands.

  When we listened it was truly difficult to hear what was going on. After all, there were two bands and they were trying to play louder than each other. I tried to record it but I didn’t succeed. When I came back to New York, I wanted to get the sound of what they were doing, so I tried to imagine that instead of hearing two bands, I had heard one band. And what if they had been playing real instruments—instruments that were not broken—and what if they could actually play them? What would I have heard? I tried to remember what I had actually heard, which was the failure of the music to sound like anything because of the distress of the instruments and the ignorance of the players. But if I accommodated for that, what would it be?

  From this came the music that would become the anthem of Powaqqatsi, which was based on an imaginary music that never really existed. But I conjured it in my mind, and in a real way, it came right out of the experience. Without having been in that place, with those two orchestras playing in the courtyard, I never would have written that music. I never would have even tried.

  A lot of the pieces for Powaqqatsi were done that way. I traveled in different countries, and I brought home instruments that I could barely play myself: flutes, trumpets, drums, whatever they were using. I looked at the instruments and made up pieces that sounded like they might have come from there, but they really didn’t. I just used that as a point of departure. However, I can say absolutely that I wouldn’t have written that piece of music unless I had heard what I heard.

  After the work in Brazil and Peru, Godfrey and his crew went on to Africa to continue the photography for Powaqqatsi. This time, instead of traveling with him, I went ahead to the Gambia on my own. Robert Browning of the World Music Institute introduced me to the Gambian griot Foday Musa Suso. Foday Musa is one of the most widely known and accomplished singers and kora players of the Mandingo tradition. He became my guide, friend, and eventual collaborator through Godfrey’s insistence (in line with my own enthusiasm) that I include the sound and heart of African traditional music in the score for Powaqqatsi.

  We spent about three weeks in the Gambia, Senegal, and Mali just driving around and listening to music. Foday Musa was a superb guide because he not only knew so much of the music himself but was a product, and a very famous one, of that very tradition. I went with him to the home where he lived in the Gambia, a compound with a wall around it and one door to get in and out. Inside was a large open space with houses built around it with balconies and stairways and windows. Everything faced in toward the courtyard—if you were standing in a window and looked down, you’d see the whole courtyard. The food was cooked there. Children were raised there. If the father was away working—maybe in Belgium or elsewhere in Africa—no one would worry, the children would be raised by a group of women. Four or five families—cousins and uncles and relatives—lived there together.

  Foday Musa told me he began his music studies at about the age of six. Part of the learning was to build his own kora, a harplike instrument with twenty-one strings made with a gourd. The gourd sits in your lap, as big as your belly, and then there is a stem. The strings line up along the stem, and each string has to be tuned separately. His teacher was his uncle. If you’re a griot, you are descended from a line of griots, but your own father cannot be your teacher, so Foday Musa went to live in his maternal uncle’s house quite a distance away in a different village.

  He told me a story about how, when he was living there, his uncle told him one day, “There’s a man in a village that I want you to go to. He owes me some money. I want you to go and get the money.”

  Foday Musa took his bicycle and rode on a path through the jungle, taking two or three days to get there.

  “What did you do at night?” I asked.

  “At night I would climb up into a tree and I would tie myself to the tree. I couldn’t be on the ground. Sometimes the tree would be surrounded by hyenas and they would call out to you. They would try to get you so nervous and upset that you’d fall out of the tree and then they would destroy you. You have to resist. You have to tie yourself on tight.”

  “How long did it take to get there?”

  “About three days.”

  “It sounds like you could have died there.”

  “Well, I didn’t, but when I got to the village, I had no money. I found the man who owed my uncle the money and he said he didn’t have it.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I didn’t have any money to go home, and I had no food. But I found a dollar in the street”—he meant a dollar in the Gambian money—“and it saved my life. I bought some food, and I could eat a little bit, but I didn’t know how to get home without having some supplies. I sat there about two days and I thought I was going to die in the street.”

  “Didn’t anyone take you in?”

  “No, I wasn’t from there. They didn’t know me. No one was going take me in. Then another uncle of mine came by and saw me and gave me enough money to go home, and I went back th
e same way.”

  “Climbing and sleeping in trees?”

  “Yes.”

  “How long did the whole thing take?”

  “About a couple of weeks.”

  Foday Musa was laughing, because I was having trouble believing this story.

  “This is what life was like in the Africa that I grew up in,” he said.

  Griots are the keepers of the history of the people. Foday Musa told me that the history of the Mandingo people that he sings about goes back eight or nine hundred years, and that he had to learn 111 songs. In Africa, it is an oral history done through songs, some of which can last two or three hours, about all the kings and the people. It’s not like learning 111 five-minute songs. It’s a huge amount of material.

  “How do you know when you’ve finished your studies?” I asked.

  “When I got to be a teenager, my uncle sent me out to sing in peoples’ houses. So I went out to sing, and when they told my uncle that I knew the songs, it was done. I went out a couple of times, but some people had to spend years before they were graduated. They graduated the same way—you just go to somebody’s house and they tell you whether you sang the songs correctly.”

  I spent three weeks with Foday Musa, going from place to place and listening to music.

  “Where will we find the music?” I asked.

  “We don’t have any concert halls here,” he replied, “so we have to go out on the street.”

  We would find a wedding where there would be music, or a dance celebration, or just someone sitting at the market playing. On my last day there, as we were getting ready to leave the Gambia that evening, Foday Musa said, “Come on, I want to take you to hear something.”

  We went to a place in Banjul, the capital, where there was a huge street fair that Foday Musa had arranged, to celebrate us. There were people singing and dancing, and Foday Musa said, “Okay, now you have to dance. You can’t leave here until you dance.”

  Everyone was standing in a circle, and they pushed me into the center of it, and I had to dance. There were men and women, and I was dancing with them, and they pulled me and pushed me around until they said I had finished my dance.

  FODAY MUSA PLAYED KORA AND COMPOSED two important solos toward the end of the score for Powaqqatsi. He and I continued to work together, our next important collaboration being a score for Genet’s The Screens, a play about the occupation of Algeria by French colonialists. We composed separately and together about fourteen compositions. He did the African parts and I did the European parts, although he also played in my parts and I played in his. By that time we had learned how to play together. The production took place at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis in 1989, the director being JoAnne Akalaitis. We then began touring with The Screens music as the basis for our repertory. We also added percussion, keyboards, saxophone, and violin along the way. We didn’t travel all the time with such a large group, but it became for a time another performance ensemble I worked with. We continue, even these days, to add new pieces that we compose together. The Screens has become the name for the collection of music that Foday Musa and I have jointly made, a collection that, as far as I can tell, has yet to be completed.

  It is really through working with Foday Musa that I began to have real insight into the relation between our Western notated concert music and the music of indigenous sources and people. Working with Raviji and Alla Rakha had opened the door for me. But it was really Foday Musa who pushed me through the door. On the first day that he and I began to compose together, we were in my studio on Broadway at Bleecker Street. We didn’t know where to start, so I suggested that we should first tune the kora to the piano. Like the harp, the kora has a string for each pitch. So we began.

  “Foday, play your lowest note.”

  He played the A below middle C. I played the A on the piano and he tuned his kora to the piano A.

  “What’s the name of that note?” I asked.

  “The first note.”

  “Oh. Okay, play the next note.” He played the B above the A. I played the B and he again tuned his string.

  “Foday, what’s the name of that note?”

  “The next note.”

  “Oh.” I was getting a little nervous, but I pushed on.

  “Okay, play the note after that.” He played the C. I played it, and he tuned his third string to the C.

  I hesitated to ask, but I did anyway.

  “And what is the name of that note?

  “It’s the note after that.”

  I almost fainted. I suddenly understood that, for Foday Musa, the notes did not have names. I was feeling a strange vertigo and I hung on to my chair. In my very first flute lesson, fifty-four years before at the Peabody Conservatory, Britton Johnson had placed my index finger and the thumb of my left hand on two keys of my flute, pressed the keys down with my fingers, and said, “Blow across the hole.”

  I managed, after a few tries to get a sound out.

  Mr. Johnson then said, “That is a B.”

  At the same time he pointed to a note on the middle line on a page of music paper with a G clef written at the left side. In far less time than it takes to tell, he had locked together a sound, my finger position, and a written note on the page. Now, fifty-four years later, Foday Musa had unlocked them. In a flash I finally understood that the whole system of music I had learned, starting with Mr. Johnson and going right through to Mlle. Boulanger, had been just that—a system, consensual in its very language and no more eternal than the human beings that contrived it. It didn’t make it less beautiful. Perhaps it was now even more beautiful. And as impermanent as an afternoon shower, ever so lightly moistening the air we breathe.

  We might consider a fourth in Foday Musa’s playing a little flat, or a second a little sharp, and so on, so that the actual intervals of African and Western music are not identical. What he has done is retune his instruments to fit a Western scale. He told me that a lot of the players who come from Africa will not retune their instruments.

  “What happens then?” I asked.

  “They can’t play with anyone because they’re never in tune. If you want to come to Spain or England or Germany and you want to play, you have to retune your instruments and most of them won’t do it.

  “Do you have any problem with it?” I asked.

  “I have no problem at all.”

  What happened to Foday Musa was similar to what happened to Ravi Shankar. When Raviji first came to America and then went back to India, he was criticized for the success he had. He would have to calm the critics who thought he couldn’t play anymore. He would put on a big concert in New Delhi or Bombay and play the traditional music fantastically well. He had to prove to them that he could still do it. That stopped after a while—they knew that he was able to do both. When Foday Musa would go back to the Gambia, because he had changed the tuning on his Western recordings, they thought he had lost the music. But when he returned to the original tuning of the kora, they were satisfied that he could still play the traditional music. Foday Musa and Raviji were able to move between musical cultures, and the real entry for them began with retuning their instruments.

  Through my contact with both of these men, I learned to adapt my playing to music that was not part of Western traditions. Recently I made a record with some indigenous Wixárika musicians from central Mexico. I didn’t know what they would play, but I knew whatever it was, I would manage it. I listened to the music and said to myself, “Where is the music? Where does the music go? What can I play?” And then I began to play.

  The work with Godfrey opened up a world of music for me, because it meant that in the end I could go and play with almost anybody. I’ve experimented widely with musicians—Raviji; Foday Musa; Mark Atkins, the Australian didgeridoo player; Uakti, a group from Brazil; Wu Man, the Chinese pipa player; and the Wixárika musicians. All of this music has been performed live or been recorded. Traveling with Godfrey for the film shoots had made it possible for me to have
regular encounters with skilled musicians in other traditions. The time I spent with them gave me the confidence to pursue new directions, and my forays into global music—Indian, Himalayan, Chinese, Australian, African, South American—have widened and deepened my understanding of my own musical roots. And not only that, over the years and as I ventured further and further away from my musical “home base,” I have come to understand that all music, without exception, is ethnic music.

  In 1990 I became the artistic director for the annual benefit concert for Tibet House US, which had been established in New York City in 1987 at the request of His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. It followed his stated wish for a long-term cultural institution to ensure the sustainability of Tibetan culture in exile and to create an awareness of Tibet’s contribution and relevance to the world’s cultural heritage. The founders of Tibet House US included Robert Thurman, Richard Gere, Porter McCray, Elsie Walker, Elizabeth Avedon, and myself. The first concert was held at the opera house at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and included Allen Ginsberg, Laurie Anderson, Spalding Gray, and me. Having lived and worked in New York since 1967, I had developed, with the help of a committee from the music world organized for this purpose, a large pool of talent to draw from in making the evening’s lineup. I discovered that almost none of the players I knew had ever played in Carnegie Hall, and that seemed to have been a major attraction for them.