Words Without Music

by Philip Glass

  Perennial performers have been Allen Ginsberg, Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, and myself. Guest performers have included Angélique Kidjo from Benin, Caetano Veloso and Marisa Monte from Brazil, Ashley MacIsaac from Cape Breton, Pierce Turner from Ireland, and Foday Musa Suso from the Gambia, as well as such Tibetan musicians as Nawang Khechog, Yungchen Lhamo, Tenzin Choegyal, Dechen Shak-Dagsay, and Techung. In addition the concert has featured hugely popular performers like Paul Simon, David Bowie, Debbie Harry, Lou Reed, Ray Davies, Michael Stipe and REM, David Byrne, Richie Havens, Iggy Pop, Shawn Colvin, Emmylou Harris, Taj Mahal, Rufus Wainwright, Sufjan Stevens, Rahzel, the National, the Black Keys, New Order, and the Flaming Lips.

  This extension into the pop-commercial-folk world has become the living confirmation for me that talent is among our most universal qualities, appearing where it will regardless of gender, race, age, or nationality.

  When I studied with Nadia Boulanger, she was basically teaching central European art music. That was her tradition, and that was what she taught. She was not interested in teaching anything else, for the very good reason that that was really what she knew. When I finally left her, I possessed an important skill and the tools with which to adapt music to different needs. I learned to move with ease from one tradition to another. Now, when I’m conceptualizing music on my own, it’s easier for me to leave Western music behind. Piano was my instrument—that’s where I started—but I had come to see that it was just a small part of the world of music. It wasn’t the whole world.

  SHORTLY AFTER KOYAANISQATSI HAD BEEN COMPOSED and had come to be known, Paul Schrader, the director and screenwriter, called me and we began talking about his film Mishima, about the life and work of the controversial Japanese author Yukio Mishima. This would become the first studio film on which I worked. Paul was filming in Tokyo in November 1983, when I was there performing with the ensemble, and I was able to be on location a number of times. Besides being on the set, I spoke extensively with Paul about his ideas for his film. I also met Eiko Ishioko, whose visual imagery for the film was so beautiful and who would work with me on the Doris Lessing opera Making of the Representative for Planet 8.

  The music had an important role to play in the film. The score I composed was not meant as a musical decoration of the film. It was, in fact, used to help articulate the film’s structure. Of course this approach grew directly out of working with Godfrey, and in that way, and particularly with Mishima, I think that integrating the composition of image and music into a unified endeavor can provide the most powerful tool for a filmmaker.

  With Mishima, Paul had a clear idea. There are three threads that run throughout the film. The first is the last day in Mishima’s life, which begins with him putting on his uniform to lead his private army in the attempted takeover of an army base. This last day is distilled into music—a snare drum and strings—that provides a military aspect. This march will become a march to his death.

  The second thread is stories from Mishima’s life: the young boy, the young man. We see him becoming a writer, becoming famous. The music of a string quartet is generally considered to have an introspective quality, and here it is used for these autobiographical passages. Schrader chose to shoot these sections in black and white, further separating them from the fictional aspects of the film taken from his novels—The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Kyoko’s House, Runaway Horses. This, the third thread of the film, contains the most lyrical and sumptuous music.

  At the penultimate moment of the film, Mishima, looking out from the cockpit of a plane, receives a profound revelation about his work and his life. The string quartet music now takes on the orchestral colors of the music associated with the novels, and leads him to the confrontation that is about to take place at the army base. His life and the stories he has told have merged and will culminate in his seppuku (suicide).

  There may be no writer more autobiographical than Yukio Mishima. Everything he wrote was about himself. The film Mishima is a portrait of the writer Mishima, and the music of Mishima is meant to add a further dimension to the film. With the Mishima material I used my total immersion strategy, reading every book in English I could find. I was very impressed with his writing. It was passionate, it was modern. In his life he had arrived at a transcendent experience that was at the core of what motivated him to be a writer. For all the writers I personally know, writing is a way of accommodating themselves to the world, of making the world a bearable place in which to live. Mishima became a writer in order to make the world understandable to himself.

  That’s very different from having an agenda, let’s say, an existentialist agenda that has an ideological or theoretical basis. Mishima’s solution derives from his experience, and in that way, he resembles Céline and Genet, writers who were not political writers but who were working out of the crisis of being alive, the crisis of experience itself. This applies to the whole postmodern generation, of which we have to say we are a part. That which authenticates our work is the genuineness and spontaneity of our intuitions. In this way, the activity of writing makes the world meaningful. It has no political status, and I would say it has no real social status. That’s precisely the way it is transcendent—it goes beyond the visible world into a world in which being alive makes sense. For the postmodernists, writing becomes the remedy. One of Allen Ginsberg’s T-shirts said, “Well, while I’m here, I’ll do the work. And what’s the work? To ease the pain of living. Everything else, drunken dumbshow.” That’s at the core of the postmodernist movement, and even now, nearly two decades after Allen’s death, we respond to his poems immediately. They need no explanation.

  WHEN I HEARD IN THE MID-1990S that Marty Scorsese was making a film, Kundun, about the life of the Dalai Lama, I was immediately interested. I had previously had some contact with Marty in the 1980s through Thelma Schoonmaker, his longtime film editor. She was married to the filmmaker Michael Powell, director of The Red Shoes, who wanted to make a film out of my opera The Fall of the House of Usher, based on the Edgar Allan Poe story. Michael was quite an elderly gentleman by that time and there was some concern among the producers that the film might get started and he might not be able to finish it. Thelma asked Marty whether he would be the back-up director, in case something happened. We met, and we talked about it, and he said he was willing to make that commitment. The idea then was that there would be a contract that would involve Michael Powell, and the back-up director would be Marty, so that the people in Finland who were producing the film would be guaranteed a completed film. But before we finished the agreement with Marty, Michael Powell passed away, and the project never materialized. But it had put Marty and me in touch with one another, so that later I was able to call Marty and he took the call.

  “Marty, I’d like to talk with you about this film that Melissa Mathison has been working on with you.”

  “Come on over and let’s talk about it.”

  When I saw him, I told him that I knew Melissa, the screenwriter for Kundun, through Tibet House, where we were both on the board of directors, and that I had had a long association with the Tibetan community. He must have known my music, because we had spoken before about the Usher project. He never told me he had heard it, but I don’t think he would have agreed to be the stand-in for Michael Powell if he hadn’t known something about the music. Also, by that time Mishima had been done, and Paul Schrader was one of Marty’s favorite writers, having written the screenplays for Taxi Driver and Raging Bull.

  I was passionate about wanting to work on the film, and Marty accepted my request. At that meeting I proposed that I do “advance” work on the score—actually sending him music while he was shooting. At first he was a little puzzled and hesitant. Industry films normally do not tolerate innovations of this (or scarcely any) kind. Finally I think he just succumbed to my enthusiasm and acquiesced, and it became one of the few times I was able to follow my preferred working methods with a film made by a major studio and with a well-known and highly r
egarded director.

  When Marty was in Morocco filming Kundun, I was sending him tapes of music for the scenes he was shooting. I knew that Thelma was there making a rough “assemblage” of the film, staying perhaps no more than a day or two behind Marty’s shooting schedule. At one point, he found that I had fallen behind on my film composing, and he urgently needed the music for reel 5, the “Escape to India” reel of the film. I had a few days off from my concert tour in Europe, so I flew to New York and quickly sketched out the music for the scene. The score I was composing included contributions from Tibetan musicians, some of them known by the actors, who themselves were Tibetan men and women whom I knew from my work with the Tibetan community in New York City. They were able to hear the music that would eventually become the sound track of the film, and I’m told that the music was very warmly received.

  Working with Marty, I became interested in everything he did. I would go to the editing room in New York almost every day that he and Thelma were working. Marty is famous for his knowledge of film history, and, for almost every scene that we worked on, he could elucidate something about that scene from the history of filmmaking. When I looked at his script, I found he had put in the camera positions when he was writing. He knew how he was going to shoot it, and he knew how it was going to look. He talked a lot about his own films and how his working methods were developed for them.

  At one point, he had been talking about Taxi Driver for a while. I didn’t say anything—I just was listening, which I normally did—but something must have piqued his interest.

  “Wait a second, have you seen Taxi Driver?”

  “No, I didn’t see Taxi Driver.”

  “You didn’t see Taxi Driver?”

  “Marty, I was a taxi driver. During the time when you were making that film, I was out driving a hundred miles a night in New York City. On my night off, the last thing I was going to do was see a movie called Taxi Driver.”

  “Oh my god, we’ve got to fix that. I’m going to have a special screening for you.”

  Before the special screening took place, I happened to be in an airplane on one of my music tours and, by luck, they were showing Taxi Driver and I watched it.

  The first thing I thought was Good lord, it’s exactly like the people I knew who worked at Dover Garage!

  SCOTT RUDIN, THE PRODUCER of The Hours, asked me if I was interested in writing the score for that film. I already knew that there had been two other composers but I didn’t know who they were. Scott asked me if I wanted to see the movie with the scores he had rejected, and I said, “No, I don’t want to hear it. Give me your rough cut without any music in it at all and let me write the music.”

  The Hours, based on the novel by Michael Cunningham, is the story of three women living in three different eras: the writer Virginia Woolf, played by Nicole Kidman, who is seen during her life in the 1920s and then at her suicide in 1941; a 1950s Los Angeles housewife and mother played by Julianne Moore; and a woman played by Meryl Streep who is living in New York in 2001 and is preparing a party for her friend who has AIDS.

  I saw right away that the issue with the movie was that the three stories were so distinct from each other that, like a centrifugal force, they pulled you away from the center and made it difficult to keep your attention on the movie as a whole. It seemed to me that the music had to perform a kind of structural alchemy. Somehow, it had to articulate the unity of the film.

  The job of the music was to tie the stories together. What was needed were three recurring musical ideas—an A theme, a B theme, and a C theme. The suicide of Virginia Woolf, for example, was always the A theme. That was always her music. The B theme was always the music from Los Angeles, and the C theme was always New York. The movie progresses A, B, C, and all six reels follow that plan. Basically, it was as if a rope had been threaded straight through the film. It was a conceptual idea, and it could be realized by the music. It worked, but it wasn’t so easy to accomplish.

  I don’t think there was really any other way to do it. I never heard the other scores, so I don’t know what the previous two composers had tried. Being the third composer on a film is very common in Hollywood. Often two composers, or sometimes three or four, will get fired and other people are brought in, until the studio decides it’s the right music. Fortunately for me, and for the film, I think, Scott Rudin saw right away what I was doing. He liked it and he stuck with it.

  Scott is extremely intense and very opinionated, but, as abrasive as he could be in terms of presenting his ideas, the films in fact got better because of him. That was true on every level.

  Very often when I worked with him he would say, “That’s wonderful. I loved the music. But there’s one little thing that bothers me.”

  As soon as he said that, I knew I had to rewrite the whole thing.

  He would press his point, but he began from a point of appreciation, which I liked. He always listened to me, and I always got a fair hearing for what I wanted to do. I wasn’t commanded to do something, I was persuaded to his point of view and, most of the time, his ideas were right. They prevailed not because he was the producer, but because his ideas improved the movie. And that was not only in the music, it was also in terms of the editing, storytelling, and acting.

  After The Hours, I did Notes on a Scandal with Scott, another film on which he was, again, a very hands-on producer. But unlike a lot of producers who are hands-on, he knew something about film. He knew what made films work.

  At one point, I asked him, “Scott, why don’t you just be the director? You do everything anyway.”

  “Oh no, no, no,” he replied.

  He insisted he could never be a director, and yet he often seemed to usurp that position. In any case, as the producer he had a very decisive role in the two films I made with him. I liked the films and I liked working with him.

  I HAVE NOW MADE CLOSE TO THIRTY SOUNDTRACKS. There were others that I enjoyed working on, though perhaps not as well-known. David Gordon Green’s Undertow, Neil Burger’s The Illusionist, and Taking Lives, directed by D. J. Caruso, are among them. My all-time favorite is perhaps the least known of these—Christopher Hampton’s The Secret Agent. I thought Hampton’s adaptation as well as his taut, no-nonsense direction totally captured the obsessive and sinister aura of the Joseph Conrad novel.

  Another favorite is Errol Morris, with whom I worked on three films—The Thin Blue Line, A Brief History of Time, and The Fog of War. I found Errol to be one of the most brilliant directors, extremely funny at times and terribly eccentric. Like Godfrey in many ways, Errol has redefined the relationship of the viewer to the subject matter, and as I feel about Godfrey, I’m always ready to work with him. The experience, though confusing and sometimes trying, is always rewarding.

  The director I found the most surprising was Woody Allen. I worked with him on Cassandra’s Dream, and he completely left me alone to place the music in the film. He welcomed my suggestions as to the temper of the music as well. In fact, that is very much the way I work with my opera, theater, and dance collaborators. My sense is that if I believe in their ability and talent, the best thing I can do is get out of the way and let them do their work. Woody seems to work in much the same way.

  THOUGH FILM SCORING HAS NOT BEEN THE MAIN THING I was doing for the last thirty years, I have generally found it interesting. The writers, directors, actors, and a few of the producers can be enormously talented. Even though the marketplace mentality is always present, it is still possible to make films of real quality and integrity. That they are mainly “industry” films does not mean they are necessarily made in Hollywood.

  I have often compared film scoring to opera composing. I’ve done a fair amount of both. More than other performance practice, films combine elements of image, music, movement, and text. Skills acquired in one easily translate to the other. I will add to these reflections about film work just a few points:

  The first is quite simple. If the movie or opera is actually telling a story,
I’ve learned to leave it alone or, at least, not get in the way. If there is no story, I will not impose one, but instead allow another of the performance elements to assume a larger role.

  Second, I’ve learned how to “underscore” the voice—either spoken or sung—by letting the actor or singer assume the central role at that moment. Sometimes that requires the instrumental parts to play a secondary or tertiary part. However, it’s also quite possible to double up the vocal parts with solo or accompanying instruments and, in this way, to actually extend the range and depth of the sung or spoken parts.

  The third point is the hardest to describe. It has to do with that imaginary “distance” I mentioned before that exists between the spectator-listener and the film or opera. I’ve found that the music can absolutely define that space. In the end, it is a psychological space. The closer the spectator-listener is to the “image”—sound or visual—the less choice he has in shaping the experience for himself. When the music allows for a distance to exist between the spectator-listener and the image, then she will automatically bring her own interpretation to the work. The spectator travels the distance to the image herself, and by moving to the image, she has now made it her own. That is what John Cage meant when he said that the audience “completes” the music. Modulating that distance precisely is an acquirable skill. Talent, experience, and some innate sensitivity will still be needed.

  CANDY JERNIGAN

  DURING THE TEN YEARS WE WERE TOGETHER, CANDY AND I ALWAYS felt that something was going to separate us. We didn’t know what it would be, but we both knew that somehow we would become separated.

  We would speculate about it. “Maybe you’ll be on a boat or plane some place, or I’ll be, and the boat will disappear, or the plane will crash,” we would say. We thought it would be a kind of incidental tragedy of modern life, like a car accident. This feeling bothered us, and we talked about it not frequently but not infrequently either. It was something that would come up, like a shadow that we lived with.