Words Without Music

by Philip Glass

  When a composer is asked “Is this the right note, or is it not the right note?” or if a painter or a dancer is asked “Did you mean that?” the artist will try to go back to the moment of creation to find out.

  “If I can remember what I did,” he might say, “I can tell you the answer.”

  The problem I have—one shared by almost everybody—is that in order to write that piece of music in the first place, or to write almost anything of quality that is both abstract and moving at the same time, the artist has to arrive at new strategies of seeing—or in my case, even to hear clearly what I think I have heard. It can be a very slippery business: “Am I hearing a triad? Am I hearing a tritone? Am I hearing a fifth?” To finally know what I’m actually hearing takes an extraordinary function of attention. In other words, the artist has to gather up his ordinary ability to see or hear, and he has to see better, farther, and more clearly than he ever did before. With this we are now moving out of the ordinary perception into the extraordinary perception that the artist has when he is writing. In order to do that, what we do routinely is to gather together our entire attention.

  Weight lifters, the ones who lift the five-hundred-pound weights, sometimes stand in front of the barbell for thirty seconds, or a minute, or even a minute and a half. When they are finally in the right frame of mind, they execute the clean and jerk—they pick the barbell up and then throw it up above their heads. They are able to do this because of their passage from their usual ordinary attention to the extraordinary gathering of attention that is required to accomplish something that is unbelievable.

  In order to do that, a sacrifice has to be made, as Cocteau, speaking through Death/the Princess, says in Orphée. In fact, something has to be given up. What is given up is the last thing left that we are holding on to: the function of attention we use when watching ourselves.

  In the ordinary world, we see ourselves essentially all the time—walking down the street, looking at ourselves in the mirror, sitting in the subway and seeing the reflection of ourselves in the window. This function of seeing ourselves is a form of attention. It’s like the trapped miner who is trying to get out of the mine. He’ll do anything he can to break through. In the same way, in order to break through that moment of frustration—to grasp the abstract and bring it into our own mind—what we have left to sacrifice is that last aspect of attention, the ability to watch ourselves.

  The reason I know this is that I often have a great deal of trouble remembering what I was thinking when I wrote a piece. What I do is to take all my sketches and number them, like an archivist, or almost like a scientist, so that I can look into my own past and find out what I was thinking.

  Although these notes provide me with evidence of a thought, they don’t, however, provide me with the thought itself. Sometimes a player will say to me, “Is this an A or an A flat?” and I’ll say to him, “I don’t know.”

  “How can you not know? You wrote it.”

  Well, that’s the point. I wrote it, but I wasn’t there. The “I” that was watching wasn’t there. The witness of my life at that moment had been sacrificed. The witness had to go, because I needed every increment of attention that I could muster in order to visualize the music. I believe that what happens at that moment is that I’ve lost awareness of myself. That awareness is now part of the attention and with that attention I can continue the work.

  “But what was it like when you wrote Satyagraha?” someone might ask.

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you were there, weren’t you?”

  “Are you sure?”

  Because I’m not sure that I am there at that moment. The ordinary witness has been lost—the artist Philip has robbed the daily Philip of his ability to see himself. That’s very clearly what happens when people say “I wrote it in a dream,” or “I don’t know where the music came from.” They’ll say all kinds of things: “It must have come from God,” or “It must have come from a past life,” or whatever. All they’re really saying is, “I don’t remember how I did it,” and they may make up an outside source. But the real source is not any of those things. It’s a process that the artist has learned. He has tricked himself into gaining that extra attention that he needed to do the work.

  There was a teacher named Krishnamurti, born in India in 1895, whom I wasn’t particularly close to, but who had a number of ideas I liked. Krishnamurti, who lectured all over the world and authored many books, including The First and Last Freedom, before his death in 1986, always talked about the moment of the present being the moment of creativity. He tried to press on you that if you really understood that creativity was opening up to you at every single moment of time, the experience of that would be the real moment of awareness. I never really understood it very well, and yet I felt that it was a very powerful idea. What he was talking about, as far as I could tell, was a truly spontaneous experience of living. He wasn’t my teacher—I heard him speak once and I read some of his books—but what was interesting about what Krishnamurti said was that it was about a spontaneous unfolding of life. There was nothing routine about it, there was nothing repeated about it: it was continuously new.

  When you have one foot in this world and one foot in the other world, the foot in the other world is the foot that takes you into the world of clarity and of power. The problem with recall is that when I return to the world of the witness, I’m not sure if I’m remembering correctly what I wrote, because I’m not using the same tools to remember as I used to write. The world of the witness is less powerful than the world of the writer, because the function of writing will eventually rob the witness of his energy so that the writer will be able to conceptualize the “art” work.

  When I’m making a sketch, I’m hearing something, but I don’t know exactly what it is. A lot of writing is the effort made in trying to hear. The question for me always is “Is that what I’m hearing?” I’ve heard so much music in my life that it’s now easy for me to recall it. I can remember Beethoven’s Ninth, Bach’s and Vivaldi’s concertos—they’re all available to me. Outside of my memory, they’re written in books, they’re in recordings. I can hear them whenever I want to. But when composing, this new music doesn’t have the benefit of having had a prior existence of any kind at all. A particular piece has zero existence until the moment of its creation. Therefore, the question comes back to “Can I describe what I heard?”

  I’ve had dreams where I dreamed music and saw it as having width, length, breadth, color: a visual object. Once I was having a dream about a piece of music, and I came to a modulation, and what I saw was a door on a hinge. It was a perfect image of modulation. You walked through a door and into another place—that’s what a modulation does. What I did in the dream was to create a shorthand to represent the modulation by seeing it visually. It offered me an alternative way of thinking of modulation—my idea of modulation was enhanced to some degree by this image of the hinge found in a dream.

  As a composer, I think we develop techniques in a kind of desperation to find a way of making something new. My sense of what happens next is “Where is the paddle that’s big enough and strong enough to power me through that moment?”

  Perhaps I’ve wandered into a discussion that’s too abstract, but the truth is that, though these ways of thinking about music may seem abstract as I write them, I think about such things all the time.

  CLOSING

  OPENINGS AND CLOSINGS, BEGINNINGS AND ENDINGS. EVERYthing in between passes as quickly as the blink of an eye. An eternity precedes the opening and another, if not the same, follows the closing. Somehow everything that lies in between (the events of this book included) seems for a moment more vivid. What is real to us becomes forgotten, and what we don’t understand will be forgotten, too.

  So I save this closing not for thoughts but for images, memories which, by writing them down, are no longer mine alone.

  I had met Allen Ginsberg many times after I returned from Paris and India in 1967. He,
of course, was close to William Burroughs whom I knew from the Chappaqua film work when I was assisting Ravi Shankar. We had shared the stage quite a few times at music-poetry events and at the Nova Convention in 1979 in New York City, a celebration of Burroughs’s work. But we didn’t do any work together until 1988. It then happened that a theater group that emerged from the Vietnam Veterans Against the War was organizing a fund-raising effort that had, as its major event, an evening at the Shubert Theater on Broadway. Tom Bird from the theater company called me and asked if I would participate. I agreed but really had no idea what I would do.

  A few days later I was in the St. Mark’s Bookshop and Allen happened to be there, in the poetry section. I was inspired to ask him if he would perform at the event. He immediately accepted. I then asked if we could perform together, using a poem of his and new music which I would compose. In a flash he picked up a copy of his Collected Poems off the shelf, deftly opened to the section “The Fall of America” and in a few seconds his fingers pointed to the lines, “I’m an old man now” from “Wichita Vortex Sutra.” I went home and, starting with that line, in a few days had composed the music, stopping after the line “Stop for tea and gas.” We only had a few weeks before the Shubert performance and we rehearsed at my house, where I had the piano. This, our first collaboration, came together quickly. After that, we began to see each other often, and since we lived not far from each other in the East Village, our regular visits were no problem.

  The first performance went very well and we were beginning to think about a longer work. I suggested an evening-length event for my own ensemble with a small vocal group. He agreed and we took up the challenge of selecting the poems from his Collected Poems—itself a colossal body of work. For the next half year, we had frequent sessions in which he read poems to me that he wanted to consider for our “song” opera. By then we were talking about staging, design, and décor. Allen was very excited by the prospect, as was I. While he didn’t read every poem in his Collected Poems, he read a lot of them, and we also considered other poems written after its compilation. Allen suggested Hydrogen Jukebox as the title. It was a phrase from Howl and worked perfectly for our project. The work, when completed, was a collection of twenty songs for an ensemble of six singers, including “Father Death Blues,” and “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” which I left as a spoken piece and which Allen and I performed together when he could manage to join us on the tour.

  We began to meet often in Allen’s apartment, along with Jerome Sirlin, the designer, and Ann Carlson, our director. The six singers eventually were set as six archetypal American characters—a waitress, a policewoman, a businessman, a priest, a mechanic, and a cheerleader. The themes of the poems reflected a good range of Allen’s favorite topics, including the antiwar movement, the sexual revolution, drugs, Eastern philosophy, and environmental issues. Jerome’s designs were colorful, powerful, and sometimes almost stark in their directness.

  I had already been presenting some solo concerts in the 1980s, but in the 1990s I became serious about piano playing and began devoting some regular practicing and composing time to it. In a way it grew out of my performing with Allen, because after Hydrogen Jukebox had run its course, we began presenting music-poetry concerts. We did a fair amount of work together and that meant new music for some of the poems that had not been part of Hydrogen Jukebox. “Magic Psalm” was one such poem, as were “Footnote to Howl” and “On Cremation of Chögyam Trungpa, Vidyadhara.” I also composed new piano solos for these concerts, which included Allen’s solo readings as well as poems with which he accompanied himself on a small Indian harmonium. He considered Bob Dylan his teacher in this area of performance. He said he learned everything he knew about music composition from Dylan.

  My Tibetan friend and teacher, Gelek Rimpoche, who lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan, had founded a center there called Jewel Heart, which was devoted to traditional instruction in Tibetan Buddhism. When he asked me to do a fund-raising concert in 1989, I invited Allen to come with me and help out at the benefit. I knew Allen had an interest in the subject and had had a famous teacher, Chögyam Trungpa, who had died two years before. When Allen met Gelek Rimpoche soon after, they immediately became close friends. From then on, he was at all the teaching sessions that would happen in New York and traveled frequently to Ann Arbor. During those years, Gelek Rimpoche’s Jewel Heart organized two retreats a year—one in the winter and one in the summer—and Allen and I went to both every year. There were usually three of us sharing a room, the third person being either Stokes Howell, another writer friend of mine, or Kathy Laritz, Gelek Rimpoche’s assistant at that time. During the retreats I often saw Allen wake up at night, turn on a flashlight, and begin writing poetry.

  One summer Allen and his lifelong friend Peter Orlovsky came to visit me in Cape Breton. I remember many evenings after dinner when Allen would recite poetry. There was no TV near us and the radio offered very little of interest, but Allen knew volumes of poetry by heart. He could recite hours of poetry by Shakespeare, Blake, and Tennyson, to list just a few. He told me that his father, Louis Ginsberg, himself a poet of some recognition, had gotten him and his brother Eugene as children to memorize poetry. At times there were readings when both Allen and his brother read poems, a performance I found both moving and beautiful.

  Allen was outspoken and honest to a fault up to the very end of his life. From time to time I witnessed his encounters with people who knew him only by name, but had no idea what a warm and spontaneous person he truly was. I remember a dinner in the 1990s at the house of Hank Luce, the publisher of Time and Fortune magazines. Hank was a big loud guy and part of the Luces—a powerhouse family in New York and throughout the country. Hank didn’t really know Allen, but at dinner began poking around conversationally, clearly looking for trouble. But Allen, at that moment, was not interested in getting riled up. He answered Hank amiably enough. Finally Hank said, “I hear you write pornographic poetry?”

  “I do.”

  “Let me hear some.”

  At that point Allen let loose with some real hair-curling, pornographic poetry. Not only was it pornographic, it was really vulgar, too. I could see that Hank was deeply impressed. Finally, when it looked as if Allen might be slowing down, he said, “Well, well, well . . . that certainly is pornographic.”

  After that they fell into a lively and very friendly conversation. In fact, Hank and Allen had a very good time together.

  During the last ten years of his life, Allen didn’t take care of himself very well. He was diagnosed with diabetes and heart disease. He saw a specialist in Boston for his heart and another in New York for the diabetes, but I didn’t notice him paying any special attention to his diet. Toward the end he spent more time in hospitals, but his general good spirits were not dampened. A year before he died, he sold his archives to Columbia University, where he had gone to college. He paid his taxes, gave his archivist some bonus money, and bought a beautiful loft that ran through the whole block from Thirteenth to Fourteenth Street between First Avenue and Avenue A. He was dying, and several times he talked to me about it. These were difficult conversations for me. I had lost Candy only six years before and I wasn’t ready to lose him. He did tell me during that year that he had always been afraid of dying, but now for the first time, the fear had left him.

  Early in April 1997, Allen was at Beth Israel Hospital for some sort of checkup. I was supposed to have lunch with him on the coming Wednesday, but I stopped by the hospital on Monday to visit him. While I was there, and just before I was to leave, he said to me, “Do you want to read my last poem?”

  “No.”

  “C’mon I want you to read it.”

  “No, Allen. I don’t want to read your last poem.”

  “Here, read it.”

  It wasn’t long. Not even a whole page long. I don’t remember it or even reading it at all. I think I just stared at the page.

  “Allen, you’re supposed to be home tomorrow evening, so I’ll see
you on Wednesday for lunch as planned.”

  He got out of bed and walked me to the door of his room. I didn’t know what he was up to, but I didn’t like it. As I was about to leave he turned me around and kissed me on the cheek.

  “I am so happy I knew you,” he said.

  At that point I was actually getting angry.

  “Stop it, Allen. I’ll see you on Wednesday.” And I ran down the hall to the elevator.

  He did in fact go home the next day and he spent that evening calling up friends and saying good-bye. I heard about a number of those calls later in the week, when we were all together at his house. That same Tuesday night he had a stroke and went immediately into a coma. Gelek Rimpoche sent six or seven monks to stay at my house and he came, too.

  Allen’s loft was filling up with friends. His bed was placed almost in the center of the room near his Buddhist altar. He was still alive, but in a coma. On Wednesday night, the monks slept in a row on my parlor room floor. By Thursday they were all sitting near Allen’s bed, reciting Buddhist texts. Gelek Rimpoche told me that he had been working with Allen for some time, preparing him for his last hours. I knew some of the texts, but only in English. I followed along in English anyway. It was the best I could do. More and more people were coming but mostly people who knew him well. Patti Smith was there. Bob Thurman, the head of Tibet House, too. And, of course, Peter Orlovsky. I had to leave on Friday for a solo concert nearby. When I got back on Saturday, Allen had already stopped breathing, though he was still there in his body. Gelek and the monks began the final recitations, and a few hours later, he was gone.

  To say that Allen “passed on” or “died,” which of course he definitely had, does not capture for me the emptiness that his leaving has left behind. Still, as I’m writing about him now, years after he is gone, I think of him with great pleasure. And to be truthful, even now I do not feel he is very far away.