When Philip Glass was 15, his father, who owned a record store in Baltimore, put him in charge of buying classical albums. Glass was then a precocious freshman at the University of Chicago and taking the first steps on the path to becoming a composer. When he learned of a new recording of the complete Schoenberg string quartets played by the Juilliard String Quartet, he ordered four copies. Aghast, his father asked if he was trying to put him out of business. To teach his son a lesson, he told him to put the recordings of these atonal chamber works on the shelves with the more mainstream classical records and report back when the last copy had been sold. That took seven years. The lesson Glass learned? "I can sell anything if I have enough time."
That is one of many revealing anecdotes in Words Without Music, Glass' warm, low-key and often delightful new memoir. Glass, one of the most influential and prolific composers of operas, symphonies, chamber works and film scores, is now 78. Enough time has passed for him to sell his own distinct musical language, developed through a blending of Western and Indian traditions, in which repeated musical cells form patterns to hypnotic effect. To many listeners it remains perplexing and even infuriating, but the influence of Glass' music, called minimalist despite his protests, is pervasive in all genres of music.
The book traces the development of that music, but above all it's a portrait of a composer who rose to prominence almost entirely outside of the usual institutions. He collaborated with innovators in theatre, dance and film and founded his own ensemble, record labels and music publishing companies. A succession of jobs — steel work, furniture moving, plumbing, construction — kept him afloat. He drove cabs from his mid-30s right up to the moment, in 1978, when he received a commission from the Netherlands Opera to write what would become the mesmerising Gandhi tribute Satyagraha. By then he was 41 and his groundbreaking opera Einstein On The Beach, developed with the director Robert Wilson, had played to sold-out audiences at the Metropolitan Opera.
That work ethic was a legacy from his parents, especially his father, Ben, who fixed cars and radios in addition to selling records. He also taught his son to play mental chess, an exercise that, Glass writes, develops the ability to visualise with "terrific clarity". The warmth with which Glass writes about his family contrasts with the relative reticence — even opacity — with which he glosses over his personal relationships. (He has been married four times.)
Chicago and then Juilliard, where he studied, were stimulating training grounds, but the breakthrough came in Paris, where he lived from 1964 to 1966 and met two teachers — angels, he calls them — who were to make a lasting impact: Nadia Boulanger, the exacting and terrifying doyenne of classical harmony, analysis and counterpoint; and Ravi Shankar, the Indian sitarist who awakened Glass to the expressive potential of rhythm.
"One taught through love and the other through fear," Glass recalls.
In Paris, Glass also dove headfirst into the experimental theatre scene around Samuel Beckett. Writing scores for plays stripped of traditional narrative required a new kind of music. Back in New York City in the late 1960s, Glass borrowed a trick from rock 'n' roll, using amplification to deepen what he calls the grunginess of sound.
"You could get high from it, and people did," he writes of Music In Similar Motion, a propulsive stream of eighth notes that pummels the listener for more than 10 minutes. "Listening to this music was like standing in a very strong, cold wind and feeling the hail and the sleet and the snow pounding your flesh."
Though the music had the "feeling of a force of nature", it was not meant to be consumed mindlessly.
"If you listened to the structure," Glass writes, "you could hear the phrases changing constantly, even though the stream of music was so constant that it might feel like it wasn't changing."
Not everyone got it.
To many it was repetitive nonsense, and even offensive in its apparent simplicity. At a concert in Amsterdam in the 70s that was preceded by rowdy protests, a man stormed the stage and lunged for Glass' keyboard. "Acting on pure instinct" — honed, perhaps, at school in Baltimore, where he beat up neighbourhood toughs who made fun of him for playing the flute — Glass "belted him across the jaw", sending him staggering off the stage.
At times Words Without Music reads the way Glass' compositions sound at their best: propulsive, with a surreptitious emotional undertow. Like his music, his prose is made up of simple components — plain, honest sentences that work their magic cumulatively. He's at his best writing about process and craft: His depiction of downtown loft living in New York in the 50s offers, among other things, a how-to on the correct method of feeding a potbelly stove. Truth, he seems to suggest, can be found in the how and the what. Little wonder that Glass, who is from a secular Jewish family sympathetic to Quaker teachings, is drawn to Eastern spiritual traditions that require the same rigorous daily practice as music.
Glass is not nearly as interesting as a travel writer. His account of an overland trip from Turkey to India in 1966 by way of Iran and Afghanistan has about as much colour as a row of pinheads sticking out of a map.
But he conveys vividly the railway journey that took him to Chicago as a college-bound 15-year-old with "no lights, no reading, nothing to do but make friends with the sounds of the night train". He was fascinated by the rhythmic patterns the wheels made on the track, although, he says, he did not yet have the tools that would allow him to hear "apparent chaos" as "an unending array of shifting beats and patterns". But here the "world of music — its language, beauty, and mystery — was already urging itself on me," he writes. "Night trains can make those things happen." © 2015 New York Times News Service
