Words Without Music: A Memoir (7 page)

“Mr. Tristano, my name is Philip Glass,” I managed to say. “I’m a young composer. I’ve come to New York to study, and I know your work. Is there any chance I can study with you?”

“Do you play jazz?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Do you play the piano?”

“A little. I came here, really, to study at Juilliard, but I love your music and I wanted to be in touch with you.”

“Well,” he said, “thank you for the call, but I don’t know that there’s anything I can do for you.”

He was very kind, almost gentle. He wished me luck.

Now fifty years later, listening to Tristano’s music again, I found what I was looking for. Two tracks: the first, “Line Up” and the second “East Thirty-Second Street.” I listened to them and there it was. No, the notes weren’t the same. Most listeners would probably not have heard what I did. But the energy, the
feel
, and, I would say, the
intention
of the music was completely and accurately captured in the “Train.” It doesn’t sound like him, but it shares the idea of propulsion, the self-confidence, and the drive. There’s an athleticism to it, a nonchalance, an “I don’t care if you listen to it or not—here it is.”

These were Tristano’s one-hand improvisations and were, for me, his most impressive achievements. He would record, slowly, a steady flow of sixteenth notes, then afterward speed up the tapes. That gave the music a tremendous buoyancy and an electric energy that was completely unique. Once you hear these driving piano lines, you know who is playing. I don’t know that Tristano ever became very well-known. He was well-known to me because I found his records and I admired him. I never heard him play live—I don’t think many people did. He might have been known as a teacher among some jazz players, and he certainly was a teacher to me. He died in 1978, but he remains an icon in the jazz world, though still largely unknown. However, he was without a doubt a master.

When I look back on it, I was also very influenced by the raw power of bebop music. Above all, I was interested in this kind of drive—a life force that was in the music itself. And that’s what I heard in the music of John Coltrane and Bud Powell as well as Tristano. That’s what I heard with Jackie McLean—it goes on and on. Charlie Parker, same thing. I’m talking about a flow of energy that seemed unstoppable, a force of nature.

And that’s where I knew I wanted to be. For the music I wrote in the late 1960s—in particular, “Music in Fifths,” “Music in Contrary Motion,” “Music in Similar Motion,” and
Music in Twelve Parts
—this flow of energy had to be an important source. Clearly, the inspiration for one of the major themes of
Einstein
came from that piano work of Tristano’s. I sometimes hear about work described in terms of “originality,” or “breakthrough,” but my personal experience is quite different. For me music has always been about lineage. The past is reinvented and becomes the future. But the lineage is everything.

In this vein, I recall something Moondog, the blind poet and street musician, told me. He was highly eccentric and very talented, and in the early 1970s he lived at my home on West Twenty-Third Street for a year.

“Philip,” he said, “I am following in the footsteps of Beethoven and Bach. But really, they were such giants, and their footsteps were so far apart, that it is as if I am leaping after them.”

IT WAS DURING MY FIRST YEAR IN CHICAGO
that I seriously began my piano practice. I had befriended Marcus Raskin, a fellow student a few years older than myself who was very bright and had been a young pianist at Juilliard. He had given up the idea of a music career and was then at the College aiming for a career in law. (As it turned out, he was later a founding member of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington.) When I met him he was still quite a good player and knew, besides the classical repertoire, modern music as well. He played the Alban Berg Piano Sonata, op. 1, and helped acquaint me with that part of the new music world, the school of Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg. In those days, we called it twelve-tone music. Later, it was called dodecaphonic music, but twelve-tone was probably more accurate because it followed the music theories of Schoenberg, where you had to repeat each of the twelve tones before using a particular tone again, the idea being to create a kind of equality of tonal center so that no melody could belong to one key.

I asked Marcus for help with the piano, and he became my piano teacher. With him I started on a real piano technique, and he was serious about my progress. As I mentioned, the university wasn’t much help in developing my music interests. There was a small music department run by a musicologist named Grosvenor Cooper, whom I met several times and who was encouraging to a point, but there was nothing there of interest for me. In those days, musicologists studied the baroque period and the romantic period, but they were neither equipped to teach nor interested in teaching composition.

My love of the piano began at an age so early I can’t even recall exactly when. As a child, I was often at the family baby grand when I wasn’t playing the flute. When I came home from school, I’d run straight to the piano. But my real piano technique began with Marcus, who instructed me on scales and exercises and urged me to play Bach. Later, when I was studying in Paris with Boulanger, Bach’s keyboard music was my syllabus, but in the years 1952 and 1953 Marcus gave me a good start, for which I will always be grateful.

The curriculum of the College was a great adventure, as were my classmates. Though most of them were a bit older, I didn’t notice the age difference much, nor was I treated very differently. It wasn’t long before I had learned to drink coffee and even smoked a bit. At the University of Chicago, social life didn’t revolve around fraternities. In fact, I barely noticed that they were there at all. The social hubs for me were Harper Library, the main coffee shop on the Quadrangles, various theaters (including the already mentioned Hyde Park movie theater), and some of the local restaurants.

The coffee shop was open from morning until early evening, and people were there constantly between classes. I always went to see if my friends were there. My dormitory was a few blocks away, but I didn’t go back to it, since you had to walk across the Midway to get there. The Midway was two blocks wide, with named streets running through it, and could be dangerous at night. You’d see students walking to school with baseball bats because they were afraid. Nothing ever happened to me, but I learned to be careful.

I didn’t study in my room that much—mostly I studied in the library because that’s where the girls were. Going out with girls maybe a bit older than me was quite informal. A “date” at the library was common. There were a handful of younger people my age—it was a policy of the school to admit “early entrants”: fifteen-year-olds, or even fourteen-year-olds who had passed the exam—and the older students, rather than ignore us, would take us out to eat and talk with us like older brothers and sisters.

Naturally, it was through the older kids that I was initiated into the mysteries of sex. It was very friendly and it was all arranged. When my friends discovered I had never had sex with a woman, a young woman I knew and whom I liked quite well miraculously missed her last bus home and had to spend the night on the South Side of Chicago. By this time, I had my own apartment with another student. She asked whether she could spend the night at my house and one thing led to another. I learned later that it was all completely orchestrated by other people—everybody knew it was going to happen. My older friends considered it important. Though I didn’t particularly look at it that way, I liked the fact that it had happened, and that it wasn’t with a person my own age who likely would have been just as ignorant. It was tender, and it was sweet, and there was no embarrassment. I can’t think of a better way it could have happened.

In Chicago in the early 1950s, the people I knew did not do drugs. In fact, there were scarcely any drugs around, not even marijuana. Maybe there was a little of what was called Benzedrine—there was one fellow who was supposed to be taking drugs, and it turned out that he was taking speed. But everyone I knew thought he was completely degenerate.

The people in my crowd were interested in politics, not drugs. In the fall of 1952, during my freshman year, we were inspired by Adlai Stevenson, who was running for president against Dwight Eisenhower. One must remember that these were the McCarthy years, and the University of Chicago was considered to be a hotbed of communism. It is true that we studied Marx and Engels, but it was in the same way that we studied any theory of economics. The very fact that it was taught at all would have made it seem to others that we were all Communists, but, in fact, very few people had radical politics of that kind. Our idea of radical politics was Stevenson, who lost the election to Eisenhower, which was considered, in my day at Chicago, a huge tragedy. We thought it was the end of the world.

In retrospect, those years, far from being all work and no play, seem to have been mostly play and very little work at all. Besides the classes, which I mainly found entertaining, there were all sorts of diversions, especially concerts at Mandel Hall, the small, cozy concert hall on the Quadrangles. There were regular chamber music concerts there—the Budapest String Quartet, for instance, but you could also hear Big Bill Broonzy, Odetta, and a whole raft of fifties folksingers. It must seem that I was just having a lot of fun and, truthfully, that’s just about the way it was. I would say that the rhythm of my life was then, as it is today, not just active but quite intense. I had acquired, in those Chicago years, the habit of a 24/7 schedule—meaning I didn’t recognize holidays or weekends—and I suppose it suited me well then, as it does now.

As an undergraduate, I made regular visits to Baltimore during Christmas and Easter. My parents and I also had a Sunday phone call scheduled every week. In those days we thought a five-minute phone call—long distance to Baltimore—very expensive, even though it was actually half price because it was Sunday. When I got home that first Christmas, my parents asked me if I had had trouble making friends, because the other students were older. “Absolutely not,” I told them. In fact, it seemed to be easy to make friends. The University of Chicago was a very gregarious place.

Besides our weekly phone call, Ida wrote me a letter every week. Often it would be barely a page long, with hardly any family news at all, just whatever she was doing that day. Some thirty-five years later, when my own daughter, Juliet, was away at Reed College, I did exactly the same thing. I had learned from Ida that the content of the letter really didn’t matter at all. It was the fact of the letter itself and its regularity that bound us together.

WHEN I FIRST BEGAN COMPOSING MUSIC
during my freshman year, I was hardly prepared for the task that would become the focus of my life. I had already been playing music for years and was well acquainted with practicing and performing, starting with my lessons at the Peabody Conservatory, where, at the age of eight, I was told I was the youngest student to have been enrolled there. In school I had played in amateur musicals and in bands and orchestras, as well as in a marching band, where I was also the leader of a fife and drum corps. When I was ten, I had played with a church orchestra that performed Bach masses and cantatas. Coming from a Jewish family, I remember that I was actually terrified to be playing in a church. I don’t know what I was afraid of—perhaps it was simply that the ambience of the church seemed so unfamiliar. It’s probably a good thing I got over my fears at that time, because in my years as a performer I’ve played in churches all over the world countless times, and even once was married in one.

My reason for beginning to compose at all was very simple. I had begun to ponder the question “Where does music come from?” I couldn’t find the answer in books or from musician friends, and perhaps it was an irrelevant question to begin with. However, that didn’t stop me looking for the answer. I thought then, in my freshman year, that if I began composing music myself, I would somehow find the answer. I never did find the answer, though over the next six decades I found that the question needed to be changed from time to time. Finally, many years later, I arrived at what seems now as a reasonable answer to a reformulated question. But, first, I need to go over “the beginning.”

From my days in the record store I knew something about modern music, but that was mainly about Schoenberg and his school. On reflection, even though Schoenberg’s music was no longer “new” (that music would have been new when my grandfather was still a young man), it was quite a good place to begin. The only person I knew who had hands-on experience with this music was my piano teacher, Marcus, and he was enthusiastic about it. So I went to Harper Library and, sitting at one of the long tables, plunged into the scores of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern.

At the time, there were only a handful of recordings to help me. The Webern Opus 21 orchestra music had been recorded on Dial Records, and I also was able to find a recording of Berg’s
Lyrische
Suite, a string quartet. I remember that I found some Schoenberg piano pieces, which I could manage on the piano, but at a very reduced tempo. If I could find a recording of the music as well as the score, I could compare the score to what I was hearing, so that helped a little bit. Just to add to my difficulties, I had been urged by one of my friends to listen to Charles Ives, the early-twentieth-century American composer. For that purpose I checked the
Concord
Sonata out of the library. I could barely play any part of the Ives, but I took an immediate liking to the music. Ives’s work was full of popular melodies. He didn’t mind if his pieces had tunes in them—that was not foreign to his practice at all. His music was polytonal and it could be dissonant and, at the same time, it could also be very beautiful. Dissonance and beauty are, of course, not actually very different from each other.

Berg, the Austrian composer who had been a student of Schoenberg’s, was my favorite. I became very familiar with his music, which had a more romantic feel and much more of an emotional sweep. It was beautiful music, and not as strict as Schoenberg (Webern was even more strict). Most of this music did not have a strong emotional effect on me. It was very easy for me to set it aside, but I was interested in it because there was a method of composition, which anyone can use if you can count to twelve.