Words Without Music: A Memoir (31 page)

With Indian classical music it’s different. There the melody and rhythm form the structural core and the harmony appears hardly at all, and that makes a huge difference. The music is organized in a specific way. The
tal
, or the rhythmic cycle, is the number of beats that make up a complete sequence. It provides the ground upon which the melodic material will be heard. The coincidence of the two elements, rhythm and melody, become the main concerns of the music. The raga will have a shape to it, in the same way that a harmonic sequence would have a shape, but within that shape the sitar player or the singer will be improvising melodies. One way to describe it would be this: There is the beginning and the end of the cycle in which the melody occurs. Within a fixed number of beats—it doesn’t really matter how many, as long as the number remains the same—the performer will find a phrase, which they call a “place.” The place, ideally, will be a moment the listener will easily recognize—for example, an ascending interval or a whole phrase within the melody itself. The place will always occur in a specific moment of the rhythmic cycle, and part of the pleasure of listening to the music is recognizing that place in the midst of the melodic improvisation.

Alla Rakha—plump and extremely pleasant—was in his late forties and he was a fabulous player. He had short but very strong fingers. He was a master of what is called “calculation.” When he played his rhythmic sequences, he could fit them into the
tal
any way he liked, and the ways of counting were endless. Within a
tal
of eighteen, there would be strings of notes, some with phrases of 3, some with phrases of 4, some with phrases of 2. In the
tal
, he always knew where he was. One of the things he liked to do was to tease the audience by pretending to come to the end of the
tal
, and then jump over the end to be in the middle of it again. He would do that four or five times, and when he finally came to the beginning of the
tal
again, when the melody came to that point and everything coincided on the first beat—which was called the
sam
—you could feel it in the audience. Together they would exhale an audible sigh of satisfaction. Part of the attraction of the music comes from this sort of playfulness.

My goal was to integrate all three elements—harmony, melody, and rhythm—into a single musical expression. The first part of this work began in 1967 and ended in 1974, a period of seven years. I knew that in New York I would have to take on the work of playing and presenting this new music myself. My first encounters with working musicians in Paris had convinced me that I would get no help from that side. In fact, they practically kicked me out of Paris. When they heard the music I’d written for the Beckett play, my French friends said, “
Mais ce n’est pas la musique.
” “But it’s not music.”

FIRST CONCERTS

I
N THE FALL OF 1967 I MET JONAS MEKAS, THE DIRECTOR OF THE FILM-
Makers’ Cinematheque, who later went on to found Anthology Film Archives. I asked Jonas right away whether I could present a concert at the Cinematheque on Wooster Street in SoHo. Jonas could not possibly have heard a note of my music, yet his reply was to smile and say, “Of course. When would you like to make your concert?”

We settled the date on the spot, arranging the concert for May 1968. I managed to book several more concerts with similar programs around the same time, including one at Queens College a month earlier, in April. Between moving furniture, composing, and rehearsing, I would be pretty busy for the next six months, and that turned out to be a good template for the next ten years. Once the Philip Glass Ensemble began working, there were always concerts to play, and my life got progressively more intense. The cycle of music, family, my personal disciplines, and especially the day jobs was pretty much the way it would be. There was no way of getting around the constant problem of money until that moment arrived by itself.

The first concert pieces came right out of my working experiences with Raviji and my private lessons with Alla Rakha. The music, to my ear, was strongly rhythmic and with a melodic dimension that was becoming more defined. These first New York compositions were solo pieces and duets, so I needed only a handful of players for my first New York City concerts. I called Dorothy Pixley-Rothschild, my old friend from Juilliard. As a student, Dorothy had played a violin concerto of mine and a couple of string quartets. She was very happy to hear from me.

“Do you have any new music?” she asked.

“You bet I do,” I replied, and she went for it right away.

A recent acquaintance, Jon Gibson, who was also a composer, joined us on saxophone and flute while I played keyboard and flute.

One of the early pieces, “How Now,” for solo piano, was pretty much like the string quartet I’d written in Paris, with six or eight “panels” of sound, each one an intensely repeated structure that then interfaced with the others. “Strung Out,” a violin solo for Dorothy, and
Gradus
, a solo saxophone piece for Jon, were straightforward pieces based on repetition and change. I was working with a language that, in the beginning, was simple but because of the perspective I brought, it became surprisingly interesting. In pieces like “In Again Out Again,” “How Now,” and “Strung Out,” I was already using additive processes and subtractive processes in the course of my playing, but they were done more instinctively.

“Head On”—a trio for Dorothy on violin, myself on piano, and a cellist—was first played for a group of Dorothy’s friends at a party at her house. It was really obsessive music, seven minutes long, which began with the players playing different melodies. With each development of the piece, the differences started to become eliminated, so that by the time we came to the end, everyone was playing together. At the very end of the piece, there was a collision of all this music—that’s why it was called “Head On”—simplifying itself until it became a single melody.

Dorothy’s husband, Joel Rothschild, a very nice man, must have thought I was insane, because Dorothy would come home with music that probably sounded like the needle was stuck in the groove—that’s what people used to say. He loved his wife, and he loved music, but I think this pretty much tested his love of music. Still, he was always most interested and supportive. Dorothy was a first-class player who was already very well-known in the world of chamber music and would later become the concertmistress of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra at Lincoln Center. But she had this goofy friend—that was me—who wrote this weird music, which she continued to perform.

In composing these pieces, I made the musical language the center of the piece. By “language,” I mean the moment-to-moment decision made when a note of music is composed. To make that work, I had to find a music that would hold your attention. I began to use process instead of “story,” and the process was based on repetition and change. This made the language easier to understand, because the listener would have time to contemplate it at the same time as it was moving so quickly. It was a way of paying attention to the music, rather than to the story the music might be telling. In Steve Reich’s early pieces, he did this with “phasing,” and I did it with additive structure. In this case, when process replaced narrative, the technique of repetition became the basis of the language.

There is a psychology of listening involved in this. One of the most common misunderstandings of the music was that the music just repeated all the time. Actually, it never repeated all the time, for if it had, it would have been unlistenable. What made it listenable were precisely the changes. There was a composer who was describing my music to someone else, and he said, “Here’s what it is: if you take a C-major chord and just play it over and over again, that’s what Philip Glass does.”

Well, that’s exactly what I
don’t
do. He completely missed the point. In order to make it listenable, you had to change the face of the music—one-two, one-two-three—so that the ear could never be sure of what it was going to hear. If you look at “Music in Similar Motion” or any of the other earlier pieces, what is interesting about them is how they don’t repeat. To miss that point is like going to a play and falling asleep but waking up for the intermissions. You miss everything if all you hear is the intermissions. You’ve got to hear what the piece is actually doing, and unfortunately, at first, not everyone was able to do that.

Why could we hear something, while the people who screamed, “The needle is stuck!” could not? Because we were paying attention to the changes. The mechanics of perception and attention tied you to the flow of the music in a way that was compelling and that made the story irrelevant.

When you get to that level of attention, two things happen: one, the structure (form) and the content become identical; two, the listener experiences an emotional buoyancy. Once we let go of the narrative and allow ourselves to enter the flow of the music, the buoyancy that we experience is both addictive and attractive and attains a high emotional level.

MY MOTHER ARRIVED BY TRAIN
from Baltimore for my first concert at Queens College on April 13, 1968. During my travels to and inside India, I had barely been in touch with my family. Their reaction to my marriage to JoAnne had been surprising. I had never expected such a complete rejection. When I arrived in New York, I had called my sister and brother, so Ida and Ben knew through them that I had returned. My father and I were still not speaking, but my mother was in contact. She wasn’t able to have me come to her home, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t talk to me or see me. The rejection had come from Ben, not Ida, but it turned out that she was the one who was being punished. She had learned about the concert at Queens College and said she was going to attend. I was surprised, but I met her at Penn Station and she rode out with us to Queens in a rented car. She didn’t say anything about the rift in our family, and neither did I.

I must have been a big worry to her and Ben. They weren’t happy about my marriage to JoAnne, and my choice of a vocation—composing music—had never made them happy either. Once I had left for Chicago in 1952, I never again needed their permission. I didn’t ask for it, and I never got it. We just left it at that.

Though the concert was beautifully played and very rewarding for Dorothy, Jon, and myself, the fact of the matter was that there were only six (six!) people in the audience—one being my mother, Ida Glass herself. I don’t believe that she, unlike my dad, had any ear for music, but she could count, and the number of heads that made up the extremely small audience must have seemed a disaster. It had been an afternoon concert, and since Ida had never planned on spending the night in New York, I accompanied her back to Penn Station. The only comment she made was that my hair was too long.

It would be over eight years before Ida came back to New York, in November 1976, when
Einstein on the Beach
was at the Metropolitan Opera. This time there was an audience of almost four thousand people—all the seats plus standing room were sold. She sat with Bob Wilson’s father in a box. I gather that they were both mystified, but at least it must have seemed real to her. I always wondered what she thought of such a great change of fortune in such a short time. From that moment on, she took my occupation very seriously, and she was concerned that I was handling the business part of it properly. By then, she knew I was always going to be a musician, but now her concern shifted over to the likelihood that supporting my family would always be a struggle.

Ida was a very interesting woman. She treated each of her children differently. She had always saved every nickel she could, and she used to buy AT&T stock with it. All her savings were in AT&T stock, and it turned out to be a very smart thing to do, as it was an investment that just got better and better. When she died, in 1983, her various assets were distributed among her children according to how she perceived what kind of help she could be. For example, she had bought the building that my brother’s business was in, and when she died, it turned out that he inherited the building. My sister received the securities Ida had accumulated. Her reasoning may have been something like, “A woman alone in the world will need the money.” My sister wasn’t alone, she’d been happily married to the same man for a long time, but Ida felt—and there were no grounds for this whatsoever—that she wanted Sheppie to have some cash just in case something happened to her family. In my case, Ida thought I would never have two nickels to rub together, that I would never have any money whatsoever, so she gave me half of her teacher’s pension, which was possible in the state of Maryland. When a teacher received her pension, she could take it at a lower rate, and then pass it along to one family member. This passed-along pension was good for one generation, and I’m still getting that money. She got half for her lifetime, and I got the other half for mine.

After her retirement and my father’s death, my mother moved to Florida with her sister Marcela and her husband, Uncle Henry the drummer. They had apartments in the same condominium complex. Ida had what we called hardening of the arteries (technically, atherosclerosis). The fat would build up, the flow of the blood would be constricted, and her limbs wouldn’t get enough blood. She had a series of amputations, and it was really quite awful. Basically they cut until there was nothing left to cut. I don’t know why anyone would think that’s a good idea, but that’s what was done then.

As her condition worsened, Marty, Sheppie, and I took turns going down to Florida. We worked it out so that there would always be someone there for a weekend, so every third weekend, I would be there for three or four days. This went on for a while. I remember once I was there with my brother and we were standing by the window. Ida’s bed was across the room. She was in a coma—she was in and out of a coma for all of the last few weeks, I would say—and I was talking to my brother, and I said, “Do you think she can hear us?”