Words Without Music: A Memoir (40 page)

I thought that was a pretty good deal, but some people, even “downtown” people, called it selling out. I called it “selling in,” because the money went into my work. I thought this selling-out idea was a bizarre notion. It seemed to me that people who didn’t have to sell out, or in, must have had rich parents. Or they taught music, which I also wasn’t willing or able to do. Otherwise, how did they do it? When someone said they didn’t do commercial work, I just thought these were people who somehow already had money.

I never had any trouble with the idea of selling music. When my brother was twelve and I was eleven, we were already working for Ben selling records. From an early age, I saw that a customer would hand him five dollars and he would hand them a record. I saw that exchange innumerable times: money—music, music—money. It seemed normal to me. Oh, that’s how the world works, I thought. It never occurred to me that there was anything wrong with it.

EINSTEIN ON THE BEACH

S
UE WEIL, WHOM I KNEW FROM HER DAYS AS THE DIRECTOR OF
the Performing Arts Program at Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center, invited me to go with her one evening in 1973 to see a new work at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where Harvey Lichtenstein was starting to bring big, ambitious pieces. This was before BAM’s groundbreaking Next Wave Festival had begun, and there was real speculation about whether people from Manhattan would make the long trek out to Brooklyn at all.

Sue would later become director of the dance program at the National Endowment for the Arts, and after that she worked with the great Russian dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov at the White Oak Dance Project, but this night we were going to see Bob Wilson’s
The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin
. Bob had already been making a stir in the theater world, but this would be the first of his works I had seen. It was to be an all-night event, starting at about seven p.m. and running almost twelve hours. I was already very interested in “extended time” in concert pieces—
Music with Changing Parts
had been a work that had the potential of lasting for hours, which in some cases it actually did, and
Music in Twelve Parts
, in a complete performance, could not be performed in fewer than four and a half hours—but Bob’s work was more than an extension of “normal” theater duration. It was intensely visual and completely caught up with movement of all kinds.

To see it for the first time was an unexpected and exhilarating experience. If Stalin was on stage, I missed him, though from the outset I hadn’t expected to see him. With dawn breaking over the city the next morning, we, the audience, followed Bob back to the Byrd Hoffman rehearsal space on Spring Street in Manhattan. There had not been a full house that night, with perhaps two hundred people in attendance, and it looked like a fair number of the audience was at this post-performance party.

I met Bob that morning and we got along from the first moment. On my side, I already had a strong premonition that there was work for us waiting to be done. We agreed to have lunch at a little restaurant on MacDougal Street. We had no real agenda for that meeting or for the next few that followed. We were just getting to know each other, our backgrounds, mutual friendships, and interests.

Bob is a tall, handsome man who is always gentle in his speech and kind in his attention. When you talk to him, he leans in and listens to you and he looks at you. Sometimes, if he’s not looking at you, he might be drawing at the same time. It’s very common to be speaking with Bob and, before you know it, he’s doing some drawing that may have something to do with what you’re saying, or it may not. Overall, though, I was drawn to him by the quality of his attention.

We began meeting regularly, every Thursday for a year, whenever we were both in the city. What I saw from the beginning was that Bob understood how events worked in time. It was very clear that we were working in parallel ways. We both had very strong connections to the dance world, Bob through choreographers Merce Cunningham, George Balanchine, and Jerome Robbins, and I also through Merce as well as John Cage. Bob knew the artists that I knew, so we were clearly living in the same world and had been nourished by the same generation of people that had preceded us.

There were other similarities. Neither Bob nor I were from New York. He was from Waco, Texas, and I was from Baltimore. We were people who had come to New York to find a world of high culture and the kind of stimulating people who belonged to it. We’d both had our training in New York, Bob at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and I at Juilliard, and both of us were working in the theater. I was the musical version of what he was doing, and he was the theater version of what I was doing.

Soon after these initial meetings, we began to talk about a music-theater work that we would undertake together. It had no name at first, but that soon came. One early suggestion from Bob was to work with Hitler as a theme—Bob had already done Stalin, so this was not a far-fetched idea. My memories of World War II were more vivid than Bob’s, I being four years older, so I had countered with Gandhi, which meant little to Bob. He came back with Einstein, to which I readily agreed.

As a boy I had been caught up in the Einstein craze that followed the end of World War II. I had read many books about him and even one (for laymen) written by Einstein himself. Science had always been a boyhood hobby of mine in a general way and I had developed a taste—though not such a sophisticated one—for mathematics and astronomy. I had even been part of an astronomy club at a very young age—ten or eleven—where the members built telescopes, including grinding a concave six-inch mirror for a reflecting telescope. From that age and until now, music and science have been my great loves. I see scientists as visionaries, as poets. In having composed operas about Kepler, Galileo, and Einstein—three outstanding scientists—I’ve probably written more operas about science than any other composer. I’ve also written music for a film about Stephen Hawking, and collaborated on a theater piece with the famous string theorist Brian Greene.

What interests me is how similar these visionaries’ way of seeing is to that of an artist. Einstein clearly visualized his work. In one of his books on relativity, trying to explain it to people, he wrote that he imagined himself sitting on a beam of light, and the beam of light was traveling through the universe at 186,000 miles per second. What he saw was himself sitting still and the world flashing by him at a really high speed. His conclusion was that all he had to do—as if it were a minor matter—was to invent the mathematics to describe what he had seen.

What I have to do when I compose is not that different. All I have to do after I have the vision is to find the language of music to describe what I have heard, which can take a certain amount of time. I’ve been working in the language of music all my life, and it’s within that language that I’ve learned how ideas can unfold.

I was immediately thrilled with our Einstein project. The original title, which I have on the cover of a book of drawings that Bob gave me, was
Einstein on the Beach on Wall Street
. Somewhere along the way the “on Wall Street” was dropped, but neither Bob nor I remember when. “On the Beach” referred to the Nevil Shute novel from the 1950s, which takes place in Australia, when the world has experienced a World War III nuclear apocalypse. In the penultimate scene of
Einstein on the Beach
, there is a spaceship and a huge explosion that Bob wanted, and I wrote a piece of music to go with it. We were aiming for a big finale that was apocalyptic, which, by the way, is followed immediately by a love story written by Mr. Samuel Johnson, the actor who played a judge and also the bus driver at the end. Bob juxtaposed the most horrible thing you could think about, the annihilation that happens with a nuclear holocaust, with love—the cure, you could say, for the problems of humanity.

Of course, from the outset it was clear that Bob would be the image maker. When we talked he always had paper and pencil. His thinking automatically became pictorial. On my side, I was good at structure. We both were comfortable in a “time-binding” medium that takes place on a stage, but Bob liked to feel time in his body, whereas I like to measure and map it. I’ve seen Bob countless times at auditions ask a dancer or actor to just walk across the stage. Bob would gaze intently at them during this exercise. I came to understand that he could see something that I would never see. He could “see” them moving through time and space. It would only take a few minutes and he would know, decisively, whether he could work with that person.

My abilities worked in different ways. For example, once Bob had decided on his three “visual” themes—the Train/Spaceship; the Trial; and two Dances in a field—he handed them to me and asked me to organize them into four acts. With barely a pause I wrote down the structure of the work. Using the letters
A
,
B
, and
C
for the three themes, it would follow this pattern: A-B for Act 1, C-A for Act 2, B-C for Act 3, and A-B-C for Act 4. Bob looked at the scheme and immediately added five knee plays—short, connecting pieces that came at the beginning and the end and in between each of the four acts. Oddly, but precisely, Bob had indicated the same “interstices” that, a few years later, Beckett would point out as the places for which I would then compose music in the production of
Company
, which Fred Neumann, working with Beckett, would direct and produce at the Public Theater. I don’t remember ever mentioning this coincidence to Bob. At this point, after maybe six months of verbal exchanges, we didn’t speak much about
Einstein
. We were beginning to work very closely and things began to fall into place.

Time would be the common material with which we would be working. The first thing we did was talk about lengths of time. Each act would take about one hour. The knee plays would be six minutes each, as they were little interludes (the knee being a connecting section between two larger parts). There would be a chorus throughout; a dance company for the dance sections; two judges—an old man and a young boy—for the trials; two additional performers for the knee plays; and a violinist (Einstein) who would be sitting on a small platform midway between the stage and the orchestra pit, where my ensemble, with Michael Riesman conducting, would be set. It had taken quite a while to get to this point, I would guess more than half a year.

During that first year, 1974, when the blueprint of the work was evolving, Bob brought Christopher Knowles to lunch. I grew to like him very much, but he took some getting used to. He was an autistic boy whose education Bob had taken on with the encouragement and blessings of the Knowles family. At our first lunch meeting, I barely understood anything he said. He could as easily, in those days, take a plate of food and try to balance it on his head as to eat from it. However, in the end, with two notable exceptions, he became the writer of the texts we hear spoken throughout
Einstein
. One exception is the love story mentioned above that ends the opera, and the equally brilliant text that our judge, Mr. Johnson, delivers at the end of the trial scene. The other speech was Lucinda Childs’s “supermarket” speech, which she delivers during the second trial scene. Lucinda became one of the two women in the knee plays, as well as the choreographer for her “diagonal” dance in Act 1, scene 1 (the “Train”). Sheryl Sutton became the second woman in the knee plays—the only actor from Bob’s previous work who was in
Einstein
. Paul Mann, at the age of nine, was the little boy judge, and Bob Brown, fully costumed and wigged, was our violinist playing Einstein. The chorus of twelve came from open call auditions and, besides singing, eight of them also had to be the dancers in Dances 1 and 2. That was it. It was conceived and the cast settled by the spring of 1975. I started composing the music to Bob’s drawings and my “time outline” that summer in Cape Breton. When I came back to New York after Labor Day in September, I had already made a good beginning.

After the completion of
Music in Twelve Parts
I had begun right away with the series
Another Look at Harmony, Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4
, which was meant as a straightforward announcement that I was beginning the second “phase” of this extended cycle of work wherein the remaining element—harmony—would finally be addressed.
Einstein on the Beach
, if you look at it scene by scene, is a very clear presentation of a melodic-rhythmic cycle interacting with a harmonic progression—first one chord, then two, then three, and so on as the piece progresses. The spaceship at the end represents the culmination of this “unified field” of harmony, melody, and rhythm, and itself ends with a cascade of chromatic descending and ascending scales by way of a final gesture.

Another Look at Harmony, Parts 1 and 2
became the source for two important thematic units of the work I was doing for
Einstein on the Beach
. Using them, I was able to compose all the music for “Train 1” (that would be our A section) and “Dance 1” (that would be our C section). Through writing
Einstein
—but beginning with writing
Another Look at Harmony
—I continued the integration of rhythmic and harmonic and cyclic music into one coherent system.

I was looking at a reconciliation of harmonic movement and rhythmic cycles. It can be heard right after “Knee Play 1,” in the “Train” music in Act 1. It became, in my mind, a unified theory, and the whole writing of
Einstein
was dedicated to that end.

In classical music, there are allegros and prestos in all kinds of pieces, but they were usually presented as contrast to other parts. There would be slow music, then fast music. I have done that myself many times, in string quartets. But with
Einstein
, the idea of an unstoppable energy was all there was. There was no need for a slow movement. Even in the scenes like the two “Trials,” the push of the music remains, slowed down somewhat, but if you listen, there’s a forward push that’s always there. Same with the “Bed” in Act 4.