Words Without Music: A Memoir (41 page)

Part of our music rehearsals were given over to teaching and memorizing the music by our chorus of twelve singers (six women and six men.) Only a few of them could actually read music, so learning the music and memorizing it happened at the same time. Here I borrowed a teaching method from Alla Rakha, and used it with our singers with great success. The method was to take a three- or four-note phrase and repeat it with the whole chorus until they had it by heart. Then I began with a second phrase, which they also had to memorize. Next, phrases 1 and 2 were performed together, which now had become fairly easy for them to do. We practiced this first combined phrase until it was solid, and then added a third phrase following the same system, ending up with a combination of 1, 2, and 3. This was the basis upon which more extended music could be memorized—for example, in the Knee Plays, which were six minutes long.

For variety, I used two kinds of lyrics. One was based on numbers— 1, 2, 3, 4, and so on, up to 8. This outlined the rhythm and became another mnemonic device. The second was based on the solfège system of “do-re-mi-fa-so-la-si-do,” which are the names of the notes they were singing and which therefore aided in memorizing the melody.

One morning Bob came by to hear the chorus and was listening to one of the Knee Plays. By then the singers were doing quite well with the numbers and the solfège. At a moment when we were taking a break, Bob asked, “Are those the words they will be singing during the performance?”

That hadn’t been my intention at all, but with only the slightest pause I replied, “Yes.” And that is how the lyrics for the choral music in
Einstein
came to be
.

The music for the five Knee Plays was actually composed last. They are all based on the same music, the seeds of which were in the other parts of the opera. By extracting the salient points and using them for the Knee Plays, they, and the larger segments of
Einstein
, were organically combined.

THE FINANCIAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE STRUCTURE
for the
Einstein
production began to take shape during the winter of 1975–76. I was working with Performing Artservices, a not-for-profit organization formed by Mimi Johnson, Jane Yockel, and Margaret Wood, which was dedicated to the work of emerging performance art and had a solid background by that time in managing music tours with my ensemble. They were in turn linked to Benedict Pesle’s company, Arts Services, our European office in Paris. Bob had an experienced team with the Byrd Hoffman Foundation, which had helped him build and produce his early body of work, already a substantial undertaking. But between us, we still didn’t have real experience in touring a large music-theater production.

Einstein
should have had a traveling opera company, which—especially for work like this, which would be highly progressive and avant-garde—as yet didn’t really exist in the theater world. There were large-scale models operating at that time with Peter Brook, the Poor Theater of Grotowski, and the Living Theater. But what Bob and I were doing in music-theater was deeply ambitious and the earlier models would not be of much help. When Peter Brook did something like his stage version of
The Mahabarata
, what was missing was a driving musical idea that would carry you through the piece. Something I have known from the beginning of my work in theater is that music is the unifying force that will take the viewer-spectator from the start through to the end, whether in opera, theater, dance, or film. This force doesn’t come from images, movement, or words. If you watch television and put on different records, with different music, the same images will look different. Now, try it the other way around. Keep the music the same and change the channels. The integrity of the energy remains in the music and changing the image doesn’t alter that fact. People in the theater very rarely understand that, but Bob Wilson does. Both of us had a keen appreciation of the power of music to lift up a work. Any good theater piece, even one from Shakespeare or Beckett that wouldn’t seem to need much lifting, would benefit from a good score.

Bob and I were two authors representing either side of the music-theater equation. We were mature enough—both of us in our mid- to late thirties—to have developed independently our own personal language. As I think about it now, it was that fact—that each of us had years of experience perfecting an easily recognizable and highly personal “style”—that set
Einstein
apart from other ambitious work. I had a well-trained team of technicians who came with me and he had the same from the theater side. I believe it was this equality that each of us brought to
Einstein
that allowed us to move forward together so comfortably. We had tremendous confidence in ourselves and in each other—a strong statement to be sure, but not in any way overstated.

The trickiest part, and it is always true of new performance work, was finding the money to make the work—that is rehearsing, building the décor and costumes and developing the lighting, and, in the case of
Einstein
, the sound design. It’s traditionally one of those chicken-and-egg problems. The work cannot earn money to finally pay for itself (which is always a big question) until the piece is built, and you can’t build the piece with money that has not yet been earned. This is where the “angels” and backers come in. Though we didn’t have anything like a Broadway show with commercial potential, we effectively had the same problem. However, we did have friends with the means to help, including various members of the de Menil family. Christophe and François de Menil stepped forward to help. Then there were credit cards that we used shamelessly to buy plane tickets and whatever else that “plastic” could buy. The financial side was a little shaky, but good enough for us to get started.

I was still in the cab-driving phase of my day jobs, and from then until the spring of 1976, when we began rehearsing, I was finishing the music, mainly working at night after my nine-hour driving stint was complete. But when the rehearsals began in earnest in March 1976, in Bob’s studio on Spring Street, I put the day jobs aside. We divided the day into three rehearsal periods of three hours each. We would begin with a vocal rehearsal at nine a.m. After the noon break, we had a dance rehearsal, and after a midafternoon break we had a staging rehearsal. I was the rehearsal pianist all through the day, and also the vocal coach for the morning rehearsal. I could see, therefore, how the music was working throughout. I could, as well, help the chorus who, in many cases, were also the dancers, form a solid basis for memorizing the music—not at all an easy task. Andy de Groat was, in this first production, the choreographer for the big dance pieces, and Lucinda Childs made all her own solo dances herself. Bob Brown also began playing some of the violin parts at this stage. Bob Wilson and I were asking a lot of our company. In later years we had a separate corps de ballet and chorus, which made it far easier. By then, Lucinda was responsible for all the dance choreography. The texts by Christopher, Mr. Johnson, and Lucinda would appear during these early staging rehearsals in the late afternoon. These texts have remained through all subsequent productions.

We put the whole thing together in about a two-month period and had a run-through performance at the Video Exchange Theater in Westbeth, a building fronting the Hudson River in the West Village that had been set aside for artist housing and rehearsals. It was done as a partially staged work but without any of the sets and drops that Bob had designed. Not all the music was ready for the ensemble, but there was enough for that early run-through. It was really our first glimpse of the work. It was rough in one way, but the
Einstein
energy was already beginning to surface, even in this partial version.

It was a “friends only” showing with our support team and a few older colleagues as well. Virgil Thomson, then the only American composer of opera whom Bob and I took seriously, was there, and our friendship began at that time. He had made a wonderful piece,
Four Saints in Three Acts
, with the texts of Gertrude Stein. Several generations before us, he had experimented with the idea that opera could once again become a popular art form, as it had been in the nineteenth century.
Four Saints in Three Acts
actually ran on Broadway, so Virgil knew something about the theater. Jerome Robbins, already a good friend and confidant of Bob’s, was there as well. Jerry, known to the general public from his choreography for
West Side Story
, was a major choreographer for the New York City Ballet, and as one of the elder statesmen of the dance world, he understood the theater, and was very interested in what Bob did. Eight years later, in 1984, Jerry would choreograph his ballet
Glass Pieces
for the New York City Ballet to music from my 1982 album
Glassworks
, as well as the opening funeral music from
Akhnaten
.

One important development was the commission for the work, from the French government. The monetary value was small, but the recognition for the work was very significant for us. This was 1976, our bicentennial year in the United States. Our National Endowment for the Arts and any number of private and public foundations were commissioning new works of all kinds and genres—literally hundreds upon hundreds of new music, poetry, film, and dance events for that year’s celebrations. I think Bob and I were too busy with the birth of
Einstein
to even notice what was going on, and in any case, neither he nor I had been contacted by any arts organization. I think we were too far below the radar for any official arts institution to notice what we were doing. That’s pretty much how arts funding on an institutional level works, and it was no surprise to us. But someone at Bob’s foundation did take notice and the Bicentennial Arts Commission was informed that
Einstein on the Beach
was the official gift from the French government to the United States of America in honor of its bicentennial. A few weeks later we received an American flag in the mail.

The head of the Festival d’Automne in Paris, Michel Guy, had come to a music rehearsal at Dickie Landry’s loft as early as 1973. Dickie, in a fit of design perversity, had painted the entire studio black. The only lights in the room were our music stand lights. The room was very dark and the music very loud and, for some reason, we liked it that way. We must have been rehearsing the last parts of
Music in Twelve Part
s that evening. I was told that someone from Paris would be there, but even so I was a bit surprised when a tall, elegantly dressed Frenchman emerged from the shadows at the end of the rehearsal.

“I am Michel Guy from Paris, and I will bring you to the Festival d’Automne this coming year,” he said.

“Sure thing, Michel,” I said, and I didn’t believe him for one second.

But that is exactly what he did. And when, soon after, he became the French Minister of Culture and learned that Bob and I were collaborating on
Einstein
, he jumped on it, securing the world premiere for the Avignon Festival, where he had also, until a few years before, been the director. I’m sure he was involved with the
Einstein
commission. He was always a man of independent thinking with a highly developed taste for new work. Josephine Markovits was his assistant at that time, and later, in 1992, she brought a revival of
Einstein
back to Paris.

Now we had a beginning date, July 25, 1976, in Avignon, and an ending date in Rotterdam. Ninon Karlweiss, our European agent, quickly put together the tour: Avignon, Paris, Venice, Belgrade, Hamburg, Brussels, and Rotterdam. All in all it would be about thirty-three performances in seven cities.

WE ARRIVED IN AVIGNON
two weeks before opening night. Between music rehearsals, staging rehearsals, and dance rehearsals, the company was working unbelievably hard. At the same time, the sets and drops had arrived from Italy where they had been fabricated and had to be loaded in. Then the lights had to be set and focused. That and miscellaneous technical details made for a short, intense work period. Bob had never teched the show before—coordinating the technical aspects of lighting and movement of scenery, movement of props. None of that had been tried out. Even the spacing of the dancers, who now had to fit into a stage that was much bigger than the stage on which we’d been rehearsing, had to be adjusted. Bob was still setting light cues the day before the premiere. And, in fact, the Philip Glass Ensemble had yet to play through the music with the singers or even the solo violin. All these things had to be taken into account, but I wasn’t worried. I was excited to be seeing the piece for the first time. Since I had been the rehearsal pianist, I hadn’t really been able to see Bob’s work until then.

In fact, we never had a proper dress rehearsal—opening night, July 25, was our first actual run without stops and fixes. It was only the second time that the performers had heard the ensemble playing with them, and we were not really sure how long the piece was. Typically, I played the “walk-in” prelude by myself at 6:20, at 6:30 the doors were open and at 7:00 “Knee Play 1” began. “Knee Play 5” would end at 11:00 p.m., so in the end it came to almost five hours long, counting the walk-in music. Over the thirty-three performances of the first tour, the overall time changed surprisingly little, never more than an overall difference of two or three minutes.

The excitement was so intense on the night of the piece that I feel I was probably outside of my body most of the evening. Neither the
Einstein
company, and certainly not the audience really knew what to expect. The five hours that it took went by like a dream. Everything happened as it was supposed to. We started with the first Knee Play and before I knew it, we were in the “Night Train” scene. Again, before I knew it, we were in the “Building” scene. And before I knew it once more, we were in the “Spaceship,” the next-to-last scene, with Bob on stage doing “the flashlight dance.” It passed breathtakingly and quickly.