Words Without Music: A Memoir (43 page)

OPERA

A
FTER
EINSTEIN, SATYAGRAHA
AND
AKHNATEN
FOLLOWED FAIRLY
quickly, forming a trilogy of “portrait operas” of men whose lives and work changed the world. Einstein, the man of science, Gandhi, the man of politics, and Akhnaten, the man of religion, transformed the world they lived in not by force of arms, but through the power of ideas.

The commission for
Satyagraha
came in 1978 from Willi Hoffman, director of De Doelen, a concert venue in Rotterdam. Hans de Roo, as the head of Netherlands Opera in Amsterdam, was the actual producer. It wasn’t a lot of money, but by the late 1970s taxi driving had become so dangerous that I knew I would have to quit as soon as possible. The success of
Einstein
had led to the Dutch commission, so in a sense I was saved, quite literally, by opera. In any event, it was the end of my day jobs, which had begun when I arrived in New York in 1957 and followed me even during my Paris years in the mid-1960s. All in all, not so bad. I even consider myself lucky.

Around the same time that the commission for
Satyagraha
came, another event took place that would eventually establish the basis for some future financial security. Barbara Rose was an old friend whom I had known from the summer of 1954 in Paris. She and I met again when I arrived in New York in 1958, and then, almost twenty years later, in 1977, she was the writer on
North Star
, a film about Mark di Suvero and his work, for which I provided a score. Now she was married and wanted me to meet her husband, Jerry Leiber.

I liked Jerry right away. He was from Baltimore and even had gone to the same high school as myself.

“So, you’re from Baltimore?” Jerry asked. “That’s good. And your name is Glass?”

“Right.”

“Wait a second. Was your mother the librarian at City?”

“That’s right.”

“I knew your mother.”

“Really?”

“That’s right. I knew her real well. She was the librarian and she saved my life every day I was there.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I was this little Jewish guy and there was a gang waiting for me outside of the school—waiting to beat the crap out of me as soon as I was out of the building at the end of the day. Your mother, Mrs. Glass, let me hang out in the library for an hour. I would work for her, putting books back on the shelves.”

“That’s right. She always had kids helping her in the library after school.”

“You know what? I’m going to do something for you that’s going to change your life!”

“How’s that?”

“I’m doing this for you for what your mother did for me. Come over to my office tomorrow. I’m in the Brill Building.”

Everyone knew where the Brill Building was, on Broadway at Forty-Ninth Street. It was home to music publishers, record producers, and recording studios. Also everyone, at least in the music world, knew who Jerry Leiber was. He and Mike Stoller were “Leiber and Stoller,” the songwriting team who were responsible for countless hits of the fifties, sixties, and seventies. They had written “Hound Dog,” “Jailhouse Rock,” “Stand by Me,” “On Broadway,” and on and on, Jerry writing the lyrics and Stoller the music. They had been two of the principal songwriters for Elvis Presley, the Coasters, and the Drifters, among others.

I was at the Brill Building the next morning and, once in the Leiber and Stoller office, walked down a long hallway lined end to end with framed gold records. It was most impressive. Jerry was waiting for me in his office, his feet up on his desk, relaxed and at home. There was a chair opposite him, a small spinet piano against one wall, and a couch with a coffee table. Jerry was four years older than me, still had a Baltimore accent, and was very energetic. He was the only person I knew who lived a life in Tin Pan Alley—the world where popular music was written, singers worked with writers, and songs were made famous.

After our hellos, he pointed to a side door and said, “Take a look over there.” I walked over and opened the door. To my surprise I was looking into a large room with rows of desks, perhaps six rows and four desks deep. At each desk was a woman, occasionally a man, with a typewriter and wearing headphones.

“What do you think they’re doing?”

“I have no idea.”

“They’re finding money under stones. When Mike and I write a song, someone will often make it famous. When that happens, other singers will make their own version of the song, called a ‘cover.’ We’re the publishers and they have to pay us, that’s how it works. Now here’s what I want you to do. Go downtown to the county clerk’s office at 60 Centre Street in the basement and register your publishing company. Do you have a name for it?”

“Yeah, I’ll call it Dunvagen music. That’s the name of the place I go in Canada in the summertime.”

“Fine. You can get a DBA for almost nothing. It means ‘doing business as.’ Or you can register it with the State of New York for a few more dollars, then you have a fully professional company. I recommend that you do that.”

The next morning I went downtown and that’s exactly what I did. The registration fee was about two hundred dollars. I then registered myself and my company with ASCAP, a member-owned society that collects the rights money in the States and, through affiliates, in Europe.

When I was working on
Einstein
, I also met Harold Orenstein, who completed my education as a “publisher.” Not only did he help Bob and me make agreements about
Einstein
, he also began helping out with the opera and film work that came in during the years after. It was a slow beginning, but by the mid-1980s I already needed to rent an office and hire a couple of people to look after it. Harold had been a Broadway lawyer and producer for years and had been the attorney for some big Broadway composers and writers, including Frank Loesser, and he brought that perspective to the opera world for the first time, as far as I know. He expected, and fought for, all kinds of monetary concessions from opera houses that, until then, had only been given to Broadway shows. For example, when I began to write operas after
Einstein
, he made the opera houses pay for the cost of music preparation—copying and producing all the scores and parts. It was common, up until then, for opera composers to pay for it themselves out of their commissioning fees. That meant that usually they ended up with nothing.

I liked the publishing business and became very familiar with it over the years. At least once a month, I would meet Harold at the Russian Tea Room on Fifty-Seventh Street and hear his stories. I soon had to hire a real business person to run the company, but it was still my company, and though I was spending all my time as a composer and a performer, I tried to keep up with the publishing, too. Of course, Ornette had told me years ago, “Don’t forget, Philip, the music world and the music business are not the same.” I learned that he was absolutely right, but I really liked both and had no problem in being active in both of them, as far as time allowed.

SATYAGRAHA
AND THE SCORE FOR
Godfrey Reggio’s film
Koyaanisqatsi
, which was composed about the same time, in the late 1970s, were my first works in which social issues became the core subject. This had been a topic of discussion I had been having with composers throughout Europe and the United Kingdom for some time. Generally speaking, my colleagues abroad were very radical in their views. Mao’s
Little Red Book
was then very popular among European artists, and some of them were actually Maoists. I was astonished by this, because I couldn’t understand where it was coming from. It was unclear to me what their social activism was rooted in. In many cases, especially in the 1970s and ’80s, these same artists were supported directly or indirectly by their governments. This was certainly true in Holland and Germany, but also to a lesser degree in Italy and Spain. Scandinavia also seemed well disposed to take care of their artists.

For Americans, it was and remains an altogether different matter. We have known little or no public support for the arts. Our museums and opera houses have received institutional support, but that was about it. The American artists, apart from the famously political Living Theater, were hardly political at all. As a result, we had a most curious situation: in countries where the arts received government or public support, the artists took up very radical politics; at the same time in the United States, where public support barely existed at all, artists were more often nonpolitical. However, when I got involved with the opera treatment of Gandhi, I saw a deeper side that I could relate to completely.

I came to understand that I had a social responsibility, which I could not avoid, but I also had a personal responsibility, which I was entitled to. From the personal point of view, I could do an opera or a movie in which I could address such things. For me, the moment of authentication came with
Satyagraha
. I knew why I was writing it, I knew what it meant, and I knew why it was important. I was in my forties before I was able to express, in musical terms, ideas that belonged to the world of social change. When I was younger, I hadn’t taken on any kind of active role. But when I was older, I became involved with social issues and took part in charity concerts of all kinds, as well as working with the ACLU—just in the nick of time, I would say, because now there is a large part of our society that thinks that it is defending the principles of America whereas, in fact, it is destroying them.

Satyagraha—
a Sanskrit word that means “truth force”
—
was a thoroughly conceived piece. I had been on the trail for a good ten years, reading Gandhi and thinking about America in the 1960s, and how it related to South Africa in the 1890s, when Gandhi went there and began his nonviolent movement for social change. As I conceived the work, it became part of a continuous meditation that had been going on for almost a decade. I wanted to focus on Gandhi’s work in South Africa because I wanted to portray him when his ideas were new, when he was finding his own way. I had discovered that when he arrived in South Africa in 1893, wearing a pinstripe suit and a bowler hat, he had boarded the train with a first-class ticket, and they had thrown him off. He was profoundly shocked that a man of his education and his position could still be considered an inferior human being. This was a moment of revelation, of self-knowledge, where he said, “Oh! I’m not the person I thought I was, I’m the person they say I am, and what’s happening to me is not right.”

When Gandhi found himself in the dust, holding on to his first-class ticket after being bodily ejected, his whole purpose in going to South Africa became clear. He made a vow that night and immediately opened up law offices to organize a struggle against racial discrimination by Europeans against Indians. The opera spans the period from the moment he arrives in South Africa up to the moment he leaves. During those twenty years, he invented and developed the tools of social change through nonviolence. There is a misnomer that is sometimes used: passive resistance. It’s not that at all. It’s active resistance. It’s just not
violent
resistance. For Gandhi, it starts with being tossed off the train and realizing that in fact he did not have the rights of the white population.

Each of the three acts of the opera is presided over by an historical figure: Act 1, Leo Tolstoy; Act 2, Rabindranath Tagore; and Act 3, Martin Luther King Jr. The culture of India emphasizes the system of the “three times” (past, present, and future), so I was actually building into the piece much of what I had learned since I had begun to study yoga in 1957. The past is represented by Tolstoy, the older man who was in correspondence with Gandhi and referred to him as “our brother in the Transvaal.” The present is presided over by Gandhi’s contemporary, the Indian poet and Nobel Literature Laureate Tagore, who accompanied him on marches and fasts. The future is represented by Martin Luther King Jr., who adopted Gandhi’s methods of nonviolence in the civil rights struggle in the United States.

The opera is a series of tableaux in which I was looking for events that articulated very clearly moments in Gandhi’s life. I wanted it to seem as if you were looking through an album of family photographs of your own life: you in kindergarten; your high school graduation; your first job; you with your children. I wasn’t interested in telling a narrative story—the events did not have to be in sequence—but there was an attempt to make them seem to have a causal relationship. The words sung by the singers are taken from the
Bhagavad Gita
, the Hindu sacred text that is part of the epic
Mahabharata
.

The first scene of
Satyagraha
reenacts the major debate of the
Bhagavad Gita—The Song of the Lord
—which takes place between Prince Arjuna, who is about to go into battle on the Kuru Field of Justice, and Lord Krishna, who appears as one of the combatants. The subject of the debate is whether the proper conduct of a virtuous man should be based on action or non-action. In principle, according to the scriptures, both action and non-action can lead to liberation. However, in the debate, the course of action is considered superior because it creates positive karma.
The Song of the Lord
is one of the great pieces of religious writing of humanity. Not only was Gandhi a devotee of the
Bhagavad Gita
, he knew it by heart. It is my belief that when Gandhi found himself embattled with the South African government, the words of the
Gita
could easily have come into his mind. So, in answer to the question, “Do I take action or non-action?” he decided to take action.