Words Without Music: A Memoir (6 page)

So the study of science became the study of the history of science, and I began to understand what a scientific personality could be like. This early exposure would be reflected in
Galileo Galilei
, which I composed forty-five years later, in which his experiments become a dance piece—the balls and inclined planes are there. I found the biographical aspects of scientists intensely interesting, and the operas about Galileo, Kepler, and Einstein pay tribute to everything I learned about scientists and science that came out of those years.

The same primary-source method was carried out in social science, history, and philosophy. Learning American history meant reading the Federalist Papers and other late-eighteenth-century essays by the men who wrote the Constitution. Of course, humanities meant theater and literature from ancient to modern. Poetry, same thing. The effect on me was to cultivate and understand in a firsthand way the lineage of culture. The men and women who created the stepping-stones from earliest times became familiar to us—not something “handed down” but actually known in a most immediate and personal way.

At this time, I became comfortable with the university’s Harper Library, where I learned to research events and people. The work I later took up in opera and theater would not have been possible without that preparation and training. My first three full-scale operas—
Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha
, and
Akhnaten
—were made with collaborators—Robert Wilson, Constance DeJong, and Shalom Goldman, respectively—but I fully participated in the writing and shaping of the librettos for all three. I could do this with complete confidence in my academic abilities. In fact, I now see clearly that a lot of the work I chose was inspired by men and women whom I first met in the pages of books. In this way, those early operas were, as I see it, an homage to the power, strength, and inspiration of the lineage of culture.

AFTER SPENDING THE SUMMER IN BALTIMORE,
I returned for my second year at the University of Chicago in September 1953. It would be my last year living in the Burton-Judson dormitory, located on the south side of the Midway, formerly the southern boundary of the University, an area that included the prefab housing where young men with families stayed. These were families who were there thanks to the GI Bill, still very much part of the landscape.

So there I was, in the corridor outside my dorm room, when I saw a young man with a fencing mask and sword prancing around practicing his moves. The minute he saw me, he pressed a mask and sword on me. After quickly showing me some of the basics, we began fencing. His name was Jerry Temaner, and I would say that first encounter was emblematic of a friendship that has continued into the present.

He, like me, was sixteen, but was a native of the place, having grown up on Chicago’s Great West Side. He was skinny, with horn-rimmed glasses, the same size as me, five foot eight, with long dark hair.

The remarkable thing about Jerry Temaner was that his father was in the same business as mine. Jerry’s dad, who was called Little Al, used to run a number of record stores in Chicago. Since his father’s store was called Little Al, he and I would call my father’s store Big Ben. At our first meeting, we discovered not only that we had both grown up in record stores but that our experiences were, in many ways, identical—we learned music from the stores, we worked in the stores, and we knew the same records. It was through Jerry that I discovered Chicago and, actually, a lot about the university, for he also introduced me to the bebop jazz clubs on Fifty-Fifth Street, where I heard Bud Powell and saw Charlie Parker for the first time.

Charlie Parker was the great genius I had admired most in my youth. I saw him many times through the window of the Beehive before I was ever allowed to get in. To me, he was the J. S. Bach of bebop: no one could play like him. His alto playing was beyond superb.

The next person who, for me, came along and had that power in his music was John Coltrane, who could take a melody like “My Favorite Things” and pull out harmonies that one would never imagine were there. That gave him a freedom—both melodic and rhythmic—but also the harmonic freedom to explore implied harmonies. These he could outline in his playing to a point that was breathtaking. You almost never knew where he would go, because he could take it so far, and yet he was never really that far away. He was another great bebop player of our time.

In addition to Parker and Coltrane, there were other great players in Chicago: saxophonists like Jackie McLean and Sonny Rollins, as well as piano players like Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell—the great players of the forties and fifties. I came to know and love their music, and beyond that, I understood it. I heard it as a variant of baroque music. It is even organized in the same way. Jazz relies on a song’s chord changes and the melodic variations that the changes inspire. Furthermore, the song has a bridge—an ABA form—and jazz solos will follow the same pattern.

Singers like Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, and Frank Sinatra were able to expand the performance of popular song by using techniques of the great jazz players. Louis Armstrong is an example of a singer who began as a trumpet player and “crossed over” to popular music from the jazz side. Years later, I came to appreciate the skills of these great musicians.

What I learned from that music became part of my own language. I’ve become very comfortable combining melodic material with harmonic material that does not
at first
seem to be supported. The melodies may not be part of the harmony, but the ear accepts them as alternate notes. They’re extensions of the harmony and can even sound as if the music is in two keys at once. That way of hearing melodies certainly comes out of listening to jazz, and I hear that in my music when I’m writing symphonies and especially operas.

What was interesting about the pianists Bud Powell, Monk, and Red Garland was that they had developed a playing technique that didn’t at all resemble the way classical music is performed. They punched out the tunes, almost the way a boxer would punch out and use his fists. I found that especially with Bud Powell. He would attack the piano. He was a fantastic player and he became my favorite because of his personal orientation toward the piano. He and the piano weren’t adversaries, but he was able to physically pull the music out of the instrument. He had a rough style of playing, which at the same time was extremely sophisticated. Art Tatum was a more accomplished pianist, however, Bud Powell was, for me, the more emotional player.

Jerry Temaner and I also visited the Modern Jazz Room in the Loop, where you could often hear Stan Getz, Chet Baker, and Lee Konitz. It was through Jerry that I was introduced to the finer points of modern jazz. Of course, I was already a musician, with at least the beginnings of a music education as a student at Peabody, but Jerry was coming to jazz from a different place. He was really a connoisseur and, after playing a record for me, he would test my knowledge of a full array of the jazz talents he expected me to be familiar with. After a year of his tutelage, one afternoon he gave me his usual “blindfold” test, playing a saxophonist who was new to me. I had to measure the degree of his talent and explain what I liked. In fact, I liked the music very much and made a strong case for it. My mentor was very pleased. We had been listening to the tenor saxophonist Jackie McLean, though until then I hadn’t heard his music.

Besides knowing music, Jerry was also very knowledgeable about film, and it was he who introduced me to the classics at the Hyde Park movie theater, which specialized in European films with subtitles. That’s where you could see the films of the French director René Clair, the stark, almost morbid work of the Swedish master Ingmar Bergman, or the neorealist movies of the Italian director Vittorio De Sica. Nothing like them had been shown in Baltimore. In fact, films with subtitles were then unknown in that city. For that you would have had to go to Washington, D.C. So all of this was a revelation to me. It was in Chicago that I saw
À Nous la Liberté, The Seventh Seal
, and
The Bicycle Thief
. When I moved to Paris a decade later, I found myself in the middle of the formidable 1960s cinema revolution, la Nouvelle Vague (the New Wave), championed by Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. By that time I had a solid background in European art films and absolutely knew what I was seeing.

Of all these films, the ones dearest to my heart were those of Jean Cocteau—in particular,
Orphée
,
La Belle et la Bête
, and
Les Enfants Terribles.
During my years in Hyde Park these films appeared several times. They must have become lodged in my mind, safe and whole, because in the 1990s, when I undertook a five-year experiment to reinvent the synchronicity of image and music in film, I chose these three films of Cocteau that I knew so well.

Jerry introduced me to other aspects of Chicago life. Besides the bebop of the South Side, there were the “big bands” you could hear—Stan Kenton, Count Basie, Duke Ellington—as well as singers Billie Holiday (I heard her at the Cotton Club on Cottage Grove on a double bill with Ben Webster), Anita O’Day, and Sarah Vaughan. So many great musicians were then coming to Chicago. When I moved to New York City in the late fifties, I became familiar with the jazz world there in the same way. As a Juilliard student I would write music by day and by night hear John Coltrane at the Village Vanguard, Miles Davis and Art Blakey at the Café Bohemia, or Thelonious Monk trading sets with the young Ornette Coleman, who was just up from Louisiana playing his white plastic saxophone at the Five Spot at St. Marks Place and the Bowery.

Years later, I got to know Ornette. He had a place on Prince Street with a pool table in the front room. A good spot to hang out and talk about music. I met numerous musicians there of all kinds, including members of his ensemble, especially James “Blood” Ulmer, who had his own band as well. Ornette gave me a piece of advice that I have pondered ever since. He said, “Don’t forget, Philip, the music world and the music business are not the same.”

SO FAR I HAVE WRITTEN ABOUT TWO TRADITIONS
that became sources of the music I was later to compose. The first was the “classical” chamber music, which I learned about through my father, both from listening to music and from working at his store Saturdays and, especially, holidays. Christmas was a peak season for record sales—Ben told me once that 70 percent of his income came between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. By age fifteen I had become the classical music buyer of the store, continuing to look over the stock whenever I was home from school. In those days the big companies would send lists of new releases and older catalogues, and I would check off the items and quantities that we needed. When Columbia released the complete string quartets of Arnold Schoenberg, performed brilliantly for the recording by the Juilliard String Quartet, I was thrilled. Now, buying records of classical or “art” music is a whole lot trickier than buying Sinatra, Streisand, or Presley. Often only one or two, maybe three copies at the most of the standard classical repertoire would be enough for a Baltimore record store and would easily be sufficient for a few months, or until the next buying period came up. However, carried away by my enthusiasm for the music, I ordered four sets of the Schoenbergs!

About two weeks later the box arrived from the distributor. That was always an exciting moment. Marty and I would be joined by Ben, who also enjoyed the moment. In those days we didn’t know what the covers looked like—the order books provided just lists of names. But these were the early days of LPs and artists and photographers had a field day with twelve-by-twelve-inch covers. With great anticipation we tore open the box, and there were the four Schoenbergs.

Ben’s jaw dropped in amazement.

“Hey, kid, what are you doing?” he roared. “Are you trying to put me out of business?”

I explained that these were the new masterpieces of modern music, and that we needed them in the store.

Ben looked at me for a long, silent moment. He was shocked by my naïveté. After all, I had been in the record business almost four years, and he couldn’t believe I had been that dumb.

“Okay,” he finally said, “tell you what I’ll do. Put them on the shelves with the regular classical stock and let me know when we’ve sold the last one.”

For the next seven years I would come home to Baltimore, stop by the store and check on them to see how we were doing. Finally, near the end of my Juilliard years, I came home and found they were all gone. I was elated and showed Ben the empty space where they had been.

“The Schoenbergs . . . they’re gone!”

Ben, always patient in moments like these, quietly said, “Okay, kid, did you learn the lesson?”

I said nothing. Just waited.

“I can sell anything if I have enough time.”

It was just as Ornette would tell me many years later—the music world and the music business are not the same.

And so we learn. Ben taught Marty and me many, many things, but, like this one, not every lesson was easily learned.

The actual sound of Central European art music, especially the chamber music, was a solid part of me from an early age but maybe not audible in my music until almost five decades later, when I began to compose sonatas and unaccompanied string pieces as well as quite a lot of piano music. Though I did write a few string quartets for the Kronos Quartet, and some symphonies besides, these works from my forties, fifties, and sixties didn’t owe that much to the past. Now that I’m in my seventies, my present music does. It’s funny how it happened this way, but there it is.

It was also a long time before I began to realize how jazz had entered my music. Because it is a form that is mainly improvisational, I didn’t connect it at all with my work. Only quite recently, while reflecting on my own history with jazz, I was surprised by what I found. In the last few years, Linda Brumbach and her Pomegranate Arts Company put together a new production of
Einstein on the Beach
. Since parts of the
Einstein
music have been part of my ensemble’s repertoire for years, I have mainly been involved with performing the music. Recently, though, I was listening to some early recordings of the “Train” music from Act 1, scene 1. Suddenly I was hearing something that I had failed to notice for almost forty years. A part of the music was almost screaming to be recognized. I began looking around in my record library and I came upon the music of Lennie Tristano. I knew this music very well. It was from my early listening years with Jerry. At that moment, in fact, I recalled that when I arrived in New York, I had somehow gotten Tristano’s phone number and called him up. I was in a phone booth on the Upper West Side near Juilliard, and to my total surprise he, Tristano himself, answered the phone.