Words Without Music by Philip Glass (Faber & Faber, £22.50)
In a 2011 New Yorker cartoon a man and a woman sit in two upright armchairs, adrift in a giant interior with an oversized canvas—a single wavy line—on the wall. The caption reads: “Only the rich can afford this much nothing.” There has always been the suspicion of emperor’s new clothes about minimalism. But the artists, architects and musicians of the movement have taken the satire smiling. People can joke as much as they like as long as they keep buying the music. And buying we certainly are. Despite his style being described as “broken-record music,” “going-nowhere music,” even “anti-music,” the minimalist Philip Glass is one of the classical world’s bestselling living composers.
A new memoir by Glass, Words Without Music, invites us to go back to the original pulse of minimalism—New York City in the 1960s. Together with La Monte Young, Terry Riley and Steve Reich, Glass was one of the movement’s first-generation “Fab Four.” All were innovators, but Glass had greater popular appeal and an instinct for the direct. He is celebrated for his triptych of operas, Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha and Akhnaten as well as his Oscar-nominated soundtracks for Kundun, The Hours and Notes on a Scandal. The critic Tom Service calls him the “most influential composer across the whole range of the musical world, from film scores to music theatre, from rock and pop to new music”; or, as the music journalist K Robert Schwartz has it, he is quite simply a “mass-culture phenomenon.”
Words Without Music is Glass’s second autobiographical book. In Opera on the Beach (1987), he looked back over the steep arc of his early career, from his studies at the Juilliard School in New York (1958-62) and later in Paris with Nadia Boulanger—whose students included Aaron Copland and Daniel Barenboim—his formative encounters with Ravi Shankar, to his return to New York and rise from the avant-garde fringe to popular success. This second book—a companion volume? sequel? variation on a theme?—goes over similar ground.
For an artist wedded to abstraction, Glass tells a good tale—lively and intimate, if prolix. Born in Baltimore in 1937, he was the son of a schoolteacher and a shopkeeper, Jewish migrants from Lithuania. His mother ensured he attended flute lessons, but his father shaped his musical tastes. Working in his music shop, he was exposed to Franz Schubert and Dmitri Shostakovich as well as Elvis Presley and Charlie Parker. Thanks to a programme for “gifted youth” at the University of Chicago, Glass was able to attend university at the age of 15, setting him ahead not only academically but also in the social, cultural and intellectual possibilities offered by Chicago. There’s plenty of colour, especially from the Juilliard years, capturing the burgeoning world of jazz—Ornette Coleman, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis—and the rackety counterculture of the downtown artistic community.
From his early years, Glass has always rejected the label minimalist. Perhaps it is a hangover from the term’s early, pejorative use in the visual arts; it was applied mockingly to the block sculptures of Richard Serra and Donald Judd, and the blank canvasses of Frank Stella and Robert Rauschenberg. Or perhaps it is because the word minimalism misleadingly implies simplicity and limitation? This debate is where Glass’s memoir, and indeed Glass’s music, gets really interesting. The question of his artistic credo keeps circling to the foreground. “I was looking,” Glass writes, “for a language of music that was rooted in the grammar of music itself.” This isn’t music as metaphor or emotional language or sonic narrative, but rather music about music. I’m reminded of the art critic Barbara Rose’s words—“The thing… is not supposed to be suggestive of anything other than itself.”
But what does music about music sound like? Initially like the denatured electronic cycling and circling of Music in 12 Parts (1971-74)—Glass’s first major work—in which even the human voice sounds alien. Scored for a chamber ensemble of 12 instruments, the music unfolds in shifting patterns over almost four hours, taking short barely-melodies—musical cells—and treating them as a dramatist might his characters. This cast of fragments evolves with mesmerising gradualness. This is not the alchemy of transformation but of perception: taking musical base metals—arpeggios, scales—and reinventing them as we listen.
"Glass’s early anti-dramatic instinct for stasis and contemplation seems now at war with his new adherence to narrative, arc and climax"The boldest of Glass’s self-reflexive works remains the monumental Einstein on the Beach (1976)—the opera that relocated the composer’s music from downtown lofts and artists’ studios to the Metropolitan Opera. This work, which left Glass and his co-creator Robert Wilson $150,000 in debt, reimagined opera. Being the first minimalist to tackle opera, forced Glass to evolve farther and faster—to take basic principles to their logical extreme. The result is an astonishing, non-narrative theatrical meditation, loosely themed around Albert Einstein, sustained over five hours of dance, movement, music and drama. If Einstein was an experiment to see if music about music could survive in a theatrical context then it succeeded. In 2012, the original creative team revived the opera for the first time in 20 years. Sitting in a darkened Barbican Theatre, I found myself surrendering, as another generation had before me, to Glass and Wilson’s demands. The drama’s transforming shapes and unfolding patterns don’t just narrate the drama, but are the drama itself.
Einstein defined Glass’s later development. It was the peak of his minimal phase—as maximal as minimalism could be—and his later operas stage a gradual retreat towards conventionality. The next two of his triptych of “portrait” operas— Satyagraha, about Mahatma Gandhi, and Akhnaten, about the ancient Egyptian Pharaoh—are, like Einstein, musical meditations that assemble meaning through a collage of sounds and images. They retain structural and dramatic quirks that have been almost entirely ironed out by the time we reach his 2013 Walt Disney opera The Perfect American. This shift to more conventional theatrical norms is an unexpected surrender. Glass’s early anti-dramatic instinct for stasis and contemplation seems now at war with his new adherence to narrative, arc and climax. The memoir tells us almost nothing about his most recent work. Where is The Perfect American, or his Kafka-based chamber operas In The Penal Colony (2000) and The Trial (2014), the newer film scores or symphonies? Is this focus on his early decades a tacit admission that he has never equalled those first remarkable achievements?
Glass has continued to do revolutionary work in film. His striking trilogy of Jean Cocteau adaptations— Orphée, La Belle et la Bête, Les Enfants Terribles (1991-96)—the first a chamber opera, the last a ballet and the central panel an extraordinary “opera-ised movie,” are part of the same artistic continuum as his radical operas. They are, in Glass’s words, a “workshop” where “allegory and fiction and poetry are brought to the level of an investigation of the human condition.”
Though the composer’s recent Oscar-nominated scores for The Hours, Notes on a Scandal and Kundun are probably Glass’s best-known pieces of music, his long association with director Godfrey Reggio has generated his most daring film projects. The “Qatsi” trilogy (the word “qatsi” means “life” in Hopi) shot between 1982 and 2002 saw Glass extend his musical philosophy still further, rewriting the whole notion of the film soundtrack. “There are two ways I could have composed the music,” he explains. “To comment on the image or to make the music identical to the image. I chose the latter.” The result were three cinematic tone-poems that explore man’s relationship with nature and technology without a single spoken word. Cars driving at night on a motorway appear in fast-forward to a rippling electronic soundtrack; explosions—planes, buildings, ships—billow outwards while voices chant and chatter urgently, their mantras tantalisingly inaudible. For Glass and Reggio this is not the usual Hollywood arranged marriage of words and music, but a love-match born of instinctive collaboration.
The tension between minimalism’s avant-garde roots and mainstream success is at the core of Words Without Music. The book’s frontispiece is a black and white photograph of Glass. Taken from above, the shot shows the composer seated at a keyboard, eyes closed, head flung back, lips prayerfully pursed, hands rooted in a chord. It is the image of a legend. The New Yorker’s Alex Ross has spoken of the “occult” power of Glass’s music, its “mesmeric” effects, and it’s a phenomenon that has been actively cultivated by Glass. But not content to be a musical guru, Glass also wants to be a man of the people. It’s impossible to imagine the memoir of an arch-modernist like Pierre Boulez or Karlheinz Stockhausen spending two pages explaining how to install a toilet, as Glass gleefully does here. He turned to music full-time only at the age of 41, three years after the premiere of Einstein on the Beach. Up until then he worked variously as a taxi driver, a removal man and a plumber, squeezing his composing into the time left over. This memoir fizzes with bathos—cocking a snook at anyone who dares to take it all too seriously—while also making grandiose claims. “I am not thinking about music,” says Glass, “I am thinking music.”
So is minimalism the cheeky upstart, lobbing rocks at the earnest intellectualism of serialism and abstract expressionism? Or is it something weightier, deeper, more spiritual? In more than any other modern composer, listeners seeking everything from irreverence to mystical surrender have found in Glass a balance that speaks directly to them.
Cocteau’s Orphée contains a brief exchange, preserved in Glass’s chamber opera, between Orpheus and an older writer. “The public loves me,” declares Orpheus. “The public,” the writer retorts, “is alone.” Simple, truthful, wilful—it’s pure Philip Glass. A composer caught between suspicious critics and adoring fans, between serious experimentalism and populist appeal, Glass has the success he always wanted. But it’s impossible to think about the young boy in Baltimore, desperate to sell the boldest avant-garde music in his father’s shop, and not wonder whether the public’s love will ever be enough.
