Words without music : a memoir / Philip Glass.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A world-renowned composer of symphonies, operas, and film scores, Philip Glass has, almost single-handedly, crafted the dominant sound of late-twentieth-century classical music. Yet here in Words Without Music, he creates an entirely new and unexpected voice, that of a born storyteller and an acutely insightful chronicler, whose behind-the-scenes recollections allow readers to experience those moments of creative fusion when life so magically merged with art.

"If you go to New York City to study music, you'll end up like your uncle Henry," Glass's mother warned her incautious and curious nineteen-year-old son. It was the early summer of 1956, and Ida Glass was concerned that her precocious Philip, already a graduate of the University of Chicago, would end up an itinerant musician, playing in vaudeville houses and dance halls all over the country, just like his cigar-smoking, bantamweight uncle. One could hardly blame Mrs. Glass for worrying that her teenage son would end up as a musical vagabond after initially failing to get into Juilliard. Yet, the transformation of a young man from budding musical prodigy to world-renowned composer is the story of this commanding memoir.

From his childhood in post-World War II Baltimore to his student days in Chicago, at Juilliard, and his first journey to Paris, where he studied under the formidable Nadia Boulanger, Glass movingly recalls his early mentors, while reconstructing the places that helped shape his artistic consciousness. From a life-changing trip to India, where he met with gurus and first learned of Gandhi's Salt March, to the gritty streets of New York in the 1970s, where the composer returned, working day jobs as a furniture mover, cabbie, and an unlicensed plumber, Glass leads the life of a Parisian bohemian artist, only now transported to late-twentieth-century America.

Yet even after Glass's talent was first widely recognized with the sensational premiere of Einstein on the Beach in 1976, even after he stopped renewing his hack license and gained international recognition for operatic works like Satyagraha, Orphée, and Akhnaten, the son of a Baltimore record store owner never abandoned his earliest universal ideals throughout his memorable collaborations with Allen Ginsberg, Ravi Shankar, Robert Wilson, Doris Lessing, Martin Scorsese, and many others, all of the highest artistic order.

Few major composers are celebrated as writers, but Philip Glass, in this loving and slyly humorous autobiography, breaks across genres and re-creates, here in words, the thrill that results from artistic creation. Words Without Music ultimately affirms the power of music to change the world.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Reading composer Glass's (Einstein on the Beach; Satyagraha) memoir is like listening to one of his earlier compositions, which would alight upon a particular theme, develop it for a time, and then repeat. Though the book unrolls in roughly chronological order, beginning with Glass's childhood in Baltimore in the 1940s and ending with the Cocteau trilogy, individual chapters deal with subjects such as studying with French composer/conductor Nadia Boulanger, journeying to India and Tibet, and the composition of operas, developing them forward in time before leaping back to take up the main thread of the narrative. Though the result is occasionally jarring, it does make for some intriguing meditations on several of Glass's major creative influences, including jazz music and experimental theater. His prose will win no points for style, particularly when he touches on more personal topics such as the effect of the AIDS crisis on the artistic community of which he is an inextricable part. Yet his insights into his own creativity and the influences of theater, visual art, travel, and spirituality on it, are fascinating. VERDICT A satisfying reflection by one of the late 20th-century's preeminent American composers that should please fans. [See Prepub Alert, 10/5/14.]--Genevieve -Williams, Pacific Lutheran Univ. Lib., Tacoma © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

In this episodic narrative of intellectual and artistic development, famed American composer Glass describes his involvement in the avant-garde music and art scenes in New York in the 1950s through the 1980s, as well as learning harmony and counterpoint in Paris from the brilliant composer and conductor Nadia Boulanger in the 1960s. He recounts touring the Indian subcontinent in search of a guru and eventually winning fame for repetitive compositions like Einstein on the Beach and Koyaanisqatsi, which delighted some listeners and enraged others. (When an annoyed audience member came up and started banging on the piano keys, Glass recalls, "I belted him across the jaw and he staggered and fell off the stage.") At its core, Glass's story is about work-he worked as a mover, a plumber, and a taxi driver to keep his family fed during his decades of obscurity, and since then he has immersed himself in the craft of composing. Glass is raptly alive to the aesthetic epiphanies, philosophy, spirituality, and magnetic personalities he has encountered, yet his prose is conversational and free of pretense. The result is a lively, absorbing read that makes Glass's rarefied cultural sphere wonderfully accessible. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

CHOICE Review

Written with humor, this memoir/autobiography offers insights into Glass's music, philosophy, and life choices. Glass recalls his collaborations with prominent artists--Allen Ginsberg, Ravi Shankar, Robert Wilson, Doris Lessing, Martin Scorsese, to name just a few. Glass reveals in these pages a life lived to the max--from his childhood in post-WW II Baltimore to his student days (at University of Chicago, Peabody Music Conservatory, Julliard), his first journey to Paris (where he studied under Nadia Boulanger), his life-altering trip to India, his return to New York (where he worked day jobs as furniture mover, cabbie, and unlicensed plumber), and his ultimate success. This is a true epic journey of an artist across four continents. Success did not come easily, but Glass refused to sacrifice his vision of an integrated artist's life, which eventually resulted in important works such as Einstein on the Beach (1976), to cite just one work in a vast oeuvre. Glass lets the reader feel the thrill that results from artistic creation and the power of music as a way of life. Readers will have difficulty putting down this riveting, touching book by a musician turned storyteller. Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers. --David B. Levy, Touro College, Lander College for Women

Booklist Review

*Starred Review* No matter your opinion of Glass' music, you will like Glass the man. In a straightforward yet often moving voice, he details his early years at the University of Chicago; his move to New York and Juilliard (despite his mother's warning that, as a musician, he would be living in hotels and traveling for the rest of his life); his studies in Paris and, later, in India; his unbending dedication to being an artist; and, in large part, the men and women from all walks of life who would influence him as he developed the habit of attention necessary to compose in genres ranging from high-school band music to symphonies, quartets, concertos, and such operas as Einstein on the Beach and Satyagraha. Glass would support his family working odd jobs part-time for years, finally becoming a full-time composer at age 41. Even so, he has lived the life, immersing himself in theater, art, literature, and music, and he relates here how the arts changed over time, the cultural loss AIDS wrought, and the evolution of his sometimes disparaged minimalist, tonalist compositions (as he posits, I'm a theater composer). Aspiring musicians and artists will learn much from Glass, as will general readers, musical or not, who will discover an artistic life exceptionally well lived.--Kinney, Eloise Copyright 2015 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

An engaging memoir of an adventuresome, iconoclastic career.The composer of 25 operas, 30 movie soundtracks and scores of other works, Glass (b. 1937) reflects on friendship, love, fatherhood and more than 70 years in music. Growing up in Baltimore, he played the flute; by the age of 15, he was the classical music buyer for his father's record store. As a high school sophomore, he took an early-entrance exam to the University of Chicago. To everyone's surprise but his, he passed and spent the next four years in that rich intellectual community, reveling in the city's major, and diverse, musical venues. One question obsessed him: "Where does music come from?" Composing, he decided, might help him find the answer. When he graduated, Glass submitted a small portfolio of compositions as application to Juilliard. Although not admitted immediately because he lacked academic preparation, after a few years as a nonmatriculated student, he earned a scholarship to the school's small department of composition. Like Chicago, New York opened up a thrilling aesthetic world. To support himself as a student and long after, Glass worked as a furniture mover, sheetrock installer, studio assistant to artist Richard Serra, self-taught plumber and taxi driver. He composed much of his opera Einstein at the Beach, he writes, "at night after driving a cab." In the 1960s and '70s, Glass became deeply interested in Eastern culture: hatha yoga, Tibetan Buddhism, Taoist qi gong and tai chi, all of which influenced his music. Equally crucial were his teachers, especially the imperious Nadia Boulanger, with whom he studied in Paris, and Ravi Shankar. Undaunted by critics who called his music "nonsense," Glass aimed to create an emotional experience for his listeners, with music that felt "like a force of natureorganic and powerful, and mindful, too." Writing with warmth and candor, Glass portrays himself as driven, self-confident and tenaciously determined to invent his own, radically new musical language. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Throughout his childhood and early career, Philip Glass received a relatively traditional and classical musical training. It was not until he met and studied with Ravi Shankar, Indian sitar virtuoso, that Glass was introduced to the mysterious world of Hindu ragas and modern musical styles. In the late 1960s, Glass formed associations with modern painters and sculptors who strove to obtain maximum effects with a minimum of means. Glass attempted to do the same in his music; he developed a technique of composition that was dubbed "minimalism."

In 1976 the Metropolitan Opera House presented Einstein on the Beach, Glass's first opera and the work that placed him and minimalism in music history. In 1986 he wrote The Voyage for the Met; an opera that commemorated the five-hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the New World.

The Portuguese government commissioned Glass to write an opera in honor of the nation's sea explorations. The result, White Raven, centers on the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama, who sailed around the southern tip of Africa and established a maritime route to India. In 2015 he made The New York Times Best Seller List with his title, Words Without Music.

(Bowker Author Biography)