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Summary
Summary
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.
Author Notes
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)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's 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.
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
New York Review of Books Review
GIVEN THAT ALL the events of a long, rich and full artistic life can scarcely be squeezed into a moderate-size book, how does one choose, at age 78, what to put into a memoir and what to leave out? The Promethean composer Philip Glass provokes this question in his lively and colorful new book, "Words Without Music," in which he offers stories from his life in varyingly detailed magnification. Whatever you think of him as a composer - self-imitator or icon of postmodern symphony and opera - Glass is one of the most articulate composers around. Insight and practical common sense pervade his new book, and reading it reminded me of hearing him speak: He's ever thoughtful and loquacious, but he doesn't answer any questions he doesn't want to. In one early emblematic story, young Philip is bullied for playing the flute. His older brother sets up a fight between Philip and his tormentor - which Glass wins handily. "I wasn't especially brave," he writes, "and I didn't like fights, but I felt that I had been corralled into it. The kid could have been six feet tall and I still would have beaten him, it didn't matter. After that, no one bothered me about the flute." It's part of a pattern: Glass came from a "struggling middle-class family"; was discouraged from pursuing a career in music; studied with the formidable music teacher Nadia Boulanger; worked day jobs, some grueling, until he was 41; but in his telling, he never saw a challenge that he couldn't lick. "I have a wonderful gene - the I-don't-care-what-you-think gene," he writes. The "making" of a composer is the real subject of "Words Without Music." Glass outlines his years before the successes of his operas "Satyagraha" (1980) and "Akhnaten" (1983) in loving detail; his life and work since then - including his film scores for Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Errol Morris and others - is skimmed through, with all-too-quick descriptions of the remarkable (and mostly nonfamous) people he has known. One struggles to imagine how any human could have kept his schedule in the late '50s and early '60s: composing from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., loading trucks in the evenings, practicing piano several hours a day, attending classes, taking music and yoga lessons, going to movies and art exhibitions with friends, driving a motorcycle cross-country. Side stories feature cameos by figures one might not associate with Glass. He shared an apartment with the blind composer Moondog, who dressed as a Viking and played his compositions on the streets of Midtown Manhattan. And he recounts inventing the "Hardart," a keyboard of toy instruments, for the fictional P.D.Q. Bach's Concerto for Horn and Hardart, written by his Juilliard chum Peter Schickele - and making it a transposing instrument in the key of E so Schickele would have an added challenge. No fewer than three chapters are devoted to a 1966 trip Glass and his wife at the time, the theater director JoAnne Akalaitis, made to Nepal to study with masters of Tibetan meditation. But we never find out what spiritual needs, beyond a kind of fervent curiosity, drove him to all that trouble and self-discipline. He refers in passing to nine years he spent in psychoanalysis after his father died - without delving into the issues he was looking to resolve. And his conclusion to a long digression on his Buddhist practice leaves us hanging: "It's hard to say what I have learned from all this, but I have noticed a certain ease I have begun to experience in my daily life. This extends not only to living but to the subject of dying as well. More than that I am unable to say." Those most interested in the music will find that the memoir repeats some stories and material from his 1987 book "Music by Philip Glass," though Glass seems to have mellowed: His rival composer Steve Reich receives some due encomiums; Pierre Boulez is no longer a purveyor of "crazy, creepy" music; the term minimalism is not totally avoided. While one might have wished for more talk on aesthetics, there are gems explaining the influences of such far-flung figures as John Coltrane (extensions of harmony leading to a sense of bitonality) or Anton Bruckner (painting in time on a large canvas). Occasionally he alludes to what he was trying to achieve in the gradual changes of his early music: "When you get to that level of attention, two things happen: One, the structure (form) and the content become identical; two, the listener experiences an emotional buoyancy. Once we let go of the narrative and allow ourselves to enter the flow of the music, the buoyancy that we experience is both addictive and attractive and attains a high emotional level." Glass complains that "the disappointment felt by some die-hard fans" after "Einstein on the Beach," his great success of 1976, "has more to do with their unfulfilled expectations than with what I was actually doing." Fair enough. And yet he devotes a detailed chapter to "Einstein" while only summing up his 10 symphonies and not mentioning at least half of his 25 other operas. He may not care what we think, but he dwells on the music he feels people remain most interested in. WITH A COMPOSER'S sense of form, Glass returns, in the final pages, to his youth, the subject that elicits his most evocative writing, and to his father, a former Marine and one of the book's most vivid characters. He attributes some of his phenomenal abilities of visualization and imaginative organization to his father's insistence that they play "mental chess" (chess without pieces or a board). Working as the classical buyer in the family record store, he rashly ordered four copies of the complete Schoenberg string quartets; when the last set finally sold seven years later, his old man wasn't impressed: "I can sell anything if I have enough time." Charged with watching for shoplifters, Glass quit turning them in because his father would take them outside and beat them "senseless." Despite his toughness, Ben Glass sounds like a father any artist could envy having: One who sent his son into the world with few material advantages but a psychic inheritance equal to any emergency. KYLE GANN'S most recent book is "Robert Ashley." He teaches at Bard College. 'I have a wonderful gene,' he notes, 'the I-don't-care-what-you-think gene.'
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
Kirkus 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.
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.