Words Without Music by Philip Glass (review)

The son of a record salesman in a low-income area of downtown Baltimore, Philip Glass grew up watching his father administer “store security” with his fists. Perhaps it was this rough-and-tumble upbringing that allowed Philip Glass, the man credited with almost single-handedly defining the sound of classical music in the twenty-first century, to maintain his blue-collar charm despite international acclaim. Rough pragmatism pervades his music—barely modulating fragments, repeated figures, electronic amplification—a far cry from the disinterested classical music that precedes it. In a long career that spans the length and breadth of compositional possibilities in music, several works (the opera Einstein on the Beach and the film score for The Hours to name just two) stand out as markers in popular imagination. But beyond and beneath these few high exposure works, the breadth of Philip Glass’s oeuvre has seeped into both high and popular culture, becoming in a very real way the sound of our time.

The simplicity of Philip Glass’s music extends to his writing in a memoir published last year. Vernacular, conversational, and casually witty, Words Without Music reads like the recollections of a friend. More concerned with the details of daily life than the philosophical underpinnings of his compositions, the composer opens a remarkable window onto one of the influential artistic greenhouses of the twentieth century. Deeply entrenched in the downtown art scene of 1960s and 70s in New York, Glass describes his efforts to create a music that served as a compliment to the rapid innovations occurring in visual art and dance at that time. “There was a huge explosion going on in New York in the 1960s when the art world, the theater world, the dance world, and the music world all came together. It was a party that never stopped, and I felt like I was in the middle of it.” Chock full of anecdotal stories, chance encounters, surprising facts, and bizarre connections, Words Without Music details the proper configuration of coal needed to heat a loft on Front Street in 1959. The book is divided into three parts: the first details his early education at the University of Chicago, Juilliard, and in Paris with Nadia Boulanger and Ravi Shankar; the second chronicles his return to New York and immersion in the downtown art scene; and the third contains mostly musings on some later works in opera and film. Words Without Music gives a broad survey of an artist’s life, the world that made him, and the motivations that kept him composing even without the early success visited on some of his friends.

It is this latter point that has the most to offer to the thousands of underfunded artists currently struggling to make rent on sketchily leased Brooklyn apartments. With virtually no institutional funding, Glass supported his music with odd jobs in plumbing, furniture moving, and taxi driving until receiving his first sizeable commission at the age of forty-one. Even his landmark opera, Einstein on the Beach (1976), created with Robert Wilson, was composed primarily in the early morning hours after long shifts in a taxicab. He never apologizes for his divided attentions, nor should he. His day jobs influenced his work, furthered his training, and allowed him the independence to write music often considered unlistenable by funding institutions. It was this life, a composer’s life, lived fully, that carried Philip Glass from the back streets of Baltimore to the international stage. And, perhaps more importantly, from a young man naively asking, “Where does music come from?” to a mature artist of seventy-eight who now claims confidently, “I’m [no longer] thinking about music. I’m thinking music.”