Words Without Music: A Memoir

About this book

The long-awaited memoir by the most prolific and popular of all contemporary composers (New York Times). 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 youll end up like your uncle Henry " Glasss 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 postWorld 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 Gandhis 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 Glasss 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 Orphe 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. 32 pages of photographs