Words Without Music: A Memoir (30 page)

In the downtown theater world we all knew each other and each other’s work. It was a true community of artists. Each company pursued its own interests and we appreciated the curiosity and imagination of others. I went to see Joe Chaikin’s and Richard Schechner’s work, as well as Bob Wilson’s, Meredith Monk’s, and Richard Foreman’s. We rejoiced in the diversity—it became affirmation through diversity rather than by consensus. Even so, a spectator might find himself challenged rather than intrigued. Richard Foreman’s pieces, for instance, were stimulating and puzzling in equal parts. I saw everything he did for years, and I rarely understood what I was watching, nor was I supposed to understand. In fact, I would say his pieces were anti-intellectual in the sense that applying rational processes to them was discouraged and, practically speaking, impossible. Richard managed to create a flow of scenic and dramatic events on the stage that was totally arresting. At the same time, there were usually lights in your eyes, noises in your ears—everything was done to disturb the normal train of thought that you would bring to the theater. At a certain point, you began to watch in a different way. You never knew what was going happen, and it didn’t matter.

The power of Richard’s theater making was that it had the coherence of rationality without the logic. The emotional effect was what many people were looking for, a kind of transcendence and epiphany, an emotional high that came from being detached from the world of the rational and the dramatic. It turns out that there is a lot of room in the human mind to experience deep and transcendent emotions that may not have very much to do with ordinary subject matter. In that way, it’s not so different from an exhilarating moment in a forest or watching a brilliant summer sky.

These ways of looking for transcendent emotions are not related to the theory of drama as presented by Aristotle and perfected by Shakespeare. When you look at a play of Beckett’s, the epiphany doesn’t come where Aristotle said it was supposed to come. It doesn’t come from the fall of the hero. In
Play
and in
Waiting for Godot
, it can happen at any point in the work. When the
feeling
content is not necessarily related to the
narrative
content, and the epiphany can come anywhere, then that feeling has become unrelated to the actual material you’re attending to. It becomes a different way of experiencing music or, for that matter, painting, dance, literature, poetry, or film.

Moreover, this experience itself now has the power to become transformative. It can appear as a transcendental experience, not conceptually, but because we’re having experiences that don’t have a pre-formed context. The story is gone.
Romeo and Juliet
is gone. We’ve gotten to the
power
of romance literature without the
story
of the romance. There’s an edginess to it. Normally when we go to the theater or opera house and it’s a conventional theater piece or a conventional opera, we don’t have the feeling that we’re on the edge of the unknown. We’re wallowing in the known. We may even be rejoicing in the known. But in the alternative theater being presented by Richard and others who were suggesting a radical change in perception, the result could be a keen sense of delight and abandon. It certainly took courage, both on the part of the author and the spectator. It was either the courage of ignorance or of sophistication, but in the end, that didn’t really matter.

Why did it occur at this time? It was a reaction in many ways against the modernism of the twenties, thirties, and forties. We still had plays from Tennessee Williams or Arthur Miller, but we were feeling the exhaustion of the romantic principle. We were the exhausted ones, so we had to start somewhere else. We got rid of the things that were trivial, even nauseating, to us, which meant most of the content had to go.

We did have some immediate predecessors: we had John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, and the Living Theater. We even had Claes Oldenburg’s “The Store” and Allan Kaprow’s “happenings.” These artists were a little older than us, and they had begun the work of clearing the ground for a new kind of theater to take root, a theater that was not based on any kind of a story, one that was visual, emotional, and chaotic. They were already crossing the borders between the arts: the composer Cage worked with the choreographer Cunningham; the painter Rauschenberg also worked with Cunningham as well as with choreographer Trisha Brown and the Judson Dance Theater. The way the generation before us worked was very important to us. Though their accomplishments were pretty much ignored by the arbiters of culture in New York and elsewhere in America, we took them very seriously.

Because of the artists like Cage and Beckett who came before us, we didn’t have to take everything apart, since it had already been taken apart. We didn’t have to destroy the idea of the novel—Beckett’s
Molloy
and
Malone Dies
had done that. In many ways, Cage and Beckett cleared the playing field and gave us permission to start playing again. We were the beneficiaries.

John Cage liked me personally, but sometimes we would have conversations in which he would shake his head and say, “Philip, too many notes, too many notes, too many notes.”

I would laugh, and reply, “John, I’m one of your children, whether you like it or not.”

In spite of his comments about “too many notes,” we got along fine. He finally found a piece—my 1979 opera
Satyagraha—
he liked, and he made a point of telling me. He mentioned to me several times that it had made an impression on him.

The work I did with Mabou Mines, which went on for more than two decades, was my real apprenticeship in the theater. In time, I branched out to work with other theater directors and other companies, contributing incidental music and songs when needed. This in turn made an easy transition for me to work in film in much the same way. By then I understood not only the job of the composer but I also had some acquaintance with many of the other theater crafts—lighting, costumes, scenery—that normally would not be in the purview of the composer. I made it my business to learn whatever I could. Not that many years later, I would be working in opera houses, again not just as a composer. I took authorship of an opera seriously and my goal was to be comfortable with all its aspects.

ALONG WITH THE ARTISTS AND THEATER COMPANIES,
dancers and choreographers were moving into SoHo, making the area rich in talent and invention. The Grand Union, a contact improvisation company, came into being. It included, at various times, Trisha Brown, Barbara Dilley, Douglas Dunn, David Gordon, Nancy Lewis, Steve Paxton, and Yvonne Rainer. Twyla Tharp, Lucinda Childs, Laura Dean, and Molissa Fenley all had companies in the early 1970s. I’m citing as many as I can remember to give a sense of the depth of talent that was working and reinventing dance. They were emotionally, artistically, and actually younger than the older companies—Paul Taylor, Alvin Ailey, and Merce Cunningham—though quite a few of them came out of Merce’s company or his classes.

These dancers were taking colloquial movement—movements of everyday life—and turning that into dance. They weren’t specialized movements made for dance bodies and dance-trained people. They were for people who could just be walking, running, or jumping around. They didn’t always wear dance clothes. Sometimes they even wore jeans. They also didn’t wear dancer’s shoes. They might wear tennis shoes, or sometimes just bare feet was enough.

One of Yvonne’s dance pieces began with a ladder and a pile of mattresses. The company would climb up on the ladder and dive onto the mattresses, and whatever happened, happened. They would let their bodies respond to the gravity and the fall and the physicality of the mattresses. It was like watching a study in human motion. There were eight or ten people who would just continually dive onto the mattresses. This was something that came out of the idea that the aesthetic content of this “dance” would be in the mind of the viewer and, in this way, John Cage had really affected young people. In this tradition, Yvonne didn’t choreograph the piece, she let the falling body choreograph it.

I performed in 1971 with Yvonne at the Galleria l’Attico in Rome, where the gallery director, Fabio Sargentini, was putting on a series of performances in an apartment building garage. Yvonne built a box that was six feet high, three feet wide, and twelve inches deep that one could stand in. Yvonne just put your body into the box, and the interaction of you and the box made something happen that wasn’t programmed or anticipated. The viewers could find choice aesthetic moments, if they cared to, and if you yourself were performing in it, you were in for an unknown experience, because there were no real instructions and no rehearsal. I just walked into the box and moved inside it for fifteen or twenty minutes while Yvonne was moving around on the outside. I was always curious about dance, but I came to it too late and without the discipline. Even so, I did actually perform once, and it was with Yvonne.

Who were the audiences for these theater and dance performances? We were: the musicians, actors, painters, sculptors, poets, and writers, many of whom lived and worked in the area. If Yvonne or Trisha Brown had a new work—Trisha was doing pieces that were very similar to what I was doing, using a vocabulary of repetitive movements—the artists were mainly the audience, often at events hosted by SoHo galleries. Paula Cooper Gallery on Prince Street was one of the first, and has remained the most prominent. Paula took up the idea that the gallery space could be used as a performance space, and she embraced it freely. Her gallery was home not only to painters and sculptors but to performers as well. I played there with the Mabou Mines, and I played there alone. Even today Paula presents new work in her latest location in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood.

SoHo was also home to Jonas Mekas’s Cinematheque and to The Kitchen, founded by Woody and Steina Vasulka, who initially rented the kitchen of the Mercer Arts Center in the former Broadway Central Hotel, hence the name. When the hotel building collapsed, they moved to a space on Broome Street. There was no money, there was nothing. In its early days, The Kitchen didn’t even advertise. They simply posted the week’s program on the door. John Cage, Molissa Fenley, Talking Heads, Bob Wilson, myself, and many others performed there.

In the beginning, the lofts in SoHo were dirt cheap. A large 2500 square-foot space could be found for $125 to $150 a month. The screw holes in the floor clearly showed where lines of sewing machines had once been installed. The whole area had been a factory district, and it remained so for almost another quarter of a century. Instead of coats, trousers, or sweaters, the spaces became the birthplace of new inventions in dance, music, theater, art, and film. In the early years of my soon-to-be-formed Philip Glass Ensemble, we played all over SoHo. And then there was Food, a restaurant on the corner of Prince and Wooster that featured a different artist as guest chef every night. JoAnne for a time was a regular chef there, and in my plumbing days—yet another in my long list of day jobs—I installed the radiators that heated the place.

JoAnne and I never lived in SoHo ourselves. Within a few months of our return to New York, we moved to an empty building on Twenty-Third Street and Ninth Avenue. My cousins Steve and Jene and I convinced the owner, an Irishman who owned the bar on the corner, that we would do all the work renovating the building and get a “C of O” (certificate of occupancy) from the city. In exchange we would take over the building “rent free.” We knew, and our landlord must have suspected, that there was no possibility of that actually happening. For that we would have needed architects, engineers, and a licensed electrician and plumber, not to mention cash for materials and waste cartage. There was no way we could do all that. But I think the landlord just liked us. He was always in his bar at one of his booths drinking, so he definitely knew no construction work was happening. Still, we were there for almost three years. JoAnne and I took the upper two floors and the cousins the lower two. The top floor was used both for my own ensemble rehearsals and theater rehearsals when they began.

I had completed a few pieces in my new style, and I was most anxious to continue to develop the language I had begun after working in Paris with Raviji and Alla Rakha. By luck it turned out that in the fall of 1967, Raviji would be a composer-teacher at New York’s City College. Not only that, Alla Rakha would be with him, first of all to accompany him as needed, but also to give private lessons on his own. I was very happy to see Raviji again, but I knew from experience that he would be frantically busy. I elected to attend his classes uptown at 135th Street at the school and take private tabla lessons with Alla Rakha downtown. This meant JoAnne and I had to have a serious talk about money. The lessons were not expensive by any standards—maybe twenty or twenty-five dollars apiece—but it would make a serious dent in our weekly budget. There were no children yet, but still it seemed a lot. JoAnne, however, had only the most encouraging words for me. In those years, when there was no money and few prospects, she was always looking for long-term and future benefits. A few years later, when I began making return visits to India, she was equally supportive. That was more difficult, for by then there were two children—Juliet, born in October 1968, and Zack, born in March 1971. Not only would I have to spend money to go, but she would be left alone with our children.

The lessons with Alla Rakha were riveting and immediately rewarding. They were not dry lectures. I had to buy a pair of tabla (another seventy-five dollars) and learn everything both as a theory and, even more important, as a practice. Working directly with Alla Rakha, I began to get a real grasp of how the rhythmic structure that was at the root of his playing shaped the overall outcome of an entire composition. By then, having a solid basis in Western classical technique, I was able to quickly assimilate the theory behind the music. The elements—harmony, melody, rhythm—are present, either all together or in part, in all music. In our Western traditions, the melody and harmony interact to form the overall structure, with the rhythm usually taking on no more than a decorative role. In other words, the emotional shape of a piece of Western classical music—for example, a symphony of Beethoven’s—would be determined by the development of the harmony and the melody.