Words Without Music: A Memoir - Hardcover

Glass, Philip

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0871404389 ISBN 13: 9780871404381

Publisher: Liveright, 2015

Synopsis

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, 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.

32 pages of photographs

About this title

About the Author:

Born in Baltimore in 1937, Philip Glass studied at the University of Chicago and the Juilliard School. The composer of operas, film scores, and symphonies, he performs regularly with the Philip Glass Ensemble and lives in New York.

Review:

“Warm, low-key and often delightful.... A portrait of a composer who rose to prominence almost entirely outside of the usual institutions.... Words Without Music reads the way Mr. Glass’s compositions sound at their best: propulsive, with a surreptitious emotional undertow.”
- Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, New York Times

“Lively and colorful.... Glass is one of the most articulate composers around. Insight and practical common sense pervade his new book.... With a composer’s sense of form, Glass returns, in the final pages, to his youth, the subject that elicits his most evocative writing.”
- Kyle Gann, New York Times Book Review

“Glass, a key figure of musical minimalism, was one of the first composers to reject a distinction between “ethnic” music and Western classical music, and in this memoir he explains how he came to view a composition not as a linear narrative but as progressive rhythmic sequences.”
- The New Yorker

“Philip Glass's place in musical history is secure.”
- The New Yorker

“America's most significant symphonist.”
- Los Angeles Times

“An icon of the avant-garde.”
- Fader

“The most prolific and popular of all contemporary composers.”
- New York Times

“An engaging memoir of an adventuresome, iconoclastic career...Writing with warmth and candor, Glass portrays himself as driven, self-confident and tenaciously determined to invent his own, radically new musical language.”
- Kirkus Reviews

“No matter your opinion of Glass’ music, you will like Glass the man....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.”
- Booklist, Starred Review

“Philip Glass has written a fascinating account of his life with recollections of family, teachers, and friends. From his childhood in Baltimore to his studies with Ravi Shankar and Nadia Boulanger and the collaborations with Robert Wilson, Allen Ginsburg, Godfrey Reggio, and Martin Scorsese, among others, Glass offers insights to his music and personal life. Words Without Music will be a pleasure to read, not only for musicians (although they will particularly enjoy it) but for anyone interested in the world of art.”
- Paul Simon

About this edition

• Publisher: Liveright
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0871404389
• ISBN 13: 9780871404381
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 432