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Liveright
April 2015
On Sale: April 6, 2015
432 pages
ISBN: 0871404389
EAN: 9780871404381
Kindle: B00OKUX36Y
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Memoir
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.
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