Words Without Music: A Memoir (32 page)

A voice on the other side of the room said, “Certainly!”

We were so shocked we almost jumped out of the window. I came to understand that people in comas can hear things. You have to be careful what you say, and also, you can talk to them. Later on, I got used to talking to people that were dying, because that’s one of the things that life is about. Death becomes familiar. It doesn’t become a secret ritual. It becomes something that happens to your friends and your family.

On these final trips—her life was winding down now, and if you went there, you might only hope to have a few words with her—I would simply stay in the hospital, have lunch in the cafeteria, and then come back to her room. On one of those visits, she was conscious as I was sitting with her. She motioned for me to come over.

“Yes, Mama. Yes, I’m here.”

She nodded her head, and she motioned for me to lean down so she could talk to me.

“The copyrights!” she whispered.

“What?”

“The copyrights.”

I understood that she was worried about the copyrights, that my music had taken on some value. She had come to the conclusion somewhere along the way—I suppose she had seen enough progress—that they were worth something, and she wanted to make sure I still owned the work.

I understood what she meant. I leaned down to her and said, “It’s all taken care of, Mom.”

She nodded.

“I’ve registered them all, and they belong to my company.”

She nodded her head again. That was the last thing we said to each other. Right to the end, she was on top of everything. Not that she listened to the music, but she understood that I had reached a turning point in my life—I was forty-six, so not only had I written
Einstein
but also
Satyagraha
. By some impossible maneuver, I had risen from obscurity in the music world into somebody who had compositions that had monetary value. She just wanted to make sure I was taking care of it.

In the end, it was my brother, Marty, who brought her back from the hospital in Florida to Baltimore, where she spent her very last days in a nursing home.

I doubt whether Ida knew much about music. We have a cousin in Baltimore, Beverly Gural, whom I would see from time to time. In fact, to this day, she keeps in touch. Beverly had been to Peabody Conservatory as a young pianist. Later she belonged to the Baltimore Choral Society, and she sang some of my music. I think it was through Beverly that Ida had found out about my music, from the reviews that were starting to come out. The reviews were terrible, but that didn’t matter. I would get letters from relatives saying, “Congratulations—hope you didn’t miss this review,” and there would be a review in a Chicago paper or wherever I had relatives, and it would be a
terrible
, scathing review. But they didn’t care about that—the point was that it had been noticed by the newspapers. It wasn’t sarcasm. They really meant “So you’re now part of the music world.” I had achieved a kind of fame. Even a bad review was fame, among my family.

BY THE TIME THE CONCERT AT THE CINEMATHEQUE
came around in May, just a month later, there was more music ready for performance. This turned out to be a full-length concert. On the program was a duet for Jon and myself: “Piece in the Shape of a Square” (a pun on Erik Satie’s
Trois Morceaux en Forme de Poire
—
Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear
); another duet, “In Again Out Again,” for one piano four hands, for myself and Steve Reich, a friend and fellow composition student from our Juilliard days who already was making a name for himself as a composer; “How Now,” for me on solo piano; and Dorothy playing “Strung Out,” for solo violin. As can be seen from the titles it was a “geometric” setting, the music stands and music making shapes in the performing space.

With these works I was making pieces that had a visual as well as a musical structure. For “Piece in the Shape of a Square,” the sheet music was set on twenty-four music stands arranged in the shape of a square, with six stands per side. In addition, there was another square of twenty-four music stands with sheet music on the inside, so that there was a square inside a square, with two sets of music and no space between the two squares. The two flute players, Jon and I, began facing each other, one on the outside, and the other inside. While playing, each of us started moving to the right, so that as I was going in one direction, Jon was going in the other. We would meet halfway around the square, and meet again when we finally arrived at our starting places.

For the unfolding of the music I was still using additive and subtractive processes, but instead of repeating one note or a group of notes, the music continued to add notes to an ascending or descending scale until a complete scale was reached. When we were both halfway around the square, the music we were playing began to do a retrograde (going backward), repeating itself in reverse. It’s as if you counted to ten, and then counted back from ten to one again. In the extreme parts of the piece, the music was at its most diverse, and as Jon and I began to approach each other toward the end, the music became more similar, arriving finally, in this way, at its beginning.

“In Again Out Again,” the duet for one piano with four hands, had the same structure as “Piece in the Shape of a Square,” except that Steve and I were sitting at the same piano. The upper part and the lower part of the music were reflections of each other, just as it was for the two flutes. In the middle, the piece could sound very wild, because both parts were extreme, but as it returned to the beginning, again, the parts became increasingly similar. The music went in and out and then back in, as described in the title.

With “Strung Out,” the sheet music was taped to the wall, “strung out” in the shape of an L. Dorothy began to play while facing the wall, with her back to the audience. As she read the music, she walked along, and when the sheets made a right-hand turn down the side wall, Dorothy turned, too, following the L formed by the two walls.

By this time, I had become good friends with the “minimalist” sculptors, among them Sol LeWitt and Donald Judd. They were older than me, and in fact, they were the people for whom the word “minimalism” was invented. It wasn’t invented for musicians like La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, or me. It was applied to LeWitt, Judd, Robert Morris and Carl Andre, among others. The term “minimalist music” was simply transferred to us, in spite of the fact that it referred to a generation that was, roughly speaking, eight to ten years older than us, which at that age was the difference between being twenty-eight and thirty-eight—the difference between being someone who had an established career and someone who was still loading trucks on Twelfth Avenue.

The second important part of the presentation that evening was the use of amplification. The intention was to separate the geometric shapes from the source of the sound, so that as Dorothy was walking and playing in one place, the sound of the music would come out of a speaker in another place. That was how I began working with amplified music. Those pieces didn’t really need to be amplified, but I liked the quality it produced. In other words, the sound itself was amplified, but the amplification itself had nothing to do with the necessities of the piece.

When I played at the
Cinematheque
, Richard Serra and my other art friends loaded the truck and we moved in all our equipment. If it weren’t for the painters and sculptors who were my friends, we wouldn’t have had the manpower to even set up the concert. Soon thereafter, I played in Don Judd’s loft. In time, I would present concerts in museums, and in this way my music became part of the art world. My friends who were painters would go to the galleries and say, “You have to put on a concert of Philip’s.”

“When am I supposed to do it?” the gallerists would reply.

“On Saturday, when everybody’s there.”

Not only did Leo Castelli, for one, agree to that, but he agreed to pay us. We were playing in the galleries first, and then we were playing museums. It was as if the artists were saying, “This is our music, too.” My music had found a home, and the art world became its beachhead.

What I wanted was a high-concept music that was aligned with a high-concept theater, art, dance, and painting. My generation of people—Terry Riley, Steve Reich, La Monte Young, Meredith Monk, Jon Gibson, and another dozen or so composers—were writing and playing music for the dance and theater world. It seemed to us that for the first time, a music world that was equivalent to the world of painting, theater, and dance began to emerge. The music world now could say, “This is the music that goes with the art.”

When I speak about the basics of music being the language of music, that in itself is abstract.
The
high concept of art is language—I mean specifically that. When La Monte Young was working with sound, he was working with the idea of a kind of sound—how it would work, how the overtones worked, and how it affected you emotionally. I was working with rhythmic structures and with the kind of epiphany that is associated with that music, as opposed to the Doors singing “Light My Fire.” Most people prefer “Light My Fire.” But, on the other hand, there are composers writing music that stands on its own. They make a base for themselves in terms of language, form, content, and process. These are all concepts, but are they concepts that are independent of feelings? No, I think they are the concepts that make transcendent feelings possible and understandable. I emphasize transcendence and epiphany because these experiences go together with language. To say you could have one without the other would be to say you could have a fire without logs and a match.

WHEN I HAD RETURNED TO NEW YORK IN 1967,
I had discovered that the people around me at the time—painters and sculptors like Bob Rauschenberg, Sol LeWitt, and Richard Serra—all listened to rock ’n’ roll. They did not listen to modern music. It was not in their record collections.

When I asked them, “Do you listen to modern music?” I found they weren’t interested at all.
None
of them listened to modern music: Stockhausen, Boulez, or Milton Babbitt—forget it. You’d never find that music there. There was more of a connection, for example, between artists and writers. What Ginsberg was doing in poetry and what Burroughs was doing in literature were not that different from what was going on in the art world.

“Why is there a disconnect here?” I asked myself.

Consciously, or to some degree unconsciously, I was looking for the music that
should be
in their record collections. If Rauschenberg and Johns were looking at painting and saying, “What could go into a painting and what goes on in a painting?” I asked myself, “What is the music that goes with that art?”

I started going to the Fillmore East, then the current hip rock-’n’-roll venue on Second Avenue near Sixth Street (only a few steps away from where I would be living in 1984). The place was full of kids, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three. I was thirty years old and felt like an old man going in. The place was packed, and it was loud, and it was juicy. I loved it. I heard big bands like Jefferson Airplane and Frank Zappa at the Fillmore, and I was totally enamored with the sight and sound of a wall of speakers vibrating and blasting out high-volume, rhythmically driven music. I knew that music. I had grown up with it. I had liked it when I was a kid, and when I heard it coming out of my own speakers, I said, “This is good.” Yet I also knew that rock ’n’ roll was anathema to classical music people. They would never accept music that was amplified and with the kind of bass lines I was running. I knew that was going to make a lot of people angry, and I didn’t care.

Look at it from my point of view: there I was, living downtown. I’d come from Paris, where I’d been working with Ravi Shankar. There were other composers like myself in New York, and I met them soon after. But when I first came, the biggest thing I heard was amplified music at the Fillmore East. It had the same rhythmic intensity that I had heard in Ravi Shankar’s concert music. That became a formal model, and I would say that the technology became an emotional model. It seemed like a completely natural progression to me, coming from Boulanger and Raviji and Alla Rakha, then returning to the United States and meeting rock ’n’ roll head-on.

In terms of the
image
of the sound, the fact that no one was doing it in experimental concert music not only didn’t bother me, it interested me. In Europe, what was being presented as new music at that time was intellectual—abstract, quite beautiful, but with very little emotional punch to it. I wanted music that would be the opposite of that.

The early music I composed was inspired more by artists and by rock ’n’ roll. Amplification added a content to the music that may have seemed alien to some people. Almost no one was going into the world of amplified music, or into the world of structural music. On top of that, amplification was a style of presentation that immediately set the music apart. If you look back, even pieces like “Music in Fifths” and “Music in Similar Motion,” which I wrote in 1968, are well articulated. They work through a process of additive and subtractive music laid out almost as clearly as if in a textbook. However, a major part of the impact of the music comes through the amplification itself, which raises the threshold experience to a higher level.

Now that I was back, I was surrounded by new ideas coming from a new generation of young performers and artists. Moreover, there was the environment that I lived in: hearing Allen Ginsberg reading
Kaddish
, or being around “weird” artists like Ray Johnson, for instance. These kinds of ideas were boiling over, pulling the downtown artistic community in a multitude of directions. Without planning or necessarily trying, my work naturally became a part of it.

AT THE SAME TIME AS I WAS MAKING NEW MUSIC,
I was looking for some other kind of work to bring in money. My cousin Jene had already moved into construction, and there was a lot of building going on in SoHo, where industrial lofts were being changed into living spaces and studios for artists.