Spending the rest of the work day under the watchful eye of Philip Glass. It‘s always hammock weather inside!❤️🎹📚
"It is alchemy that takes the sounds of the city and turns them into music."
"[The House Committee on Un-American Activities] put Joe in the crosshairs and he took the microphone and he turned the tables on them. He roasted them....He castigated them thoroughly and let them know that they were complete idiots and beggars at the table of art."
"I was really looking for a language of music that was rooted in the grammar of music itself. I was working in a very foundational way, building the language of the music that I was going to be working with for the next ten years."
"I've been working with Mr. Philip Glass on music technique. My impression is that he is a very unusual person, and I believe that someday he will do something very important in the world of music."
-Nadia Boulanger on Philip Glass-she wrote a recommendation to try to renew his Fulbright. She never told him of her efforts.
"'Philip,' he said, 'I am following in the footsteps of Beethoven and Bach. But really, they were such giants, and their footsteps were so far apart, that it is if I am leaping after them.'"
"Fritz Reiner, the famous Hungarian conductor, was fascinating to watch. He was somewhat stout, hunched over with round shoulders, and his arm and baton movements were tiny-you almost had to look at him with binoculars to see what he was doing. But those tiny movements forced the players to peer at him intently, and then he would suddenly raise his arms up over his head and the entire orchestra would go crazy."
The first of a series of quotes I marked from Words Without Music, and possibly my favorite one.
Words Without Music was an incredible book. I checked it out of the library solely because I liked one composition of Philip Glass's, but I had no idea he was as powerful a writer as he is a composer. Glass's voice is so well-defined, and he reminds me somewhat of both Holden Caulfield and Douglas Adams. I strongly recommend to music fans.
Intro to Philip Glass's Music (my favorites):
Mad Rush
Metamorphosis
The Hours
Études
Music in 12 Parts
Loved this story about a tour in Europe in 1971, with some other artists who were getting some negative audience response to their works. An audience member came up during Glass' performance and started banging on his keyboard. Glass slugged the guy in the jaw and went back to playing.
Enjoying this audiobook. Good narrator - sounds reasonably like Glass himself. Simultaneously amused and jealous of all his youthful encounters with other young luminaries.
The point was that the world of music—its language, beauty, and mystery—was already urging itself on me. Some shift had already begun. Music was no longer a metaphor for the real world somewhere out there. It was becoming the opposite. The “out there” stuff was the metaphor and the real part was, and is to this day, the music.
Words Without Music: A Memoir | 
