Words Without Music: A Memoir

As someone who primarily reads fiction, I'm finding it hard to base my assessment of this book on its structure rather than on the quality of its content (I mean, Philip Glass only has one life to draw from).

My first complaint about the book is purely technical: there were portions that were inaccessible to a non-musician. These portions are mostly towards the beginning of the book, but I though that Glass could have done a better job of explaining these elements to an untrained audience.

My second complaint is that he kind of seems like a jerk. Although, since he wrote the book himself, there are no explicit criticisms of his behavior, it's not hard to imagine where his single-minded focus on his art might have negatively impacted his relationships. I can't dock him points for that, per se, but I do think he could have done a better job of deciding what to include here. For example, according to Wikipedia, he's been married four times, yet he only mentions two of his wives by name in the book.

I'm a fan of Glass's music, and he certainly has led an interesting life, which I greatly enjoyed learning about. My favorite thing about biographies and memoirs is discovering relationships between notable figures that I otherwise would not have known existed. Glass has been in around and in the avant-garde art scene long enough to see his life intersect with, among others, Allen Ginsberg, Doris Lessing, and Samuel Beckett, and I came away from the book with a better understanding of art in the 20th century.

Somewhat unexpectedly for a memoir by a composer, very little of this book concerned music as such. However, it was perceptive about art, the transmission of knowledge within and across fields, and the act of creativity more generally, and all of that spoke to me at a very deep level despite the fact that my own vocation could not be more different than his in some ways. In other ways, we are exactly the same — what is research if not a creative endeavor? This book is also an excellent addition to the canon of recollections about the downtown New York art scene — if you are into that sort of thing — back when renting a second apartment in the East Village to serve as a studio was a financially unremarkable accomplishment.