Words Without Music
Philip Glass's 2015 memoir is the book of a working composer rather than a celebrity. Born in Baltimore to a Lithuanian Jewish family, he absorbed music in his father's record store, studied at Juilliard, drove a New York taxi for years while composing, and traveled to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger and to India to work with Ravi Shankar. Glass is generous about influences and frank about money. He shows what it actually takes to invent a new musical language, how Einstein on the Beach got produced, how the Philip Glass Ensemble was held together by sheer effort. The voice is dry, plain, and disarmingly modest. Readers expecting downtown gossip will get some, but the book is mostly about discipline, friendship, and the long apprenticeship of a major American composer. One of the best musicians' memoirs of the last decade.
What you might want to know about Words Without Music
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Philip Glass's memoir of becoming a composer, from Baltimore record store to Paris with Boulanger to downtown Manhattan.
Words Without Music was written by Philip Glass, published in 2015 by Liveright Publishing Corporation.
Words Without Music is 416 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Words Without Music takes most readers 6 to 9 hours to finish.
Words Without Music is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
