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Could a new composer replicate this? is too broad a question. Rather,
- could they support themselves with a blue collar job?
- could they support a family with said job, as the primary breadwinner?
- could they do it in X, where X is the geographic location of the cultural center of their art form?
Glass was lucky enough to hit all three. Today's young artists might be lucky to hit 1, and maybe the internet helps with 3 a bit, but if you work in an art form that really, really needs in person connection (eg theater, or you need to be where the gallerists and dealers are), I guess it doesnt solve the problem. 2 is very difficult.
The perfect trifecta is when you have a dense urban center that happens to be the center of your art form, but still has enough of a rough edge to it that you can live and work cheaply. New York, 1970s, classical music. Berlin, visual arts, 2000s. Or you can create the scene yourself given enough mass and energy (see: Atlanta, 1990s, rap, or NYC, 1980s, hip hop).
The next Glass is therefore more likely working in an urban coffee shop than a suburban landscaping crew, living with roomies or parents rather than alone, has no children or spouse to support, and exists on the fringes of a city like London, NY, or Berlin.
What do you mean? It's still normal to have a "blue collar job", isn't it? Not to mention "retail"? Whether or not one is an artist. "Many" people do that and support their family that way. And it's still normal for artists to have a day job. Not just for young ones.
I don't think the Philip Glass story is all that different from today's artists'. More retail, less steel mill.
if anything, there is more awareness now that a day job is normal. And that the main concern is that this job needs to not be "toxic". That is, it needs to leave you enough energy to do your art. That's the main requirement.
I agree, other than the part where he worked at a steel mill. But that was only 5 months.
Glass clearly had a can-do attitude that not many of us possess.
And yes, supporting a family on a single income these days is difficult (I do it), and you wouldn't be doing random plumbing jobs any more!
Frameworks and examples now exist showing how to gain this freedom. Jacob Lund Fisker[0]'s ERE[1] in particular is an interesting system theory based approach .
I have a friend who lives near NYC and is a theatre director for a company in St Louis. Travels in person 1 week a month and remote with Zoom the other 3 weeks. It pays better than what he gets in his local market and allows him to support his family and spend more time with his children. Opportunities and life has changed significantly since COVID.
> “I could manage quite well working as few as twenty to twenty-five hours a week—in other words, three full days or five half days. Even after I returned from Paris or India in the late 1960s and well into the 1970s, I could take care of my family by working no more than three or four days a week.”
Would today's youth, even if equally gifted and ambitious, have the same opportunity? I think now there is such a great imbalance in cost of living and pay rates, it may no longer be possible to follow a similar path and get similar results.
Sure, you could move out to rural nowhere, where housing costs next to nothing. Find some part time job, and live your life.
I'm from a place like that, and a bunch of my old classmates from HS have lived like that their entire adult lives working part time. They work 2-3-4 days a week.
Of course, you'll be sacrificing lots of materialistic things, but that's a given.
In New York particularly this could maybe work. They have strong blue collar unions so benefits and pay would be actually livable. Plumbing anywhere is pretty viable. Faulkner worked in construction and did a similar thing. I am working in tech to fund my creative pursuits, an industry on its way to being blue collar
IME, my impression, is that far more people today are in 'survival' mode - the fight/fligh/freeze response: not trying to create, build, and self-actualize but to survive, and ridiculing - as people in that mode do - art, humanities (and humanitarianism), knowledge, etc. Advocating the value in those things is now transgressive, IME. 'That's all pointless!' they say - and yes it's pointless if your only goal is to survive a week or maybe a year, and make nothing better of the world.
>Would today's youth, even if equally gifted and ambitious, have the same opportunity?
Not the exact same opportunities, but the same type.
The type of opportunities that work like this have never been there for the taking, only for the making.
It's simply impossible today, in the same way that my dad was able to pay his way through college with summer jobs is also impossible today.
Many of my cultural heroes were ignored by academia
Ignored, or the jobs just weren't there?
A department head once told me that she couldn't hire any new tenure-track faculty. Turnover at the school is so rare, and when a position does open up, there are literally hundreds of highly qualified applicants. It's been that way for decades, particularly in the humanities and arts.
She noted that among the existing faculty were several tenured professors who had been hired in the previous century when their respective areas of study were hot. Even though their expertise was outdated and students weren't signing up for their classes, they were still on the books until they voluntarily retired ... or died.
Fresh Air had a great interview with Glass in which he talked about his career and the various jobs he had to take as he developed his music. He was driving a cab in NYC in the 70s and he said it was very dangerous. It's the top interview in this list:
...they are all very poor people who follow as a trade, what other people pursue as a pastime.
From The Wealth of Nations:
http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN4.html#I.10.6
Hunting and fishing, the most important employments of mankind in the rude state of society, become in its advanced state their most agreeable amusements, and they pursue for pleasure what they once followed from necessity. In the advanced state of society, therefore, they are all very poor people who follow as a trade, what other people pursue as a pastime. Fishermen have been so since the time of Theocritus. A poacher is every-where a very poor man in Great Britain. In countries where the rigour of the law suffers no poachers, the licensed hunter is not in a much better condition. The natural taste for those employments makes more people follow them than can live comfortably by them, and the produce of their labour, in proportion to its quantity, comes always too cheap to market to afford any thing but the most scanty subsistence to the labourers.
There are a lot of jobs in teaching and most are not tenured. And that's probably true of many disciplines, not just art. Many are not even full time. So... depending what you are looking for, it may not be a comfortable situation - but it might be good enough as a day job. At least if teaching art is within your tolerance for a "not toxic" job... From an economics perspective, the fact that plenty of people teach art without tenure may have something to do with why so little tenure is available.
The rise of social media and 'smart culture' has led to huge, sudden interest over the past decade in all sorts of niche or esoteric subjects. Talented people are making a good living at math videos, TikTok tutoring, playing instruments on TikTok, reaction videos, food videos, etc. In the '90s, if you were a 'philosophy buff' your options were limited to academia. Now there is a devoted, captive audience for practically anything you can think of.
In the art world, I'm convinced ignored is correct. Academics often have very different goals and produce very different art than those outside academia.
Also tenure Glass would have been just different than blue collar Glass we had.
Yeah, I think a lot of people miss that these jobs opened up when the population was growing much faster due to the baby boom, plus people are living longer. Things have changed since the 1950s-80s.
> Just imagine reading Siddhartha or The Glass Bead Game at a steel mill—but that’s Philip Glass for you.
I don't know what this means. I worked a lot of "blue collar jobs" in my time, and I'd often see people reading "serious books" on break. It's not uncommon. I read a lot of Hemingway because of recommendations I got from a dude I used to work with cleaning concrete truck drums with jackhammers.
I'd almost say high concept books pair better with blue collar work. I'm mentally exhausted after a day of meetings or programming, but if I'm doing manual labor I end up physically exhausted, not mentally exhausted
His experiences are completely alien now and not reproducible today.
How is it possible to get any blue collar job at all without extensive training and certifications on your own time and with your own money in that very specific field?
How is it possible to not only be able to support your family on 3 working days per week, but to find a boss willing to hire you as a part time worker for what seems like a high wage?
How was he able to seemingly be unaffected by frequent job hopping and employment gaps that today seem to be as disadvantageous as having face tattoos?
My own grandfather told me stories of lying about knowing how to drive a tractor-trailer, and learning on the job. Now we have licensing, background checks, reference checks, and all manner of ladder-pulling that is leaving the younger generation without the same opportunities.
Another factor that is overlooked is the tradeoff between interest rates and employment. The Federal Reserve, by law, must target maximum employment first, and then 3% inflation second. It flagrantly disobeys this law with zero consequences. For the first time since the 70s or 90s, we had a job market that favored employees, and all levels of government treated it like a policy emergency to stop immediately. https://x.com/mucha_carlos/status/1791621965343560152
And yet so many people do it. Really.
Many stories tell that one secret is "showing up". For many jobs, the boss has a long list of ideal requirements. Even a retail manager would loooooove to find someone with solid experience and recommendations (and is a buddy, jk, or am I?). Anyway. And then also keeps around people who simply reliably show up.
this is sadly true. as much as i "want" the old stories like OP to be true now (they may still be in rural areas i suspect), those times are basically over. i suppose one could do jobs like fruitpicking (totally unskilled) or other things like that but those employers dont want someone fluffing around for 3 days a week they want your life
I mean, I could probably get you a job washing dishes in 15 minutes. You are not picky, are you?
Labor Ready is always hiring.
The problem with allowing "too many" people to have "too much" money is that suddenly rich people have to gasp wait in line for things!
I guarantee you that a non zero amount of thought like this is in the hearts of folks making rate cut/hike decisions.
Philip Glass and Steve Reich worked together as removals men. For some reason I find it fascinating that the two greats of minimalist composing did this. It shouldn’t be that strange, I have plenty of struggling musician friends who work day jobs together. Perhaps it’s the fact that they both became greats, or just my reverence for them that makes it seem fascinating (or perhaps it's just the mental image of Philip Glass and Steve Reich moving a sofa up some stairs!)
The reason is simple, Western classical music was extremely, extremely (and it's impossible to stress this enough: extremely) conservative in late 20th century. Anything that's not part of the canon Schoenbergian atonalism, or Mahlerian Romanticism was considered "wrong", "illogical" etc. Believe it or not WCM had a just as rich of a history and stream of movements as any other tradition of art, but by mid-to-late 20th century academia -- one by one -- killed every single vehicle of creativity for simply being "incorrect". Here is a theory from 1880s and 1920s from a German musicologist that "proves" mathematically that this music is incorrect and should be rewritten.
No artist can make rent money in that atmosphere.
Artists like Steve Reich and Philip Glass were gigantic innovators, they were iconoclasts, they wanted WCM to go way beyond what it was stuck at in 1970s. Of course they spent decades being considered a charlatan by their colleagues. Philip Glass in an interview explains how, when he founded the Philip Glass Ensemble and started producing his early (brutally minimalist) music people tried "helping" him by teaching basic musical composition, and told him that he needs to learn basics first before writing music like that. It's a farce really, from 2020s having listened to 21st century post-minimalism, if you go back and listen to early minimalism in 1970s and 1980s (think, Music for 18 musicians, Music in 12 parts, Einstein on the beach, in C, Glass Violin Concerto, De Stijl etc) it's just haunting how creative their music is. They had to invent everything from scratch! You have to go all the way back to 1640s Froberger to find anything that remotely sounds idiomatic within the tradition, while aggressively responding to their contemporaries like the extreme-complexity of Boulez etc. It's really unfortunate, my sense is, modern music education creates very conservative, robotic craftsmen who play technically perfectly but are unable to see innovation and artistic response.
I would like to say 21st century WCM is in a much better situation and there is more creativity, but I would say it's likely a marginal improvement over late 20th century, rather than a significant transformation.
Removal sounds right up their alley
He is such a humble guy. When I was dating my wife about 12 years ago, he gave a piano concert for free in Battery Park. You could walk right up to him: no barriers, no bodyguards. How many musicians of his caliber would do that?
It's inspiring for sure, and I think this post will have some impact on my life. Giving me a stronger/better attitude basically.
But I'd like to take a moment for people who live lives like Philip Glass but don't have that famous composer label attached to them. There are so many anonymous people going through such a crazy amount of work that they do and we never hear of them.
I suppose that at least I think of them now.
That's good to hear.
Lest you feel any guilt for how you may have felt before reading this piece, I have to say that artists are going to art — whether they are successful or not. It's what they do and it's something that they cannot stop doing.
I read once that a passenger in his cab told him "You have the same name as a very famous composer."
I once had Wolfgang Pauli's cousin use my checkstand at the grocery store. I noticed his last name because he wrote a check. When I asked if was "Pauli like the exclusion principle?" he got very excited and hung around for an hour just to chat.
I don't miss checks, but that was pretty cool.
For anyone who's interested there's a BBC radio programme in which Glass speaks about his life in New York in the early 70s, driving a cab and finding his way to recognition as a composer. Lots of interesting colour about life in a city which was on the verge of bankruptcy and yet, partly because of that, had opportunities for the impecunious artist.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b065tqz1?partner=uk.co.bbc...
My favourite bit is his, years later, encounter with Martin Scorsese who, on learning he used to drive a cab, was surprised to discover that Glass had never seen Scorsese's film "Taxi Driver". Glass replies that when "Taxi Driver" was released he drove a cab four nights a week and so, when he had time off, he hardly felt the need to go and watch a film about cab driving ;-)
John Adams wrote in his memoir about trying something similar around the same time, but with less success. When he moved out to the Bay Area he ended up taking a job as a longshoreman at the port. He wrote that he had this Marxist fantasy of laboring with the proletariat during the day and composing avant-garde music during the night.
But the job left him so exhausted when he got home that he could barely read a few pages of a book let alone compose any new music.
He didn't really pick up composing again until he happened to get a job teaching music in SF.
And Laurie Anderson got a job at McDonalds. But somehow I think with her it was kind of part of her art, ha ha.
> Standing behind a cash register in her uniform, Anderson became practically invisible, even to her friends. "They would come in and I would be like 3 feet away from them," she says. "And I wasn’t trying to disguise anything. But I wasn’t supposed to be there, so I wasn’t."
Working as a janitor, I learned that people will talk around the janitor like they are not even there.
In Philip Glass's autobiography he says when people accuse him of selling out by having his music in movies and ads, he tells he got into music to make money.
I've got an insane amount of respect for that honesty.
The book was really a fascinating read.
I always find those criticism hilarious. Glass with his "sold out" style made more innovation in WCM tradition than pretty much anyone else in 20th century who lived before him, except perhaps Schoenberg who came close to his levels of iconoclasm. Once you're that good and creative, "you sold out" stops being a valid criticism. Bach would poop out a cantata weekly for the church he was a Kapellmeister at, because his job was to write music for the church for people to listen to during various ceremonies. That's not selling out, that's just working for money.
I live in Baltimore, home of Philip Glass (as far as I know, he still lives in Baltimore) and a lot of my friends went to a famous Peabody conservatory. Even after graduation, a lot of them either entirely left music or struggling musicians, who have blue collar jobs.
I remember going to one the local bars and saw a girl working as bartender(she quite attractive), years before that, I saw her playing cello in one of the concerts.
One interesting tidbit I learned when the solo pianist George Winston died, is that he'd been the driver for Larry Flynt.
I don’t get this piece. I don’t know who honest broker is but I’ll take it he’s a Philip glass (PG) fan. So I’ll start there.
What is the difference between PG doing blue collar work and anyone else? Why is PG having to drive a taxi or work at a plant any different?
The article seems to want to praise PG by, what I’m reading anyway, almost patronizing him. But there is an undertone that insults people who have to work for a living and there’s no glamour there. I doubt I will read a “the blue collar jobs of joe nobody” expounding joe’s salt of the earth character for having to make ends meet.
I’m not posting this with sour grapes, I just genuinely don’t get what is different between PG working and anyone else working that same job that warrants writing about it.
To be fair it’s not the first time. Reading people waxing poetic about Charles Bukowski’s life like he relished in the down-trodden shit of it all is just makes them sound pretentious.
I think HN readers are missing the point. It's not about the money, or opportunity to (or lack of) make living off a blue collar job today.
Here's what I got from reading this article. No job is beneath me. I once scoffed at an opportunity to work at a supermarket when I was between employment. But looking back, maybe I should have. I believe strongly that everyone should work at least once in their lifetime to work at menial/low-level job. I think working at menial jobs like in retail when I was young helped me a lot, even though I didn't realize it at that moment. By working at minimum wage jobs at restaurant, retail, etc..., I've learned to respect others, no matter what they do for living, like a janitor or truck driver or a fastfood worker.
Also there is something about physical labor and working with your bare hands that makes me feel so alive and fulfilled.Perhaps, I am wired and built to work on physical things. Even as an old guy, since I started fixing physical things like broken toilet, or making physical things, even if it's just assembling Ikea furnitures, or tinkering with hardware, I feel more well and alive compared to when I'd been working as a dev. Maybe that is why some of high-level tech workers leave their high-paying career to work at a farm or become a truck driver.
That moment when you realize your dishwasher installer is a real person.
That's an inspiring story!
I was never really a fan of Glass' stuff (but always respected his talent). This gives me a reason to reconsider my stance.
I may still not like his music, but I can't help but admire him.
Most artists can't make a living from their art. So they do other things to supplement that income. Its not glamorous. It sucks.
I don't know why people look down on trust-fund kids. Being born smart ,as this author clearly was- is just another innate advantage, like being born rich. It's that the latter is denigrated. High IQ, or music talent, or sports talent is just as unearned as having rich parents. Yet we're supposed to downplay or feel ashamed of the latter.
Could any spoiled software engineer today do this