Words Without Music: A Memoir

Every station of any size had a bookstall that carried the whole Penguin Books series, brought out from London. I clearly remember reading George Orwell’s Burmese Days between Lucknow and Patna Junction, and Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers between Patna Junction and Siliguri.

Mashhad is considered a holy city, where saints are buried. We planned to spend a few days but soon found that whole parts of the city were closed to us. There were no signs or warnings. If we wanted to enter a part of the city that, unknown to us, was closed to foreigners, a crowd of people would quietly but suddenly block access. It was not violent, but it was decisive. We never were able to see any of the religious sites of Iran.

was interested in the acoustics and how they worked, so Allen would go on the stage and recite the famous W. B. Yeats poem “Sailing to Byzantium.” The tourists who were around would sit down in the seats in the amphitheater and listen, because here’s someone with a big head of hair who looked like a professor—I don’t think anyone knew it was Allen Ginsberg—and the guards didn’t stop him. He would walk to the center of the stage and recite, and it was amazing how beautiful and clear the poem would sound in that open environment.

Finally, in a gentle and really kind way, he asked me if I had ever considered the possibility of going to music school. Somehow, I wasn’t surprised. I thanked him for his suggestion and time spent with me and left.

I was often taken by surprise by the anger over the new music I was writing. I was widely considered a musical idiot. I found this unexpectedly funny. The thing was, I knew what I knew and they didn’t.

If you don’t know what to do, there’s actually a chance of doing something new

The way things changed during my professional lifetime is, in part, the subject of this book.

Some years afterward, I came across Dr. Mishra’s book The Textbook of Yoga Psychology. Firmly based on Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, I do not know of a better book or a more fully outlined account of the Indian yoga system and its philosophy.

Albert once described his whole life to me in the following sentences: “I began playing the clarinet when I was six, the piano when I was eight, composing when I was twelve, conducting when I was sixteen. Then I gave up conducting, then composing, then piano and finally clarinet.”

The New York Correspondence School seemed to be mainly Ray Johnson himself. He would send out postcards to his friends, usually just images or some enigmatic remarks. Really, it could be most anything. I didn’t reply to him, I just collected the postcards, and they would arrive always unexpectedly.