When Philip Glass Installed Dishwashers
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David Hackett15. May 2023
When Philip Glass Installed Dishwashers: How Composers Have Made Ends Meet over the Centuries
Making money is art. And working is art. And good business is the best art - Andy Warhol
Anyone who has ever attempted a creative career will know that eternal question: can I pursue my artistic dreams and make money at the same time?
And whether you’re an aspiring composer, painter, writer or other artistic performer, you will soon discover the answer to that question goes something along the lines of - no, maybe, not easily.
Making a livelihood as an artist is to experience capitalism at its most hard-nosed and unforgiving. The spoils are always spread unevenly. Most of the wealth ends up in the hands of a very small minority while the rest go chronically underpaid. No matter how talented you are, you will very rarely make a sufficient income from your art alone.
But for composers there is a silver lining. As a musician, the chances are you have other skills, such as teaching, playing or conducting to fall back on. And it is usually through one of these that you will be able to keep a roof above your head. The tricky part is, of course, to ensure that your paid work doesn’t impinge too far onto your creative time.
If you were a composer living at some point over past six hundred years, there were various ways in which you could manage this delicate balancing act – doing what you were born to do, but without starving.
To begin with, your career choices were limited.
Back in the Middle Ages, the best and most secure living for a composer was to work for the church, either as a music director or organist. But there were obvious restrictions over what you could and could not do. Not least you were only allowed to write sacred music.
After 1450 two things happened – the wealth and prestige of the Catholic church began a slow decline, while the European nobility increased in size and political authority. Many top aristocratic families began to employ a musical court. While the composer-musicians they hired were still subject to certain restrictions, their responsibilities were more varied, and they were given a freer hand over what they could write.
There was of course a third route, which was to provide music for the stage. In medieval and early renaissance times, this did not exactly offer a glittering career path. It would normally involve turning out music (as both composer and performer) for a theatre troupe, an often precarious and impoverished existence.
Theatre work would not remain that way forever. The rise of opera after 1600 offered composers an alternative means towards prosperity. The downside was the intense competition to produce a successful hit. But for the lucky few who could get the top, there was big money to be made.
Up until 1800, you were often treated no better than a court servant.
If you worked as a composer for the church or nobility, you had to endure a lowly social status. In an aristocratic household you not only had to dress and behave a certain way, you were also not always granted basic human rights. When JS Bach (1685 – 1750) once had the impudence to inform his employee, the Duke of Weimar, that he wished to move on from his role as Konzertmeister, the duke was so incensed that he threw his prize composer in jail for a month in the hope of forcing him to change his mind. The ploy did not however work on a man whose genius was probably only matched by his stubbornness.
Things only improved when Haydn broke free and laid a platform for others to follow.
The same court servitude affected Joseph Haydn (1732 – 1809) in the late eighteenth century. Although Haydn was by then one of Europe’s most famous composers, he remained trapped at the remote estate of his aristocratic employers on the Austro-Hungarian border, with only limited periods of leave. He was forced to turn down many lucrative opportunities that came his way.
Thankfully his fortunes would change after his main employer died in 1790. Although Haydn was kept on at the estate at a reduced salary, he was also granted the professional freedom he had craved for so long. He immediately made his way to London, where for the first time professional, independent orchestras were putting on ticketed concerts for the general public. Various impresarios got hold of the great man, offering him large sums of money for a symphony, or an opera, and Haydn was in no mood to miss out. In just two tours of Britain, he made as much money as he had earned in twenty years in his old job.
After 1800, there were new, independent ways for you to earn a crust.
Haydn was one of the very first to benefit from a changing social order. Ticketed concerts, along with a sharp rise in musical publishing houses, were allowing composers a measure of independence from their old, wealthy patrons for the first time. The new public concerts also allowed virtuosic composer-performers of the nineteenth century (such as Hummel, Chopin, Liszt, Paganini, Brahms, Rubinstein and Saint-Saens) to earn large sums of money, irrespective of how their compositions fared.
Teaching can be a grind… but also an inspiration.
Whether or not you were a performer, almost every composer has turned to teaching at some point, some more than others, and some better than others. Beethoven for example had a reputation for yelling at students (unless they were pretty countesses) and he once bit one of his students on the arm after they had messed up a scale. But Beethoven was far from alone in regarding the profession with a certain dread.
Teaching could be taxing work for those who relied upon it as their main income. In middle age, Gabriel Faure (1845 – 1924) found himself endlessly traipsing across Paris giving piano lessons at various addresses. Such an existence dragged him down: he was often tired and depressed, and his creative work suffered. His fortunes only improved when he was appointed inspector of provincial music conservatories by the Paris Conservatoire, with better pay and more free time. He later became the Conservatoire director, by which point he had the authority to ensure his job description allowed him ample scope for creative work.
But there are also examples of composers who found the so-called drudgery of teaching beneficial to their art. Hailing from a modest background, Gustav Holst (1874 – 1934) was earning a wage even before he had graduated from London 's Royal College of Music. After a few dispiriting years as an orchestral trombonist, he found his career and finances at a low ebb and was forced to take a series of teaching jobs, firstly at a girls’ prep school, then at an adult education college in south London. Surprisingly, the possibilities of his new career appeared to release in him a whole new level of creativity. From this point onwards, he began to write some of his best and most original music, including his famous Planets suite. Holst later regarded his achievements in teaching to be every bit as important as his compositions.
Music does not even have to be your main career.
Not infrequently, composers have earned a living entirely separately from their musical endeavours. Alexander Borodin (1833 – 1887) was known primarily as a scientist rather than composer in his lifetime. He gained a considerable reputation as a pioneer in organic chemistry, particularly in his work on aldehydes. Simultaneously, he spent eighteen years of his spare time writing his grand opera, Prince Igor, which although left unfinished is an undisputed masterpiece in its own right.
The early twentieth-century American avant-gardist, Charles Ives (1874 – 1954), had an even less likely second career. By night, horrified residents in his New York apartment block would listen to the composer’s various cacophonous experiments on his piano. But by day Ives had a sober job in insurance, a career he pursued with such success that he was eventually able to set up his own firm and retire wealthy in his mid-fifties. Oddly enough, this release from the day job did not make him more creative and he stopped writing music at around the same time, despite living for another three decades.
If Ives represents an interesting duality of careers, the life of Russian composer, Vladimir Dukelsky (1903 – 1969), was a case of near double identity. In the 1920s, Dukelsky was a promising young modernist composer living in Paris, widely regarded as Prokofiev’s protégé. On the either side of the Atlantic he was building a completely different musical alter-ego: working in the US under the name of Vernon Duke, he became a popular songwriter and composer of Broadway musicals. One identity funded the lifestyle of the other and allowed him to keep writing his more serious music. But this was obviously not a trick every composer could pull off.
In the end, it doesn’t matter how you earn money…
Like opera before it, writing music for the big screen has offered another means towards making big bucks. But it is a hyper-competitive industry, where only a very few of its aspirants succeed – and that is to assume you even want to write film music.
The vast majority of composers have continued to get inventive in other ways. The enfant terrible of modern music, John Cage (1912 – 1992), once worked for a New York advertising agency, running campaigns and designing business and Christmas cards (perhaps it was from such a work environment that Cage eventually had the idea of placing various items of office stationery down the strings of his piano!) Cage’s interest in graphic design would have a clear influence upon the creation of his own highly characteristic, non-traditional musical scores.
In more recent times, it has not been uncommon to see composers support themselves with casual labour. For many years, Philip Glass (b1937) took on a number of tradesmen jobs while making his name as a composer. He worked as a plumber and cab driver in New York, while at other times he found employment with a moving company. The art critic of Time magazine, Robert Hughes, was shocked to find his dishwasher once being installed by Glass. Hughes protested that such work must be beneath the composer. “But you are an artist,” Hughes told him. Glass replied “that I was an artist but that I was sometimes a plumber as well and that he should go away and let me finish!”
… All you have to do is keep writing.
For some creative musicians, Glass’ approach is nothing less than a logical endpoint. The contemporary Canadian composer, Chris Sivak (b1982), once described how even regular commissions could not make him enough to live off. He realised that he would have to produce music at such a backbreaking rate – in order to be able to earn a proper salary – that he would have to forgo such luxuries like “sleep, daylight, and grocery shopping…” The other danger was that “I would produce exponentially less work I was proud of. The scales would be tipping towards quantity at the expense of quality if I pushed much harder.”
Eventually he decided to become an internet plumber, a job involving “climbing telephone poles with climbing gaffs, ladders, or in a bucket truck; splicing together fiber optic, twisted pair, and coaxial cable; troubleshooting network problems; and getting absolutely covered in grime…”
But Sivak also recognized that building an alternative career need not have any detrimental effect on his composing. He found that he could still make the same time as before for his creative endeavours.
As he explains pointedly: “the only way you fail at art is if you stop doing it. There’s no reason a composer can’t be a plumber or an electrician instead of a teacher. All you have to do is keep writing.”