Like plenty of 15-year-olds, Philip Glass liked to play hooky on Fridays.
Unlike most 15-year-olds, he’d skip class to head to student matinees at the Chicago Symphony, where he’d marvel at then-music director Fritz Reiner’s interpretations of 20th century modernists like Bartók and Kodály.
Glass only lived in Chicago for four years, moving here in 1952 as a baby-faced early entrant at the University of Chicago. But those four years, avuncularly recounted in his 2015 memoir “Words Without Music,” made an outsized impact on his musical thinking. The musical experiences he sought out in Chicago would eventually lead him to the oft-emulated — and oft-maligned — “minimalist” aesthetic that has become synonymous with his name, though Glass himself rejects the term about as often as it’s applied to his music.
But for Glass’s superlative stature among living composers and his formative experiences at Orchestra Hall, the CSO has presented his music only twice: his “Facades” in 1999, conducted by composer John Adams, and a suite from the Oscar-nominated score to “The Hours” in the 2007-08 season.
When CSO music director Riccardo Muti leads Glass’s Symphony No. 11 from Feb. 17-19, it will be the first time one of Glass’s symphonies has been performed by the orchestra. (He’s written 14 and was too busy wrapping up a 15th, a Kennedy Center commission, to be interviewed for this article.) The concerts will be in conjunction with “Scored by Glass,” a monthlong film score retrospective at the Gene Siskel Film Center including “Koyaanisqatsi” Feb. 19. One could arguably draw a straight line from Glass’s student years in Chicago — where large-scale symphonies by Bruckner and Mahler “lodged in (his) psyche” during group listening sessions in his dormitory — and his tilt towards symphonic writing decades later.
“We spent hours and hours together listening to recordings of Bruckner and Mahler symphonies, comparing recordings — often difficult to obtain even in Chicago — by Bruno Walter, Jascha Horenstein, and Wilhelm Furtwängler,” Glass writes in “Words Without Music.”
“We” included Gerald Temaner, who would introduce Glass to his first wife, JoAnne Akalaitis (also a student at the University of Chicago), and go on to cofound Kartemquin Films with Gordon Quinn and Stan Karter. Glass wrote two of his earliest film scores for Kartemquin: “Inquiring Nuns” (1968), screened Feb. 16 as part of Siskel’s series, and “Marco” (1970) Temaner’s last film for Kartemquin.
Like Glass, Temaner was a high-school-aged college student and the son of a record store owner: His father ran Little Al’s, formerly at Kedzie and Lawrence. Temaner moved into the dorms with a prodigious LP collection — catnip to the young Glass, who lived down the hall.
“We’d turn off the lights and listen,” says Temaner, now 85 and calling from a high-rise retirement complex in Gold Coast. After a pause, as though closing his eyes, he hums the theme from the Ländler movement of Mahler’s Symphony No. 1.
“I think music is what drew us to one another. He was a quiet person, actually — he wasn’t pushy or anything. He’s still that way.”
Temaner largely echoes Glass’s account of the comprehensive musical education he absorbed in Chicago. He was the one to introduce Glass to jazz (“I would play Charlie Parker and Lee Konitz”), taking him to long-gone clubs like the Blue Note at Clark and Madison (“back when you could park downtown”) and the Beehive at 55th and Harper (“I saw Dizzy Gillespie there once, with his cheeks blown out”).
Sometimes future astronomer Carl Sagan, who also lived in the dorm, would attend their late-night listening sessions — though, as Temaner recalls in a grumbling aside, “Nobody liked Carl. Big smarty pants.”
Also on Glass’s floor was Marcus Raskin, the influential co-founder of the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank in Washington, D.C. He had abandoned his piano studies at Juilliard to transfer to the University of Chicago, where he fell in with a group of friends that included Compass Players members Mike Nichols and Elaine May, as well as Glass. He also became fast friends with Glass, who sought him out as a piano teacher because of his affinity for composers of the Second Viennese School: Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern.
“I guess (Glass) didn’t really mesh with whoever the formal piano teacher was at the school,” remembers U.S. House Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), Raskin’s son. “So, some of the kids in the dorm hallway said to him, ‘You got to talk to this kid, Marcus Raskin. He’s a piano prodigy.'”
Talk, they did. The elder Raskin promptly prescribed a heavy dose of Bach to Glass, helping the budding pianist build up his technique. (That would have been in character for Marcus: Rep. Raskin says that his father, for his wide repertoire, frequently returned to Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” while practicing at home.) Those lessons, too, seem to have taken deep root: When Glass returned to the University of Chicago in 2016, commemorating his 80th, he shared the billing with four other pianists in performances of his complete piano études, Bachian in their clarity, technical sturdiness, and emotional breadth.
Raskin isn’t sure if his father was part of the listening crew that would gather in Temaner’s room, nearly 70 years ago. But he said the two men remained close until his father’s death in 2017 — so close that, when Raskin first ran for his congressional seat, Glass performed at a 2016 campaign event.
“Before he began, he said, ‘I’m very nervous, because I haven’t played for my teacher in more than 60 years,'” Raskin recalls with a laugh.
It was a rare streak of self-consciousness from a composer who, in his own words, was born with the “I don’t care what you think” gene. That fearlessness was certainly shared by his friends at the University of Chicago. Temaner’s work at Kartemquin was distinguished by a dedication to social causes then — and now — punishable by law: He filmed Bernie Sanders getting arrested at a protest against racial segregation in Chicago Public Schools, and he and his work appears in “The Janes,” a new documentary about an underground abortion network founded in Hyde Park. Marcus Raskin — a member of the Boston Five, who were indicted in 1968 for assisting young men to avoid the Vietnam War draft — similarly dedicated his career to deeply held values, regardless of the danger to himself.
“Sometimes people will say to me that they heard my dad taught Philip Glass how to play piano, and that explains everything,” Rep. Raskin says. “My dad was a great philosopher and kind of a wild, boundary-breaking thinker, and Glass is quite the iconoclast and autodidact. He’s very much an American original.”
And a Chicago original, too.
Hannah Edgar is a freelance writer.
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