The Blue Collar Jobs of Philip Glass
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- 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.
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!
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.
This is a consequence of wealth concentration and the destruction of the middle class.
If he could see the premium his work fetches, now, he’d probably be pissed. Gratified, but also pissed.
He had a rough life.
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.
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.
Going out into the sticks, while calming and healing for the soul, is artistic suicide.
Nonetheless your final point is far more vapid because the frontier is where civilization is created and destroyed. It is where norms, values and modes of production of some civilization are placed with decreasing amounts of their domestic support, and usually in increasing conflict with a different civilization, so that it becomes clear what aspects have some more fundamental truth or at least robustness, and what is simply town and gown, responding to the ever shifting attentions of easily bored patrons.
These days internet and digital production can ease a lot of the rural isolation. But for many (most?) people it is essential to be in and around the art scene to be able to create and maintain focus and motivation to work on their art. Especially when starting a career it is important to meet and see other artists and art.
Not to say anything about networking, which is critical for most arts.
I'm not so sure. A lot of art comes out of "affordable areas" — sometimes small college-town ghettos like Athens, Georgia, for example. Why couldn't we get a Philip Glass from Manhattan, Kansas?
Most artists that try to invent something new start with essentially no audience. They don't create that for the big bucks.
What I have noticed of this, and my readings seem to point to the reaction of people around someone in an uncharted direction like PG being a mix of "bemused but admirative and encouraging", and "ignored". And what proportion of the "peers" is now online? IG and such? (For an artist in my life, IG seemed to be an essential lifeline. A main connection.)
And they can all post videos of performances on YouTube. You don’t even need to have an orchestra perform a work for an extended time before you can find an audience. I would think that this would make it more likely for new composers to be able to find success than before. You don’t necessarily need to be in an NYC or Boston like before.
Congratulations-- you're officially wrong on the internet!
Meet Harry Partch:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Partch
He roamed as a hobo for years during the Great Depression. The text for Barstow is graffiti that he saw scrawled on highway railings during that time. It's featured in most music history books that cover the 20th century. (Also, many of the instruments he invented are visual works of art, in addition to being musically beautiful.) And if you liked the recent HN article on just intonation, well... let's just say you're gonna love Harry Partch!
There's also Conlon Nancarrow, who got pissed at the U.S. harrassing him when he got back from fighting the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. He moved to Mexico City and hand-punched player piano rolls in seclusion, for decades.
Other composers and musicians made pilgrimages to his studio, just to hear what it sounds like when, say, a 12-voice canon has each voice moving at different tempo.[1]
Nancarrow received the MacArthur fellowship back in 1982. At one point there was a piano duo who taught themselves to play a selection of his pieces as a four-hands duet for one piano.
People who care about music will find interesting musicians, no matter where they live. This goes back at least to J.S. Bach, who reportedly walking hundreds of miles to listen to Buxtehude improvise at the organ.
1: and what are the proportions for the voices of that canon? You guessed it-- they're the ratios from a just intonation chromatic scale, which Nancarrow probably got from a book by Henry Cowell (New Musical Resources, IIRC).
Edit: typos
The commenter remarked "we would never have heard of Philip Glass." Who among the laity would have heard of Philip Glass and the people you listed? I expect that Venn diagram is really two circles.
> People who care about music will find interesting musicians, no matter where they live
This is the 'just world hypothesis' and survivorship bias combined. Some very talented people will be discovered despite their circumstances. An enormously larger number will not. You won't know you don't know them.
Some places might be better, but this is a dangerous option.
I can't tell if you think tech or art is going to be blue collar, but based on the AI revolution, you should stay in tech, or join UA.
Funny thing is in hindsight, I didn’t realise how much my “rational” attitude was informed by the Protestant work ethic pervading secular society. It’s like we threw away the god part but kept the part where we’re all “sinners” until we prove ourselves worthy through work.
Instead of appreciating the natural beauty in the world as it is, I was trying to prove myself worthy of being in the world. From that latter, small view, art was difficult to appreciate.
I was there too, and I see others doing it. I think that when we look externally for our value, we end up sacrificing a lot of ourselves for someone else's approval.
Is 'rationality' the right word here (I see you put it in quotes)? It doesn't seem rational or based on reason, more a social custom.
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.
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:
Teachers who just take public school jobs rather than start local learning programs and nurses who idle in hospitals rather than start some in-home nursing service for their community, academics whose careers stalled due to progress sit there reliving the same old routine blocking newcomers from moving through the pipeline
Whole lot of ossified minds in industry who need to get over coddling some sacrosanct story and identity and move along
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.
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.
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
You just have to be a freelancer (and all that entails), and be able to live on a very low income.
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.
I'm talking about the ability to get a job in the first place. Employers are spoiled for choice since 2008, and their requirements genuinely are hard unless you happen to know someone. Your experience in tech is an outlier. Your experience outside of tech in your state and your city is vastly different from my state and my city.
> 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?
People do. And sure you can find lots of fields as counter examples. I guess people do because they do not insist on these fields.
I was not talking of re-hiring. In the case of retail, you have store managers with lots of candidates who end up having to "hire" one after the other because they still can't fill their schedule with people who actually show up. They hire enough at random so that eventually they do have people who stick.
Parts of Los Angeles, specifically, now, specifically, are filled with entertainmnent industry hopeful for small part time industry jobs. Meanwhile they make do with day jobs that require no particular training or certification. Besides actually showing up, which is not to be taken for granted when many people will outright say it aloud "why should I care?"
The Ghost Ship in Oakland, SF Bay Area, an artist coop kind of thing until it burned to the ground was "charging about 25 resident artists rent ranging between $300 and $600 per month. The monthly rate for a one-bedroom apartment in Oakland at the time typically exceeded $2,000." They are not the only place like that in the Bay Area - they were cheap though.
I'm not talking tech jobs. But actually I do have examples as tech jobs also! Some startups are fairly desperate in their hiring - and may not pay all that much but certainly enough to survive. In one crazy example, they paid room and board, and not much more. And they worked out perfectly fine on that person's resume for their next job.
I guarantee you that a non zero amount of thought like this is in the hearts of folks making rate cut/hike decisions.
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.
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.
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 don't miss checks, but that was pretty cool.
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 ;-)
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.
> 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."
I've got an insane amount of respect for that honesty.
The book was really a fascinating read.
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.
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.
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.
I would go as far as to claim that it's a moral bad as a creative to put a payway behind any of your work and those who subvert it (i.e. fine-tuning your likeness into a model) are doing ethically good work.
We should look (up|down) to people who (do|don't) have X.
We should look up to people who have inherited wealth.
We should look down upon people who don't have high IQ.
It seems an odd approach. The initial premises seem to illuminate the person who selects them, rather than illuminating any societal issue. What can we learn from your selection, other than that you seem to feel an affinity towards those with inherited wealth?
There is of course one apparent distinction between inherited wealth and inherited ability, be it musical or sporting or intelligence or what have you. Wealth tends to be accrued, while talent can only be recognised when it is shared.