9 ms·

The Blue Collar Jobs of Philip Glass

169 points by samclemens 2y ago

rvense 2y ago
I read once that a passenger in his cab told him "You have the same name as a very famous composer."
- __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
  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.
vatys 2y ago
> “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.
- TrackerFF 2y ago
  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.
  - medion 2y ago
    100% - but people don’t want to make those sacrifices. They want to live and do what they’ve always done. It has and likely always will be possible to pick up stumps and move somewhere very cheap and get on with a personal creative endeavour - not many have the courage though.
    - financltravsty 2y ago
      Your creativity is a composition of all the novel stimuli you experience. Going out into the sticks, while calming and healing for the soul, is artistic suicide.
      - l33tbro 2y ago
        Cormac McCarthy? Georgia O'Keeffe? Robert Johnson? Plenty of artists excel beyond the urban fringe.
        financltravsty 2y ago
        I'm sorry, but I don't hold them in high regard as artists. They're part of the "western/southern frontier" crowd that encapsulated the zeitgeists of their environments, rather than create something that transcended it. The "frontier" is a notable and interesting subject in itself, but it has only peripheral cultural value to... civilization.
        bartonfink 2y ago
        [flagged]
        blt 2y ago
        I was going to write a more serious rebuke, but I can't really do any better than yours
        financltravsty 2y ago
  - joe5150 2y ago
    If Philip Glass had had to live in "rural nowhere" in order to afford to make music, we would have never heard of Philip Glass. vatys isn't asking if you can make any living this way, because of course you can. The specific conditions that allowed Philip Glass to work part time jobs and still live in the same city as people like Steve Reich and institutions like The Kitchen don't exist anymore.
    - JKCalhoun 2y ago
      > If Philip Glass had had to live in "rural nowhere" in order to afford to make music, we would have never heard of Philip Glass. 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?
      - joe5150 2y ago
        Why not indeed? If there is an orchestra's worth of musicians available and an audience there with the taste and curiosity necessary to support avant garde performing arts, anything can happen. It's easier now than ever to put a band together in your college town or even record and release music without ever leaving your bedroom, but beyond that scale you still need a critical mass of creative collaborators all in one place to pull it off.
        creer 2y ago
        There are orchestras everywhere. Because musicians want to play and directors want to direct and any random school has a performance hall. Whether they are all that good is another question, but that's true of big cities in the US also. And audience is still another question: I expect you don't get to have all that much of an audience until you have somewhat made it. No doubt Philip Glass didn't start with much of an audience. Most artists that try to invent something new start with essentially no audience. They don't create that for the big bucks.
        2y ago
  - CalRobert 2y ago
    I did that, and it was horrible. The people were nasty, mean, and intellectually incurious. Conformity was valued over all other traits. Some places might be better, but this is a dangerous option.
- baerrie 2y ago
  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
  - hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
    Not at all. Do you know what it actually takes to get in to those blue collar unions in NYC? It's not at all a "I can just show up, with no experience, and convince a business owner to give me a job" like Glass did.
    - neaanopri 2y ago
      Well it sounds like glass was charismatic enough to get people to take a chance on him
  - JKCalhoun 2y ago
    Glass learning plumbing by asking the guys working at the hardware store sounds more like handy-man work, not a union job.
  - thechao 2y ago
    > I am working in tech to fund my creative pursuits, an industry on its way to being blue collar 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.
- mmooss 2y ago
  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.
  - jordwest 2y ago
    In my experience, that attitude for me was due to the devaluing of spirituality and the resulting overemphasis on rationality. 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.
    - mmooss 2y ago
      > I was trying to prove myself worthy of being in the world 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.
- hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
  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.
- fuzzfactor 2y ago
  >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.
ilamont 2y ago
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: https://freshairarchive.org/guests/philip-glass https://freshairarchive.org/guests/philip-glass
- gedy 2y ago
  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.
  - uhmpire 2y ago
    Changing quickly now as the prior generation sat still collecting rent as long as possible, refusing to evolve themselves, and kept the next generation away from opportunities to evolve. 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
  - ghufran_syed 2y ago
    but people have more income now - surely working for uber or lyft today is the equivalent of driving a cab then?
antognini 2y ago
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.
- JKCalhoun 2y ago
  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."
mettamage 2y ago
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.
- JKCalhoun 2y ago
  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.
ZoomerCretin 2y ago
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 https://x.com/mucha_carlos/status/1791621965343560152
- globalnode 2y ago
  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
  - neaanopri 2y ago
    Running a "guy with a truck" business is great for working 3 days a week, if you can make the finances work. Simply ... only accept 3 jobs a week! You just have to be a freelancer (and all that entails), and be able to live on a very low income.
  - creer 2y ago
    You don't think there is demand for people willing to work weekends in jobs like retail, hotels, moving, entertainmnent, teaching?
newprint 2y ago
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.
paulpauper 2y ago
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.
- lr4444lr 2y ago
  Because wealth, unlike those other things, is readily transferable by taxation to level the playing field. I don't necessarily agree it should be, but if we could sap intelligence or other skills from the gifted and spread them around to shore up deficient people, I bet there would be a faction of people supporting this as the moral thing to do: "why should talented musicians meet and mate and produce offspring who keep disproportionately high inherited talent they didn't earn?", they might say.
  - Der_Einzige 2y ago
    This is 100% what Generative AI is doing and I am one of those people who "support this as a moral thing to do". 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.
- austinjp 2y ago
  Hmmm, kiiiiiinda. But if we declare equivalences without providing any justification, there's little substance: We should look (up|down) to people who (do|don't) have X. It's meaningless. In order to make this seem meaningful, you could dictate some premises, for example: We should look up to people who have inherited wealth. We should look down upon people who don't have high IQ. What issue does this illuminate? By declaring unearned wealth and unearned IQ (or unearned musical talent) to be comparable, what can we learn? Are they, in fact, comparable in any meaningful way? 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.
jonnycomputer 2y ago
Most artists can't make a living from their art. So they do other things to supplement that income. Its not glamorous. It sucks.
stonethrowaway 2y ago
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.
- debo_ 2y ago
  I agree. The tone of this article was grating to me. Most of my family is blue collar and is very well read. My uncle -- who worked at a grocery store his whole life -- made a habit of buying me books 10 years ahead of my reading level all through my childhood.
kjellsbells 2y ago
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.
- dajtxx 2y ago
  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!
- creer 2y ago
  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.
  - 2y ago
zombiwoof 2y ago
Could any spoiled software engineer today do this
ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
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.
lr4444lr 2y ago
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?
debo_ 2y ago
> 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.
- neaanopri 2y ago
  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
  - pinkmuffinere 2y ago
    +1, very much in the tradition of “we want what we can’t have” and “a change is as good as a rest”
  - creer 2y ago
    A great illustration of what "not toxic" means. For you manual labor seems fine as a day job. (While for other people it might be the opposite.)
  - jajko 2y ago
    An age old wisdom - if you work manually, rest via mental efforts, and vice versa. For most HNers it means do tons of sweat inducing efforts, often, so mind can rest a bit and do some defragmentation, not leaving everything only for sleep.
failrate 2y ago
Working as a janitor, I learned that people will talk around the janitor like they are not even there.
glaucon 2y ago
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&origin=share-mobile 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 ;-)
donatj 2y ago
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.
- gnulinux 2y ago
  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.
louthy 2y ago
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!)
- thenthenthen 2y ago
  Removal sounds right up their alley
  - louthy 2y ago
    There’s a deep philosophical question there: did they remove items or were the items never there in the first place?
- gnulinux 2y ago
  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.
vintermann 2y ago
One interesting tidbit I learned when the solo pianist George Winston died, is that he'd been the driver for Larry Flynt.
datavirtue 2y ago
That moment when you realize your dishwasher installer is a real person.
otterpro 2y ago
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.

169 points by samclemens 2y ago

rvense 2y ago

I read once that a passenger in his cab told him "You have the same name as a very famous composer."

__MatrixMan__ 2y ago
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.

vatys 2y ago

> “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.

TrackerFF 2y ago
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.
- medion 2y ago
  100% - but people don’t want to make those sacrifices. They want to live and do what they’ve always done. It has and likely always will be possible to pick up stumps and move somewhere very cheap and get on with a personal creative endeavour - not many have the courage though.
  - financltravsty 2y ago
    Your creativity is a composition of all the novel stimuli you experience. Going out into the sticks, while calming and healing for the soul, is artistic suicide.
    - l33tbro 2y ago
      Cormac McCarthy? Georgia O'Keeffe? Robert Johnson? Plenty of artists excel beyond the urban fringe.
      - financltravsty 2y ago
        I'm sorry, but I don't hold them in high regard as artists. They're part of the "western/southern frontier" crowd that encapsulated the zeitgeists of their environments, rather than create something that transcended it. The "frontier" is a notable and interesting subject in itself, but it has only peripheral cultural value to... civilization.
        bartonfink 2y ago
        [flagged]
        blt 2y ago
        I was going to write a more serious rebuke, but I can't really do any better than yours
        financltravsty 2y ago
- joe5150 2y ago
  If Philip Glass had had to live in "rural nowhere" in order to afford to make music, we would have never heard of Philip Glass. vatys isn't asking if you can make any living this way, because of course you can. The specific conditions that allowed Philip Glass to work part time jobs and still live in the same city as people like Steve Reich and institutions like The Kitchen don't exist anymore.
  - JKCalhoun 2y ago
    > If Philip Glass had had to live in "rural nowhere" in order to afford to make music, we would have never heard of Philip Glass. 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?
    - joe5150 2y ago
      Why not indeed? If there is an orchestra's worth of musicians available and an audience there with the taste and curiosity necessary to support avant garde performing arts, anything can happen. It's easier now than ever to put a band together in your college town or even record and release music without ever leaving your bedroom, but beyond that scale you still need a critical mass of creative collaborators all in one place to pull it off.
      - creer 2y ago
        There are orchestras everywhere. Because musicians want to play and directors want to direct and any random school has a performance hall. Whether they are all that good is another question, but that's true of big cities in the US also. And audience is still another question: I expect you don't get to have all that much of an audience until you have somewhat made it. No doubt Philip Glass didn't start with much of an audience. Most artists that try to invent something new start with essentially no audience. They don't create that for the big bucks.
        2y ago
- CalRobert 2y ago
  I did that, and it was horrible. The people were nasty, mean, and intellectually incurious. Conformity was valued over all other traits. Some places might be better, but this is a dangerous option.
baerrie 2y ago
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
- hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
  Not at all. Do you know what it actually takes to get in to those blue collar unions in NYC? It's not at all a "I can just show up, with no experience, and convince a business owner to give me a job" like Glass did.
  - neaanopri 2y ago
    Well it sounds like glass was charismatic enough to get people to take a chance on him
- JKCalhoun 2y ago
  Glass learning plumbing by asking the guys working at the hardware store sounds more like handy-man work, not a union job.
- thechao 2y ago
  > I am working in tech to fund my creative pursuits, an industry on its way to being blue collar 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.
mmooss 2y ago
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.
- jordwest 2y ago
  In my experience, that attitude for me was due to the devaluing of spirituality and the resulting overemphasis on rationality. 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.
  - mmooss 2y ago
    > I was trying to prove myself worthy of being in the world 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.
hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
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.
fuzzfactor 2y ago
>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.

ilamont 2y ago

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: https://freshairarchive.org/guests/philip-glass https://freshairarchive.org/guests/philip-glass

gedy 2y ago
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.
- uhmpire 2y ago
  Changing quickly now as the prior generation sat still collecting rent as long as possible, refusing to evolve themselves, and kept the next generation away from opportunities to evolve. 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
- ghufran_syed 2y ago
  but people have more income now - surely working for uber or lyft today is the equivalent of driving a cab then?

antognini 2y ago

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.

JKCalhoun 2y ago
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."

mettamage 2y ago

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.

JKCalhoun 2y ago
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.

ZoomerCretin 2y ago

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 https://x.com/mucha_carlos/status/1791621965343560152

globalnode 2y ago
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
- neaanopri 2y ago
  Running a "guy with a truck" business is great for working 3 days a week, if you can make the finances work. Simply ... only accept 3 jobs a week! You just have to be a freelancer (and all that entails), and be able to live on a very low income.
- creer 2y ago
  You don't think there is demand for people willing to work weekends in jobs like retail, hotels, moving, entertainmnent, teaching?

newprint 2y ago

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.

paulpauper 2y ago

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.

lr4444lr 2y ago
Because wealth, unlike those other things, is readily transferable by taxation to level the playing field. I don't necessarily agree it should be, but if we could sap intelligence or other skills from the gifted and spread them around to shore up deficient people, I bet there would be a faction of people supporting this as the moral thing to do: "why should talented musicians meet and mate and produce offspring who keep disproportionately high inherited talent they didn't earn?", they might say.
- Der_Einzige 2y ago
  This is 100% what Generative AI is doing and I am one of those people who "support this as a moral thing to do". 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.
austinjp 2y ago
Hmmm, kiiiiiinda. But if we declare equivalences without providing any justification, there's little substance: We should look (up|down) to people who (do|don't) have X. It's meaningless. In order to make this seem meaningful, you could dictate some premises, for example: We should look up to people who have inherited wealth. We should look down upon people who don't have high IQ. What issue does this illuminate? By declaring unearned wealth and unearned IQ (or unearned musical talent) to be comparable, what can we learn? Are they, in fact, comparable in any meaningful way? 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.

jonnycomputer 2y ago

Most artists can't make a living from their art. So they do other things to supplement that income. Its not glamorous. It sucks.

stonethrowaway 2y ago

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.

debo_ 2y ago
I agree. The tone of this article was grating to me. Most of my family is blue collar and is very well read. My uncle -- who worked at a grocery store his whole life -- made a habit of buying me books 10 years ahead of my reading level all through my childhood.

kjellsbells 2y ago

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.

dajtxx 2y ago
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!
creer 2y ago
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.
- 2y ago

zombiwoof 2y ago

Could any spoiled software engineer today do this

ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago

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.

lr4444lr 2y ago

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?

debo_ 2y ago

> 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.

neaanopri 2y ago
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
- pinkmuffinere 2y ago
  +1, very much in the tradition of “we want what we can’t have” and “a change is as good as a rest”
- creer 2y ago
  A great illustration of what "not toxic" means. For you manual labor seems fine as a day job. (While for other people it might be the opposite.)
- jajko 2y ago
  An age old wisdom - if you work manually, rest via mental efforts, and vice versa. For most HNers it means do tons of sweat inducing efforts, often, so mind can rest a bit and do some defragmentation, not leaving everything only for sleep.

failrate 2y ago

Working as a janitor, I learned that people will talk around the janitor like they are not even there.

glaucon 2y ago

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&origin=share-mobile 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 ;-)

donatj 2y ago

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.

gnulinux 2y ago
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.

louthy 2y ago

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!)

thenthenthen 2y ago
Removal sounds right up their alley
- louthy 2y ago
  There’s a deep philosophical question there: did they remove items or were the items never there in the first place?
gnulinux 2y ago
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.

vintermann 2y ago

One interesting tidbit I learned when the solo pianist George Winston died, is that he'd been the driver for Larry Flynt.

datavirtue 2y ago

That moment when you realize your dishwasher installer is a real person.

otterpro 2y ago

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.