'Words Without Music', by Philip Glass

It is 1952 and a 15-year-old Philip Glass is on the night train from Baltimore, setting out for life away from home as an early entrant student at the University of Chicago. There are no lights for reading, only the chugging of the train. "The wheels on the track made endless patterns," he writes in his memoir of that memorable night, "and I was caught up in it almost at once". Was this where Glass's uniquely repetitive music was born?

Anyone who knows Glass's music will recognise it as quintessentially American. Glass himself makes that very point and is even more specific about where his music found its roots. A revealing early snapshot finds him, now in his twenties, in Yoko Ono's New York loft apartment, watching as the minimalist artist and composer La Monte Young showed what he could do with a pendulum, a pointer and a piece of chalk.

That was typical of 1960s New York, where Glass enthusiastically immersed himself in a cross-cultural melting pot of painters and sculptors, writers such as Allen Ginsberg, and radical creative partnerships such as composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham. It is small wonder that Glass identifies the city's "energy system" as the biggest influence on him. "What does your music sound like?", people ask him. "It sounds like New York to me," he replies.

A city famed for its straight-talking has left its mark on him. Glass's style of writing is devoid of pomposity or fake intellectualism. Words Without Music is informal, chatty and self-aware. It presents us with a dual portrait of its subject: a composer rooted in normality in his day-to-day life, but one whose artistic impulses are always striving for a higher plane.

Glass was born in 1937, the son of secular Jewish parents of immigrant stock. His mother was a school librarian, his father owned a record store. In the best American tradition Glass has never been afraid of rolling up his sleeves to earn his keep. After university, he worked in a steel mill. Later spells of self-employment include a removals business, plumbing and long days as a taxi driver (the latter right up to the commission of his second opera, Satyagraha, in 1978). The book is exhaustive on the basics of how to use a potbelly stove, installing a toilet and surviving late nights in a taxi heading to a dodgy part of the Upper East Side. Just do not expect a treatise on how to write a symphony.

The other side to Glass, though, is just as important. Following the spirit of the 1960s, he set out with his future wife JoAnne across Europe on a pilgrimage to India and Tibet. This is not at all the best part of the book and Glass's insights rarely rise above the level of backpackers' guide. (Do we really need to know that the temple at Amritsar is "gleaming" and "golden"? Or that a passenger on a train in India would do well to take "a dozen peanut butter and jelly sandwiches"?) But once he has arrived at the Tharpa Choling Monastery in Kalimpong, the spiritual goal of his journey becomes clear.

Meditation, the focusing of the mind, a sense of the timeless - call it what you will - are central to the understanding of Glass's music. This is where simple, everyday American sounds meet transcendental eastern mysticism. The Tibetan Buddhist Domo Geshe Rinpoche presided over the teaching, Ravi Shankar (a revered collaborator) provided the musical foundations and director Robert Wilson, a contemporary in New York, set what Glass calls the "visual tempo". Wilson, as Glass observes, is a "master of SLOW". The result is Glass's own brand of minimalism, where subtly shifting rhythms and harmonies seem to be repeated into infinity. Some people are entranced by the endlessly rippling arpeggios. Others complain, like his French friends, "Mais ce n'est pas la musique".

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The most serious criticism of the book is that, once he breaks off from his narrative, Glass never properly gets back to it. The memoir in effect ends somewhere around 1976. Where did his life go from there? What happened to the people we have met on the way? It would be useful to know how the later works that he discusses fit with the personal story.

Surely Glass, of all composers, could get back in the rhythm and write a sequel? Words Without Music is an amiable and entertaining book. Even if we do not want his memoir to go chugging on like some never-ending minimalist symphony, one more volume would be welcome.

Words Without Music, by Philip Glass, Faber, RRP£22.50/Liveright, RRP$29.95, 432 pages

Richard Fairman is an FT music critic

Photograph: Randall LaBry

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