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About Einstein on the Beach
— Maarten Beirens
The very least one can say about the American composer Philip Glass (born 1937) is that he is a true phenomenon. His later success may cause one to forget that his career began in the late ‘60s as an obscure avant-gardist in the downtown New York art scene. Now, at the age of 87, he carries an aura that is almost unheard of among contemporary composers.
Philip Glass’s musical career started off fairly traditionally: he studied at the Juilliard School in New York, where he developed an unremarkable, academic composing style. Like many American composers, Glass made for Paris next to study under Nadia Boulanger – at that time the ‘grande dame’ among composition teachers, who had pointed several generations of American composers towards the neoclassical style of Stravinsky. More definitive for the direction Glass would take was his encounter in Paris with the Indian sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar. The latter was in Paris to record the soundtrack he had written for Conrad Rooks’ film Chapaqqua. Glass was taken on to write out the parts for the (western) musicians.
For Glass, this was an intense confrontation with the formal principles of Indian music, with a focus on long, modular melodies over a simple, static harmonic base, and above all a highly refined rhythmic structure. This so-called additive rhythm (with unequal groups of two, three or four notes in a regular pulse which are combined into larger, somewhat rhythmically turbulent wholes) would shortly form the key with which Glass was to rein- vent his own style. On his return to New York, Philip Glass found himself in an environment in which the tendency towards austerity, concentration and reduction had suddenly taken root. This was the breakthrough of ‘minimal music’. Composers such as LaMonte Young, Terry Riley and Steve Reich had written a number of pioneering pieces which combined extremely limited material, brief motif-like ‘cells’ or extremely long sustained tones in combina- tion with long durations and extensive repetition. Glass started to develop his new additive structures into striking compositions, to be performed by his newly formed ensemble.
The work they produced was quite radical: loud, intense, systematic, strictly structured and uncompromising in the clear way in which limited material is gradually put through a transformative process. Instead of the classical venues, they performed in art galleries, museums and the lofts of artist friends. Thus, the connection with the minimal art of Sol LeWitt, Richard Serra, Donald Judd and so many others of their generation was cemented: the places where the artists exhibited were also the places where minimal music was originally performed. In this way, minimal music became part of a New York scene with visual artists, dancers and dramatists.
It was inevitable that in that artistic melting pot Glass would cross paths with director Robert Wilson, who already had a number of remarkable productions to his name. These stood out due to their extremely long dura- tion and an intensely stylised approach, in which, as in the Japanese noh tradition, for example, text, motion and music together form a single, encom- passing static spectacle with the allure of a ritual. Wilson and Glass began working together in 1974 on a project that was to become a portrait of an iconic figure of the 20th century. Hitler and Ghandi were briefly considered but they swiftly decided upon Albert Einstein. The working title of their opera was Einstein on the Beach on Wall Street – neither Glass nor Wilson can now recall why or how ‘Wall Street’ was dropped from the title during the working process. Einstein on the Beach premiered at the Avignon festival in 1976 and then began a triumphant tour of European concert halls and opera houses. Finally, the Metro- politan Opera invited Glass and Wilson to play two performances of Einstein in New York. This American premiere of Einstein on the Beach quickly cata- pulted Glass and Wilson to the position of standard-bearers of the new minimalist aesthetic in the US.
Like all of Wilson’s work of the period, Einstein on the Beach was called an ‘opera’ and is effectively the start of Glass’s career as an opera composer. However, the work is highly unusual for an opera: there are no vocal roles and no linear narrative – the libretto consists of fragments of text, mostly from the pen of Christopher Knowles, an autistic boy with whom Wilson (still a social
worker at this time) was working, supplemented by performers – actor Samuel Johnson and dancer (later choreographer) Lucinda Childs. The choir sings the note numbers or names, which emphasises the rhythmic patterns and harmonic content of the music. The orchestra pit accommodated the Philip Glass Ensemble: two electric organs, three wind players on saxophones, bass clarinet and flutes and a soprano. In addition there was a solo violinist dressed up as Einstein.
In terms of its content, the opera weaves loose associations around the figure of Einstein, expressed most clearly in the three visual themes: the train (the paradigm often used to illustrate the theory of relativity), the trial/prison (the ethical implications of a theory that also indirectly makes the atomic bomb possible – the opera’s final scene ends with a reference to an atomic explosion) and a spaceship (the science fiction aspect of Einstein’s ideas; relativity theory is at its most interesting when we think of phenomena occurring at near-light speed). Wilson translates these three themes into similar scene concepts that retain only a visual link in the final act: Building is a variation on the train, Bed is derived from Trial/Prison. These major scenes are interchanged with five shorter, intimist interludes, given the name Knee Plays as they, like the eponymous joint, provide a connecting function before, between and after the acts of the opera. The whole perfor- mance usually lasts just under five hours without breaks. In Einstein on the Beach Glass and Wilson provided the blueprint for a completely new type of opera: non-narrative, static, with associative images and lyrics and an almost ritualistic process in which even the smallest gesture is meticulously choreographed.
Glass’s equally radical music was a perfect fit for Robert Wilson’s theat- rical language. Like Wilson’s scene concepts, Glass’s music is often very fast (and uncompromisingly loud) on the surface, but static underneath due to the repetitive and slowly-changing patterns. It is music in which minute elements are continually undergoing all manner of transformations. Glass limits his material to a handful of themes that have been developed mainly as chord progressions. There are three main ones: the three-chord theme which starts the opera, a four-chord theme that appears in the three Trial scenes and the ‘cadential theme’ of five chords which is omnipresent during the final Spaceship scene. We can also discern another four recurring themes, each of which is based on a single chord.
Glass builds up the scenes by swapping around the recurring blocks of themes. For example, Train 1 has three (which are played in an ABCABC pattern): a first theme on one chord that is built on a poly- rhythm of 3 against 4 beats, a completely instrumental passage based on another single-chord pattern in continuous contrary motion and then the ‘cadential’ theme.
In Einstein, Glass’s interest in additive rhythmic patterns (in which you can allow a motif to grow and shrink by adding or subtracting irregular groups of two, three or four notes) continues to drive his music. But at the same time, you notice that alongside these rhythmic/melodic processes, which form the core of his minimalist style, he already demonstrates in Einstein a greater interest in harmonic structure. Chord patterns become an important iden- tifiable element and the cadential theme shows a particularly high level of harmonic refinement. It is a cadence that is diverted in its resolution ending a semitone lower than the listener expects – it thus sounds like an ending (which is what a harmonic cadence traditionally should do) but then again, not at all. For the listener, this can easily evoke an unusual sense of musical ecstasy, which matches the essence of Glass’s early style. It is music that is superficially hyperkinetic yet remains static, or seems to be simply repetitive but remains highly unpredictable due to the ongoing rhythmic regrouping of similar motifs; it is music that is at once breathtakingly fast and excruciat- ingly slow. Precisely the type of paradoxical experience of time that coin- cides with Einstein’s ideas.
Maarten Beirens
by courtesy of Concertgebouw Brugge
Answers to Guillaume Kosmicki’s questions
— Jean-Luc Plouvier
G.K.: The collaborations for your version might seem unlikely at first – how did you go about choosing them?
J-L. P.: Who do you mean? Collegium Vocale? You’d be surprised at the profile of a Collegium chorister nowadays. Not one of the fourteen singers who volunteered for our project is a stranger to pop music. Many of them have their own home studios and fiddle around on their computers. That’s life today. As for Suzanne Vega – the idea came from Bert Schreurs – she defi- nitely fits the bill, with her flawless diction and a real literary temperament. She also has a genuine, very soft New York accent, strange yet familiar, and without emphasis – it’s an instrument that we really couldn’t do without. The type of modernism we deploy stems from Gertrude Stein; it means moving elegantly through a libretto that is highly constructed, chopped up, full of repetition and parataxis, polyphonic in its texture: we entrusted Suzanne with all the texts, all the voices.
We asked Germaine Kruip to help us with the scenography (ultimately quite simple, but it had to be figured out), to make the musical process itself the central theatrical theme. This production is a celebration of the concert in its purest form! The aim was to draw out the diagonal lines of force enclosed in this repetitive, polyrhythmic machinery, where everyone listens to everyone on the very edge of vertigo. No conductor in the centre, for example, but a rhythmicist on the outside who provides the pulse, and another within who helps us count the innumerable interlocking repetitions and repeats. We had a very materialistic vision, inspired by contemporary dance – and in particular by our friends at Rosas – to do without the back- stage, to emphasise every gesture, whether graceful or functional, treating them with equal dignity.
Your version is very unusual from a musical point of view: in some sequences, we almost struggle to make out the score through the sounds of the two synthesisers. Some passages were almost techno, moments that clearly embrace the element of pop. You said you hadn’t changed anything in the score, so what makes you sound so different from the original versions?
Each score invites its own treatment... not only what is revealed by the connections between the notes, not just the notations and directions, but the spirit that runs through the writing, its presentation and its omissions. You may be surprised, but let me tell you something: there is no single, compre- hensive score of Einstein on the Beach, complete to the final detail. Nowhere will you find a summary of the nomenclature (of the performers), nor the ideal number of choristers, you don’t know if the singers of the solo parts should be drawn from the choristers or chosen separately, you don’t under- stand why you need three flutes for just a few minutes and not all the way through, whether you need an alto or a tenor sax, and so on. In fact, there is no indication for the organ sounds, the tempo or dynamics.
The score is beautifully written out by hand – much as it would have been in the 17th century – the only clue to its era the title typed out on an Olivetti. The texts come separately in a small booklet, with only the barest suggestion on how to marry text and music. So we had to engage in real forensic work based on record sleeves (two versions), concert hall programmes that we could find online, and of course listening to the recordings themselves. The history behind this opera’s creative process is not without significance. The story emerges in fragments, and the score that I described bears the traces of this process; a frenzied collective effort, trial and error, meaning and form emerging from assembling and reassembling, last-minute scrib- bled revisions to match the timings to the staging, etc. It can feel somewhat disheartening at first, but it turns into an amazing challenge as you go along. You realise that the collective effort must go on, that the work is alive, and you just know that you cannot fall back onto some sort of musicological archaeology. The work leads you away from this approach, it’s humming with potential that’s yet to be explored.
And so the ‘pop’ section that you evoked, Building, is perhaps the most open in the whole score. A complex combination of rhythmic arpeggios for the two organs, descending or ascending, needs to be coloured by the harmonies of wind instruments and voices, for which the composer lacon- ically indicates the pentatonic mode (go figure!). On the two available recordings, this layer also features a saxophone solo, pretty ‘free’ in the ‘79 version, an awful ‘Jazz FM’ solo in that of ’93. We then came up with the idea of pre-recording the organ parts in MIDI in a dance music spirit (sequenced, mechanical, very fast, filtering the highs, with a big resonator in the bass), and entrusting the solo to our flautist Michael Schmid. At the time, he was studying Sciarrino’s complete works for flute. We made him a demo by mixing the synthesizer sequences with Brian Ferneyhough’s Unity Capsule drowning in the echo, and he immediately latched on to the idea of the improv we were looking for – it was in the bag (°). I don’t want to pile on the anecdotes, but it’s just to give you an idea of the spirit that prevailed during our preparatory work. And I repeat: this spirit is nothing other than the wind that blows when you open the score. We had no subversive inten- tion, but artistic loyalty also means – as all performers know – being able to transgress at times.
It takes incredible stamina and extreme concentration to perform this work from Philip Glass’s “vicious experimental period” as you describe it on the Ictus website. You yourself spend a very long time on stage behind the keyboard. How do you approach such a perfor- mance as a musician? How does it all work?
I have to admit that I love this vicious experimental period. The tiny permutations over five notes, the unpredictable, high-speed additive and subtractive rhythms, all this is unashamedly expressed in its pure mechanics, and yet it trembles, it never ceases to tremble, memory and perception are constantly thrown into disarray. You then hear additional voices, the famous psycho-acoustic sub-products of repetition theorised by Steve Reich. This trembling of a simple object is the very core of mini-
malism. It calls for a very particular approach from the musician, rigid yet gentle, willing to embrace the inevitable accidents, and resolve them as a tailor threads his fingers to fix a snag. No, it’s not so exhausting to perform. I’m sad when it comes to an end after three and a half hours. I don’t want to head off to the bar, I want an encore. Here, the tension of performing, which grabs you in the solar plexus, is not directed to a great force, or phrasing, or virtuosity, but to a kind of manic moderation. Add nothing, follow this necklace of tens of thousands of pearls, wriggle like a lizard through the polyrhythms, and advance like this (andante, even when it goes very fast) until the end of the tunnel. Giorgio Agamben has some remarkable words about the power of restraint. He quotes the words of Dante about “the artist with the trembling hand” and adds:
“Those who lack taste cannot refrain from anything; tastelessness is always not being able not to do something.”
The later Philip Glass loses me. For me, he stops trembling.
Jean-Luc Plouvier
by courtesy of Hémisphère Son
(°) But for the record, we’ve done things quite differently.