And man, what a blast. Whenever I go through a piece of music I know well with the score for the first or second time, my opinion of the piece either rises or falls somewhat, depending on what I start to perceive in the piece once I fully realize what’s going on. Einstein was a vastly important piece from my youth, and while I always loved sections of it, my opinion of the whole has risen noticeably this week. (I had an opposite experience with Glass’s later opera The Voyage, a more tedious work than I’d remembered.) Today we went through the “Train” scene in about an hour and a half, and broke it down into an A A’ B A” B form – it’s the most complex scene from the opera, bringing together two of the recurring chord progressions (there are only about five in the whole four-hour work), as well as running ostinatos of different lengths together, Totalist style – which I may have to start calling Minimalist style. There’s a returning transitional passage (“x”) between the other sections, so it’s really A x A’ x B x A” x B, and the three A sections all fall into the same material after awhile, but start out with a different additive-process buildup. (The B sections recur in the final “Spaceship” scene.) In short, the form is both musically logical and satisfyingly intuitive. We had a similar experience with Reich’s Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ, and I’m not even going to tell you where I got that rare score – one of the prettiest pieces ever made. Much as I love so much minimalist repertoire, I somehow don’t expect it to excel in the intuition department, and I’m being pleasantly surprised.
And now I’m pissed off as hell that I had to wait until age 52 to get a score to Einstein, a piece I’d been obsessed with since I was 22. I was wearing out my vinyl discs of this piece nonstop in 1978, and a score should have been available for sale at Patelson’s by 1980, so I could have learned all of Glass’s (and Reich’s) formal tricks before I embarked on my professional career. Instead, I find out that I correctly stole some of their ideas by ear, but there were some other neat formulas that I didn’t realize were there. It’s criminal that great music can’t pass in score form to younger composers within a few years. And it’s why I put nearly all my scores up as PDFs on my web site: I refuse to catapult any ideas out into the world without facilitating their immediate theft by young (or older) composers. I may not have any ideas anyone wants to rip off, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to squirrel them away out of reach.
That’s a great way to teach analysis, Kyle. And by that I mean, of course, that that’s how I would do it.
I agree about the Reich. What a pretty (and beautiful) piece!
KG replies: It’s also very convenient because not preparing for class becomes a virtue.
I do appreciate that you share your music and ideas so freely. Thank you. I recently printed up, played and enjoyed a couple of your “Private Dances.” Nicely done!
I am very interested in how musicians, academic and otherwise, think about the music of Glass, Adams, Part and others. I admire the fact that you are doing your analysis in tandem with your students. I too have parsed this music sectionally, harmonically and motivically in an effort to understand it. But since the materials of the music itself can sometimes be pretty simple, I wonder about how it works on me and other listeners.
As a sometimes busker living, writing and performing here in Western Michigan, I have had interesting conversations with listeners on the street after performing “China Gates” by John Adams on my EP. “Sounds random” a couple of elderly appreciative listeners new to the style once observed. I realized that this aspect of the music is something that also attracts me.
I have introduced a room of Music Ap college students more than once to Part’s “Spiegel im Spiegel” and been amazed at how often this simply-constructed piece finds sympathetic and patient first-time listeners.
Does this music work a bit like a Calder mobile? A mobile is a concrete creation. But I think of it as non-linear the same way I think of some music as non-linear. There are random aspects of a mobile that rely on the subjective point of view of the looker. For me, the experience of looking at it and being in the same room with it creates a still kind of changing motion that reminds me of the music I like by people like Glass, Reich, Adams and Part.
Not sure exactly how this kind of observation relates to the rigorous analytical studies necessary for parsing any music. I did notice however that in Adams’s pictorial analysis included in my copy of his score for ” China Gates” that he seems to make a few mistakes in relation to his parsing of his own music. At least it seems that way to me as I try to understand what he is representing with his synoptic graph.
I was reading recently about Brahms’s reaction to his colleagues less-than-enthusiatic reception of his Fourth symphony. He said something about the impossibility of analysing or quantifying melody. I think that unquenchable curiosity about all aspects of music is a given, but I haven’t really been exposed to much thinking about the so-called miminalist approach to composing that has helped me in the same way I remebmber Schenkerian analysis turned on some lights of understanding for me as a student. Come to think of it, as I age I tend to conceptualize about the music I play, listen to and write more and more in a subjective intuitive way even as I continue to analyse it.
where exactly are you uploading the pdf’s? I’m also obssesed with Einstein on the Beach. greetings and respect from South America.
KG replies: Well, I’m not uploading them. What did you have in mind?
I wanted to thank you for taking the music of Glass so seriously; all too often, I’ve run up against the idea that he does not deserve serious consideration as a composer and had nothing more than a gimmick. I have great respect for Glass because of the sheer tenacity with which he stuck to his ideas. Einstein was also a pivotal work in my musical thinking and it was that one piece — in combination with the CIVIL warS — that brought me back into the academy to finish up my bachelor’s.
KG replies: Thanks, and you’re entirely welcome. Glass’s output is extremely variable, but there are some amazing pieces, of which Einstein is deinifitely one.