Alessia Degraeve

As I listen to the first knee play of Einstein on the Beach, I struggle to make out the words.

Would it get some wind for the sailboat. And it could get for it is.

It could get the railroad for these workers. And it could be were it is.

It could Franky it could be Franky it could be very fresh and clean.

It could be a balloon

The chorus and two solo voices chant over slow, shifting chords played by an electric organ. The libretto seems indecipherable until I realize that it is not meant to be deciphered. One voice reads numbers. The other recites confusing, repetitive, impossible poetry. The chorus sings solfege.

This continues for five minutes. It’s confusing and intriguing, and most of all boring — a seductive sort of boredom. I continue listening. 

I am listening to Einstein because of Susan Sontag. Her essays is the reason I love art. In Against Interpretation she imagined a new way of thinking about art. An “erotics,” rather than a “hermeneutics” of art, she called it. To strip the experience of art from its obsession with interpretation and ultimately with “content”  was the erotics of art. Art, Sontag thought, should aim to provide an experience that evades interpretation. To aim for art as she imagined it to be during the earliest creation of art: “incantatory,” “magical.”

A great deal of art produced in the sixty years since Sontag published her essay has attempted to shed itself of the notion of “content,” that is, the meaning of a piece as separate from its form.  Visual artists followed this road of abstraction into oblivion, shifting from directly representative art to less concrete representation, not expressing any experience of emotion or consciousness but rather intending to evoke a specific, transgressive experience in viewing the art. Music soon followed suit: minimalism, as it was aptly named, distilled and abstracted the composition and performance of music until “content” was lost and only a turbulent sea of notes and rhythms remained.

That is the artistic world Einstein finds itself in. The piece is an ultimate abstraction of the musical experience. 

Philip Glass’s opera — if one can even call a piece with no plot or character, aria or recitative an opera — is five hours long, performed without intermission. I remember this fact as I contemplate rising from my couch thirty minutes in to use the restroom. 

I remain seated.

It’s separated into scenes and “knee plays” — connectors, like the human knee. The scenes are simple and, like the music, repetitive: Field. Train. Trial. Night Train. Trial. Prison. Spaceship.

For twenty minutes, I listen to the same motif. Two musical lines that repeat and interchange, slowly modulating and altering themselves. Their change is subtle and impermanent—phrases return just as soon as they change. Dancers race across the stage in frenetic, repeated patterns. Watching this scene has me simultaneously bored and terrified. The music feels strangely ominous, but I struggle to identify what the music itself is. 

All these are the days my friends and these are the days my friends.

It could get some wind for the sailboat. And it could get for it is.

It could get the railroad for these workers. And it could get for it is were.

It could be a balloon. It could be Franky. It could be very fresh and clean.

It could be those ways.

The musical and physical landscape only becomes more turbulent. The chorus continues to repeat, growing louder, their voices straining against the score as the dancers grow frenzied and a sole voice continues to chant his impenetrable libretto over it all. Until, when you least expect it, everything stops. 

The lights go out. The stage is silent for a split second.

From the chaos a sole saxophone plays and it is transcendent.

While listening to Philip Glass I think about the ocean. The music is like unrelenting waves, crashing on my ears. I picture the tide coming in and out as the music swells and sinks.

Maybe that’s why when I listen to Philip Glass I think of my mother. My mother is in love with the ocean. She swims from the minute it is warm enough to bear to the minute it is too cold to stand. I’m not sure why. I’ve always figured she enjoys the exercise, but have started suspect there is more to it than that. 

When I was a child, she used to drag me to the beach. I did not like the ocean. It was cold and dirty and not fun. 

Somewhere along the line, I fell in love with the ocean, too. I have learned to appreciate the simple ritual of our visits. Now, over the long summer months, I swim out until it feels as though I am on the horizon and I float. I feel the gentle rocking of the waves and little else. I stare up at the sky or my eyelids and think nothing. In the winter, I stand on the sand, shivering, and stare at the waves. I like to focus on the smaller ones, those small bumps on the surface. They’re in constant motion, homogeneous and random.

Will it get some wind for the sailboat and it could get for it is it.

It could get the railroad for these workers and it could get for it is.

All these are the days my friends and these are the days my friends.

Put these days of 8 8 8 cents into 100 coins of change.

In the minutes that drip away, I find transcendence.

Nearly an hour into Einstein on the Beach, I consider giving up. What once was novel and exciting has grown boring. I feel like I am unable to stand any more synthesizer and saxophone. But I continue. I’m not sure why. Obligation, maybe. To the ocean, or to my mother.

I am struck by the cave paintings from Lascaux, France because their animals flow like waves. The rich, earthy streaks of color give the impression of animals up close but look like one mass of beauty from afar. The walls suggest a pre-civilizational world so abundant with livestock that the cattle could be mistaken for an ocean. The walls evoke both mystery and boredom, much like the glacial chord changes of Einstein.

The act of creating these paintings was itself ritual. They were likely created to pray for an abundance in the hunt. The spiritual labor of creating the art was as vital to the physical labor of slaying beasts. Einstein is, in some ways, also a ritual. The opera will never be performed again: it is so intricate and physically demanding that, once its original director decides to not direct it again, it will be lost. To endure Einstein is to labor in the service of art. To seek, like a fresh kill, sustenance.

Now hours into the opera, I feel like I am being violently shaken. The tempo oscillates between extremes. The soundscape finds neither balance nor resolution. With each shake I wonder when Glass will latch onto the next motif and move on. 

But then I remember the ocean. I let the waves rock me.

Mark Rothko painted to make people cry. His works are dense masses of shape and color — pinnacles of abstraction. They intend to express, as he put it, “tragedy, ecstasy, doom.” 

I wanted to know for myself whether his method worked. I sought out a Rothko at the Museum of Modern Art and waited to cry. I didn’t. But it fascinated me: I felt as though I could keep looking and continue finding new layers of shape and color. It was almost moving before my eyes, but never changing. 

I felt that I understood what Rothko intended. I entered a trance, staring up at these massive canvases, trying to make sense of the minutiae of color and shape. I experienced the erotics of art.

There was ecstasy in Rothko’s painting — and agony, too. But mostly there was boredom.

It was an ocean.

This love could be some one

Into love

It could be some one that has been somewhere like them

It could be somewhere like like liiiiike them

I’m listening to Einstein on the Beach because I was told it, too, would put me into a trance. I chase these artistic experiences, like I did with Rothko. I relish the light-headed feeling I get walking out of a museum where I did nothing but stand and stare. Like stepping out of water, emerging from entrancing artistic experiences allow me to re-experience the sensual world as novel and exciting.

And, a few hours into Einstein, it works. I am completely enraptured by the sound. It is repetitive, yes, but it is divine. It’s unlike anything I had experienced before. The ardor of pure boredom forges an entirely new aesthetic and sensory experience.

Philip Glass composed Einstein on the Beach to bore. He was a minimalist: composing beyond content in the service of a new experience of art. In the opera about him, Albert Einstein appears only once, as a violinist He composed an ocean of music: so massive that each bit of movement and turbulence is gone in an instant, replaced by another, nearly the very same. The experience of listening to Einstein is analogous to the psychological experience of watching the ocean. It is boring, but in its repetition it becomes entrancing. 

Rothko and Glass are perhaps some of the few artists who truly achieved the paradigm Sontag laid out in Against Interpretation. They created an art that was meant to be experienced, not interpreted. An art that was erotic and visceral and in some ways magical. Like the handprints and flowing bison on the cave at Lascaux, this art points to an experience free of the structures we create to explain “art.”As hand paintings of bulls and horses bring us as close as art may to the earth, Einstein on the Beach brings us to the edge of the shore of the blank blue ocean.

After five long hours, I rise from my couch. I think about my mother again, and in my mind I am staring at the waves.