Einstein vs. Aristotle

If the music of Philip Glass has anything in common with God, it is the following: both are easiest to describe in terms of what they are not. The New York Times: “To best say what ‘Einstein on the Beach’ is, consider first what it isn’t. Forget Aristotle, tragedy, unified time and place, beginning, middle and end, and all other cultural baggage.”

Einstein on the Beach is an “opera,” but you can forget that label along with the rest of your cultural baggage. Last night, Einstein returned for the first time in fifteen years, but as a mere concert: Glass’s music stripped of Robert Wilson’s staging. What do you call an opera with no plot, no actors, no arias, no sets, and almost no words? You sure as hell don’t call it an opera. In my book, you call it music.

But what kind of music? According to the same New York Times article, Western music is “based on change and development.” Glass’s music is—you guessed it—not. Most of the “scenes” in Einstein employ only one dynamic marking: forte. They have no clear beginning, and often feel like they will never end. They start abruptly, drone on for some time, and end abruptly.

Contrast this with the Western canon—Bach or Beethoven or Brian Wilson—where music is driven, linear. It starts somewhere and ends up somewhere else. In Philip Glass’s world, time moves in glacial cycles. Change happens, but you have to be wait for it. Glass does not do ABA; he does AAAAAAA until A morphs, subtly, inevitably, into something slightly different. He lavishes so much attention on one chord that when he then expands his harmonic palette to two chords—I’m thinking of the F minor to E major modulation in “Train”—it feels as transcendent as the Hallelujah chorus.

When I left Carnegie Hall, still with one foot in Philip Glass’s universe, I half-expected the E train to pick me up, carry me around the island of Manhattan thirty-two times, and deposit me summarily in New Jersey. Instead, my real-world subway barreled west (how appropriate!) to Times Square.

After the jump, a self-indulgent tangent on cultural relativism and the concept of time.

Philip Glass dumbfounds critics into using the apophatic language of theologians (see above). Though skeptical of this trap, I can’t help but fall into it (again, see above). Still, I would prefer to speak positively, to state rather than negate. While the Times is right to note that Glass’s music is not Aristotelian, this does not tell us what the music is. I would argue that, if X has nothing to do with Aristotle, X must be somehow distinct from the Western canon. Whoever it was who said that all [Western] philosophy is “footnotes to Plato” would also, I think, agree that most everything else Western–be it music, literature, cosmology, physics, history–is a response to Aristotle.

So if Glass’s music is non-Aristotelian and, therefore, non-Western, what is it? Eastern?

In a word, yes.

As I noted above–and as many smarter people have noted before me–Glass’s music unfolds cyclically, not linearly. He takes an unusually broad view of time for a Westerner. While Wagner takes five hours to tell an epic story, Glass takes five hours to tell no story at all, but to let his simple patterns develop, minutely, over time.

The difference–circular arcs versus lines–is more profound than it may seem. Glass’s approach is not a personal idiosyncrasy but an act of cultural appropriation. (Again, I am not the first to point this out. It is commonly noted, for instance, that Glass began his career by transcribing Ravi Shankar into Western notation.) Glass’s departure from Western tradition makes him non-Western, but his embrace of Indian notions of time makes him specifically Eastern.

I spent a year in India studying Indian philosophy, during which almost all my romantic preconceptions about the “Eastern ethos” were shattered. Except for this one: almost without exception, Indian worldviews (Vaisheshika, Vedanta, Buddhism) and Western worldviews (Greek philosophy, Abrahamic monotheism, Enlightenment humanism, logical positivism) hold opposite positions on the nature of time. In fact, “views” is probably the wrong word; “assumptions” might be better. Each side took its premise about time to be so basic, so obvious, that no one on either side ever thought to defend it.

In the West, time is linear. All individual lives, as well as the life of the universe, have a beginning, middle and end. In the East, time goes in cycles. Yes, “Hinduism” and “the West” and “time” may all be social constructs, and you may pad them with as many pairs of scare quotes as you like, but I will still insist: if any intellectual distinction is useful, this one is. It explains so much. It explains why God is the sine qua non of Western religion—unmoved Mover, creation ex nihilo, etc.—while many Eastern religions don’t give a shit about God one way or the other. It explains why notions like karma and reincarnation are common sense in India but seem exotic in the West. It explains why Indian people don’t show up on time. (I really think it does, but that’s a discussion for another–time? Har har.)

Philip Glass is a Jew from Baltimore; he writes for piano and strings in Western musical notation. But perhaps the most seminal tenet of his music is its use of time, and in that sense at least, Philip Glass is a Westerner writing Eastern music, just as much as Justin Timberlake is a white boy singing black music.