I am utterly in awe of this tour. I’ve never seen an orchestra perform so many complex, difficult works in one go. Seeing them performed so well, and seeing them communicated to the audience with such enthusiasm and commitment: this is what orchestral playing should be about, and so rarely is.

Moreover, they’re doing this with composers and pieces that are too often ignored. When Berlin was here a few years ago, they renewed my faith in orchestra playing, but they did it primarily with Brahms. San Francisco has done it again, but with Henry Cowell, Lou Harrison, and even John Cage. (I’m sure they would have done it with Varèse, which I sadly had to miss.)

Other orchestras (e.g., our own vision-devoid Ann Arbor Symphony) take note: you ignore ambitious programming at your peril. The audience universally *reacted* to these performances. They *listened*. You could feel it in the room. Sure, the reactions weren’t all positive. But many were, and people that hated the absurd randomness of Cage may well have loved the finely crafted soundscapes of Varèse.

The really old stuff can be great, but there’s so much more out there. Real art requires a coevolutionary dialogue among human beings—artists and listeners need to have their brains modified over time!—and that’s what we’ve been seeing this weekend.

Thanks for the thoughtful response. Certainly, the work succeeded at getting me to comment here.

Sure, pretension is everywhere and unavoidable, and I’ll concede also that it’s often in the eye of the beholder—at least, accusations are.

I probably sound like a bitter traditionalist myself. In some ways I am perhaps, but I actually liked the music and many of the other aspects of the work. But for me, four and a half hours is just too long to wait for a handful of references. I felt like I came away with less than an hour of insight and experience and three and a half hours of wanting more. The gigantic scope is exactly what made the social commentary feel shallow to me. At that scale, I wanted them to either say something substantially more or just say something less.

I did not feel that I wasted my evening.

Einstein on the Beach contains amazing bits of art, moving sounds and images, numbers, Minkowski diagrams, interesting-sounding bits of text, and a gigantic light bar that rotates ninety degrees and then disappears upwards. It’s a technical marvel all around, and the musicians, singers, dancers, and stage crew are all to be commended for amazing work.

That said, taken as a whole I find Einstein on the Beach to be a steaming pile of pretentious, vapid monkey crap.

Why? As auteuricon said earlier, this work is best appreciated as a “transcendent epiphany”—that is to say, a drug trip. Something devoid of complex thought or feeling. Something far removed from the references and so-called themes that have been slapped onto it: Einstein was brilliant and affected humanity in unexpected ways and it’s horrible that his work led to the weaponization of atomic energy. (This is the same problem with the Qatsi trilogy, except there the massive waste of human talent is less evident.)

Not that I’m necessarily against references to Einstein in a massive drug trip spectacle. Nor that Glassian drug trips can’t be great works of art. I just hate the artifice that we’re supposed to be learning anything besides the fact that altered neural states can be quite wonderful to experience.

For those of you looking for more than that, don’t look here.