Einstein on the Beach has been one of my favorite Post-Modern works and as far as my limited theoretical mind knows, not much analysis has been performed on the Opera. Currently many of our tools for approaching music are geared towards looking at the music that came out of the modernist era before the 1950’s, which is great and hopefully those that I’ve learned will be helpful as I explore this gargantuan work, but I suspect that some new ways of looking at music will have to be developed to look at this work.
Now the biggest problem with this analysis (if I can just get the meta-critique section over with before I even begin) is that I have no score, if I were able to obtain the score to this opera, (by shoveling out a ton of cash being robbed just to rent the part) I would more than likely be enjoying my time sipping on some pomegranate soda in the Caribbean because I’d be a rich man. This not being the case, the principal source I’ll be using is the 1993 recording. This does severely limit my ability to perform pitch class analysis, which I think would have been fairly useless in this work anyways, but I’ll make due by highlighting the large structures of the work and then zooming out of those to see the even larger structures. This is what minimalism is about anyways, an intense focus on micro-changes only serves to bore the listener.
Come on back intermittently (between sheet music downloading of course) and check out this journey I am about to begin on and see where Philip Glass, his Knees, Trains and Spaceships will take us.