One Hundred and Sixty Eight

I listened to Philip Glass’ Akhnaten on YouTube today.  I would have liked to have seen it performed, but it hasn’t been performed often enough to have been videotaped. 

People who walk out of a Glass performance obviously came knowing little or nothing about him.  One must come prepared to experience his music (one doesn’t enjoy Glass' music; one experiences it) because he doesn’t seek to entertain, to create a fantasy in which the audience can suspend their disbelief for an hour or two before returning to the real world.  He attempts to depict that aspect of the real world which most people most prefer to forget: what we called eternity, when we still understood that change is an illusion. 

Those who accuse Glass of being limited because there’s no progress, no development, in his music are missing the point.  His music is limited because Glass is a composer of and for our times, and we no longer believe in progress. That illusion has been dispelled, because the more we tried to change the more we remained the same - although most people don’t seem to know it, or don’t want to know it. 

Everyone’s accepted - most of us with resignation, but some with glee - that history is dead, and there's no alternative to the existing social order. Change is an illusion. They've heard that god is also dead, but for some reason many refuse to accept it.  Those who still create narratives with a beginning, a middle and an end do it for them.  The rest of us know there is no story - or if there is, it isn’t about us and our fantasies.  We come into the story, if that's what it is, in media res, play our part and leave with nothing resolved. 

Those who claim Glass is religious because gods figure so often in his narratives ignore the fact that those gods are museum artifacts or objects d’art for the discerning cultural tourist.  Glass is an antiquarian, and his minimalist music is a dead end, the aural equivalent of Beckett’s prose.