The Sound of Patience
The most moving concert I heard this fall was an evening of Philip Glass piano etudes, music of such sparing eventfulness that some liken it to watching paint dry. I should add that the performance by ten different pianists at David Geffen Hall last Sunday was the first and only live event I have attended this season. That delay, and the reason behind it, must have had something to do with my emotional response to this music. But if you’re approaching the end of this year with even a fraction of the frustration and impatience I’m feeling, you might need this music in your life, too.
I broke my ankle on Yom Kippur, the day before the opening of the Metropolitan Opera season and a few days before the New York Philharmonic reopened its doors for business. I spent those first six weeks on my sofa in Westchester watching the leaves outside my window do their stoic dance. With my youngest now out of the house, some days were so quiet I thought I could hear them snap when, one by one, they finally let go.
I did spend much of that time writing. And I spent at least as many hours picking apart what I had done .
Which is why, at the end of a year of injuries, illness and setbacks, Glass’s etudes hit me so hard. They are studies in patience. If you know anything about Glass, you know that he works with small musical cells and lots of repetition. In these pared down piano pieces, you can follow the compositional process as he isolates certain elements and subjects them to algorithms almost as in a lab. There’s something dogged about his beginnings. This and this and this. This and this, and also that. He starts with humble materials, nothing you would even call an idea. But he keeps at it. Until, at some point, there’s a breakthrough.
The one that brought a lump to my throat last Sunday was Etude 5, performed with heartbreaking composure by Timo Andres. (The concert, which celebrated the release of a stunning boxed set of the sheet music to the etudes, also featured the pianists Inon Barnatan, Lara Downes, Daniela Liebman, Jenny Lin, Nico Muhly, Maki Namekawa, Ursula Oppens, Christian Sands, and Adrian Zaragoza.)
A lot of the patterns in Glass chug along in perpetual motion, but this etude loses its thread as soon as it starts. The opening left-hand motif doesn’t so much cut off as peter out, unsure of what to do with itself. It’s an unpromising, self-doubting little seed, but Glass allows it time. Eventually, the right hand comes in with little bell-like chords, and suddenly there’s mood. There’s movement. There’s character.
From where I was sitting, it sounded like hope.
That boxed set includes a book of essays on Glass’s music by people who have been touched by it, not only musicians, but chefs, choreographers, and a world champion figure skater. (I had a hand shaping some of the texts.) In one of the essays, Maki Namekawa talks about how Etude 5 “is so calm, it is actually hard to play.” She says it takes a special state of alertness to stay with such seemingly tranquil music. “And all the time, it’s like water,” she says. “It may look like a pond or a very calm river, but there’s energy coursing below the surface.”
If you’re in New York, you can catch Maki perform some of the Glass Etudes at the Joyce Theater where they are set to dances by choreographers including Lucinda Childs and Justin Peck. I can see why they’re drawn to this music. It takes an obsessive interest in movement. In my current state, those little cells remind me of the exercises my physical therapist has me do. Inversion. Eversion. Flex and point. They’re the components that will eventually lead to running, dancing, Triangle pose. But not yet. For the time being, they’re all the expression I get.
At David Geffen Hall, Maki closed with a sublime rendition of Glass’s Etude 20. It’s the last of the set, written years after that early Number 5. I dare you to call the composer of this last etude a “Minimalist.” He’s closer to Schubert here than to Steve Reich. But still, there’s that mystical patience with threads that lead nowhere or that only loop right back to the start.
“His music gives you a chance to look at your thoughts, your life, yourself,” Maki writes in her essay. “That’s why all those repetitions are so gorgeous. They create an opportunity for reflection that we’ll never have in real life, where everything changes quickly and you can’t stop to understand. His music gives us the time to process.”
Photo of Maki Namekawa: Lawrence Sumolong / Lincoln Center