On Repetition: Einstein on the Beach

As a piano student, I play lots of Hanon. Hanon’s exercises develop strength and speed, and the essence of this is repetition. I couldn’t help thinking of Hanon when I went to see a substantial (4 hours long) work, Einstein on the Beach, with music by Philip Glass, who is a master of repetition.

            The demands of repetition are first of all on training: everyone is a virtuoso performer. One dancer was striding diagonally forward and back for 30 minutes, longer than any ballet soloist would be called upon to dance, and must have the fitness of a middle-distance runner. The solo violinist performed continuous repeating patterns evoking Bach: the more I listened, the more I was aware of the warmth of the living instrument, in contrast to electronic sounds. You become involved: will this violinist ever be let out of purgatory, repeating the same movements seemingly endlessly? To the ear, it isn’t troubling, but to the eye, you have to ask what the repetitions are doing to his arm, his shoulder? And the mental demands of counting so much the same, but sometimes different.

            It isn’t quite meditative, because the repetitions contain small variations. And not quite random; it would take a lot of rehearsal. The repetition is constantly broken and interrupted, only to return to the pattern. Where words are involved, in choral passages for example, repetition makes the listener sort out voices: upper, lower, heavier, lighter. The words become objects, released from context, part of a pattern: indeed, the words are often numbers.

            Counting the repetitions is a musical project. Counting of chords, intervals, bars, beats. Scales, solfeggios, vocalises set one against another: the conductor beating time is repetition. You begin to be aware that underlying the world there is repetition. Repetition is practice; practice is living. Life is practice. It’s not about what it says; it’s about what it does.

            The tick of the clock or the metronome is repetition. The lapping of the sea against the sand: repetition. The saxophone may appear to improvise in jazz against the repetition; the singer may delicately soar above a bell-like repetition. It underlies; it surrounds; it supports; it abides.

            Repetition is also seen in the returns of the liturgical year. Cells renew themselves, breaths rise and fall, God and man are killed and rise together as the events of our salvation recur and remain the same.

            Repetition avails.

            And when you go outside, and the performance is finished, everything sounds different.