Einstein on the Beach

“These Are the Days, My Friend.” Collegium Vocale, Ictus and Moor Mother make time tangible in a musical trip that stays with you. Emerging in the mid-1970s, Einstein on the Beach marked a radical break with what opera had been until then. Philip Glass and Robert Wilson did not create a piece about Einstein’s life, but about time, thought and perception. No plot, no psychology. Instead: counting, pulse, repetition. Numbers are spoken. Musical figures return with slight shifts. Scenes follow one another without explanation or resolution. Collegium Vocale Gent and Ictus take on the work’s precision collectively, under the direction of Tom De Cock. The music demands exact counting, close listening and constant adjusting. Moor Mother joins them, intervening in the score with text and voice. Drawing from poetry, hip hop and experimental sound, she places language against the work’s strict patterns, cutting through repetition with a presence that is direct, poetic and grounded in the present. Three months before the premiere of the work in 1976, Music for 18 Musicians by Steve Reich also had its premiere, another piece grounded in pulse and gradual change. Together, they mark a moment when composers ceased to ask what music means, and began to ask what it does to perception over time. On Saturday 26 September, you can experience Music for 18 Musicians live during the festival. Today, fifty years on, both works remain precise in their effect. They shift how time is felt, shared, and sustained. A trip through duration, in which time loosens, stretches and briefly lets go of you.