Philip Glass – “Train/Spaceship” from Einstein on The Beach (1983) – Old Man Playing a Music Box

Although the piece “Train/Spaceship” from the opera Einstein on The Beach is very repetitive and contains a lot of classic instruments, it seems like a modern piece of music. It seems repetitive at first but actually contains a lot of variation. Glass creates a very abstract piece by combining and repeating the same sound patterns throughout the part of the opera. 

To me personally, although I recognized how complex this approach is, I found myself lost within the piece at about five minutes of listening. Even if the sound patterns were not repeated in the same manner throughout the whole nineteen minutes, I felt like I had already heard everything this piece had to offer.        
When I already began to feel some sort of aggression towards listening, the piece took an unexpected turn when entering ten minutes. I felt relieved and was eager to know whether the newly introduced sounds would mix with the ones I had already gotten to know until now. But I felt quite disappointed when I came to realize that Glass decided to again repeat the created sound system. It was impressive how he varied between them again, but I soon became tired of these new repetitions also. At about twelve minutes, the repetitions made my head spin. I imagined an old man walking through a big, abandoned fairground playing on his portable music box (Wagen mit einer Spieluhr, I do not know whether there is an English term for this). He repeatedly turns the handle of his music box and pushes it through the alleys. In between, his arms get tired, and this is depicted in the sound also slowing down and becoming squeakier or quiet before it repeats itself again. I felt like I had found myself within some horror movie. 

As I could not get this picture out of my head, when I was listening to the 16^th minute, the sounds became even more horrifying and I thought of the old man playing his music box running through the alleys of the fairground, almost not being able to uphold the speed of the music, tripping over his own feed, the music box rattling until he collapses and the music box falling apart. The old man stops and the only thing that he still holds onto is the handle of his music box. All the parts of the music box lie down on the ground, some are completely broken. He looks at the handle sadly and slowly starts collecting the pieces of his music box in a disturbing silence. Although there is no music and no sounds left, he collects the pieces in the same speed as the piece by Glass went, he repeats his movements, then slows down and repeats them in a different manner. All while there are no sounds left to hear, just the old man trying to find all the pieces that once constituted his portable music box.