Glass, Schubert, and the Nature of Time

from the Amazon.com Web page for this recording

This Friday Orange Mountain Music will release a new album of solo piano performances by Simone Dinnerstein entitled A Character of Quiet. The “program” for the album consists of three of Philip Glass’ études (numbers 16, 6, and 2) serving as an “overture” to Franz Schubert’s final piano sonata, D. 960 in B-flat major. As can be expected, Amazon.com has created a Web page for processing pre-orders.

The album was recorded under “lockdown conditions.” The performances took place over the course of two evenings at Dinnerstein’s home in Brooklyn this past June 22 and 23. The title of the album occurs at the conclusion of one of the stanzas in the fourth book of William Wordsworth’s “autobiographical poem” (phrase taken from the title page), whose full title is The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind. I must confess that I have found Wordsworth to be long-winded ever since I had to wrestle with him in high school; and, while the album jacket reproduces that stanza, I am not quite sure what the poet’s semantics have to do with the pianist’s approach to Glass and Schubert.

Thus, engaging poker as a metaphor, I shall take the “Wordsworth chip” that Dinnerstein has placed on the table and “raise it” with a reference to Henri Bergson. Unless I am mistaken, I first became aware of Bergson through reading Igor Stravinsky’s Poetics of Music in the form of six lessons, in which he used the phrase “Bergsonian time” in contrast to “clock time.” Bergson wrote at great length about time, and I first learned about his approach through his book Creative Evolution. In my copy of the authorized translation by Arthur Mitchell, I found this sentence:

The more we study the nature of time, the more we shall comprehend that duration means invention, the creation of forms, the continual elaboration of the absolutely new.

I like to believe that Stravinsky was influenced by this sentence (probably in its original French).

Our awareness of “physical” time is measured through repetition, the simplest instance of which is the ticking of a clock. Both Stravinsky and Glass appreciated the rhetorical impact of such repetition; but each had his own way of departing from that repetition, thus inducing a “psychological” sense of time in the spirit of that Bergson quote. This is particularly evident in the Glass études, which he conceived as exercises to maintain the agility of his aging hands. It is through repetition that the hands maintain their limberness, but it is through Glass’ capacities for invention that each étude unfolds in Bergsonian time.

When the “program” of the album progresses from Glass to Schubert, the ghost of Stravinsky still lingers. My favorite Stravinsky anecdote is about when he told a friend that he always fell asleep while listening to Schubert. However, he then continued, “but, when I wake up, I find that I am in Heaven!” Towards the end of Schubert’s life, there are movements that he composed that come as close as one might imagine to creating the sense of time standing still; and I often wonder if this is what Stravinsky mean by “Heaven.”

The first time I was aware of this sensation was while listening to the Adagio (second) movement of the D. 956 string quintet. The Andante sostenuto (second) movement of D. 960 induces the same impression; but, more remarkably, that impression emerges just as powerfully in the sonata-form Molto moderato that begins the sonata. It is only in the remaining two movements that the architecture “descends from Heaven” to more worldly auditory experiences.

Those that have been reading this site for some time probably know that I have had a more-than-generous share of opportunities to listen to D. 960 and write about it. I may even have mentioned that, back in the Eighties, I put a fair amount of time into trying to get all those notes under my fingers on my Baldwin grand. (This was the time when I took a vacation in Seattle for my first encounter with a performance of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen. There was a shopping mall atrium next to my hotel with a grand piano on the ground floor that anyone could play. I would work my way through D. 960 every morning after breakfast.)

With all of that context, it is inevitable that I would have a few nits to pick with Dinnerstein’s approach to Schubert. However, these dissolve in that “Bergsonian flow” almost as soon as they have been perceived. What is more important is than any subjective sensation of that unfolding in Bergsonian time flows almost seamlessly from Glass into Schubert. If the Glass études were conceived in the interest of physical agility, the entire album could not be a better exercise of subjectively mental agility.