I have Ukrainian or Russian Neighbors... I'm not sure which

My neighbor has lived next door since I was in sixth grade, a little over a decade, and just last week he told me he was actually from Russia, not Ukraine. Judging from his history, I think he’s full of shit, but that’s beside the point.

I was telling him about how I’d been reading the letters of Richard Feynman and how Feynman, known for his contempt towards “high societies” and frequent refusal to a) support these societies or b) implicitly support them by providing recommendations to induct people into these guarded groups, made an exception for a Russian by the name of Andrei Sakharov.

Alright, so it wasn’t a blatant violation of his ethics, but Feynman did associate himself with a press statement that was released on December 9, 1975, which congratulated Sakharov for receiving the Nobel Prize for Peace.

Andrei Sakharov was an academician most closely associated with mathematics and physics. In 1948, Sakharov worked on the Soviet Atomic Bomb project which successfully tested the USSR’s first atomic bomb in 1949. Sakharov directly influenced the testing of the Tsar Bomba in October of 1961. These contributions helped Sakharov remain safe from Stalin’s unforgiving persecution of intellectuals and artists who, as determined by Stalin, posed a threat to the sanctity of the USSR.

Unlike Sakharov, composer and musician Dmitri Shostakovich came under intense scrutiny throughout his career during the reign of Stalin. At one point in Shostakovich’s career, his music was blacklisted throughout the USSR and he was deemed an enemy of the state, all because of an article that declared a misunderstood composition to be “muddle instead of music”. Though Shostakovich faced exile in his late life, he remained safe for a long period of time. Much of Shostakovich’s safety came from his adherence to Russian musical traditions when creating music for propaganda films meant to glorify the USSR. These compositions tend to avoid Shostakovich’s musical idiosyncrasies in favor of a more commercial, nationalistic style. This artistic compromise suggests a sense of desperation on the part of Shostakovich to continue to make a living through music.

You could argue that Shostakovich attempted to appease Stalin by writing music for propaganda films but these contributions did not prevent him from having conflicts with Josef Stalin. At one point, after being invited to the US to present some of his compositions to an American audience in NYC, Shostakovich called Stalin and asserted he would not represent the USSR unless he was taken off the blacklist of composers. To confront Soviet authority, as Shostakovich had, presented the potential for stiff consequences, including death.  This type of confrontation was later mirrored by Andrei Sakharov in challenging a decision made by Nikita Khrushchev to restrict the publication of Sakharov’s essay, “Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom.”

In spite of his earlier contributions to the Soviet nuclear program, Khrushchev forbade Sakharov from releasing his essay outside of the USSR. Before reading Sakharov’s, “Reflections…” I assumed there would be some controversial information regarding the Soviet Union, but I was pretty far off the mark. I think a paragraph from the Press Release, drafted by Nobel Laureate Max Delbruck, summarizes a major component of the essay better than I ever could (without plagiarizing):

[Sakharov] argued that the capitalist and the socialist systems have great merits and demerits. There should be a freer flow of information, of visits, and of open critical discussion, to accelerate the natural process of convergence between the two systems, and thus lead to a more humane way of life for all of us, including the Third World.

It should be noted that when Sakharov received the Nobel Prize, seven years after the original publication of the essay, Khrushchev would not allow him to leave the country to accept the award. This is why Delbruck drafted a press release in support of/congratulating Sakharov for his recognition. Many other Nobel laureates, including Harold Urey, Carl Anderson, Julian Schwinger, and Richard Feynman, associated themselves with this press release.

At first, I was alarmed by the fact that Khrushchev and the Soviet Leadership would take offense and try to prevent the spread of such a balanced essay. With more consideration, I understood this is the exact type of thing leadership hates when trying to maintain control. By taking a balanced approach, a person reading Sakharov’s “Reflections…” will have to admit that both systems have good and bad aspects. If the “opponent’s” system is not 100% evil/wrong then the power of the controlling party begins to erode from doubt.

Balanced arguments only upset those who are trying their hardest to convince people of something, regardless of their stance. This happens because a balanced argument has truths that become self evident to the reader after a proper amount of consideration. A person with underlying motivations can’t afford to allow an audience to find these truths because then their charged argument becomes moot.

What’s interesting to me, in regards to large groups of people, is how we often write them off as stupid, ignorant, lazy, or blind followers of ideology. I sometimes do this, and it’s a very lazy habit that helps avoid having to think for myself. If people were as dumb as we sometimes like to think, then people like Khrushchev or Stalin would not work so hard to maintain a certain ideology because people would never change their ideas or rebel when something wasn’t working. In other words, the fact that fascists and dictators attempt to control how people think is an admission that people can think and determine truths for themselves.

There’s one main ingredient necessary for people to reach these truths: the ability to think freely without fear of consequence. While this is important, there’s an assumption that people will take advantage of this freedom, but that is not always the case…

In the following post I will break down Andrei Sakharov’s essay, “Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom,” and provide analysis regarding why this is such a potent essay. In addition to this analysis, I will pose some questions I have about the essay and connect this back to the current times.

An introduction to EINSTEIN ON THE BEACH

Robert Wilson and Philip Glass met unintentionally at a party which followed the performance of Wilson’s theatrical creation The Life and Times of Josef Stalin. After a brief conversation, the two agreed to meet again for lunch—an occurrence which became habitual for the pair. During these lunches Wilson and Glass began brainstorming and their ideas eventually developed into the skeleton of the “portrait opera” Einstein on the Beach. One interesting and important aspect of Wilson and Glass’s relationship is the spontaneous chemistry which existed between them.  From determining the title of the opera, to the subject matter, to the idea of targeting the audience’s subjective biases, Glass and Wilson had an unspoken way of agreeing on creative decisions. In his book Music by Philip Glass, Glass describes how his ideas naturally meshed with those of Wilson:

…it never occurred to us that Einstein on the Beach would have a story or contain anything like an ordinary plot.  Bob, by then, had done a series of large theater works which, by their titles at least, were based on the lives of famous persons. But how that title character appeared in the work could, in the end, be very abstract.

From this quotation, we can see how the similar thoughts on theater which existed between Glass and Wilson helped propel the creation of the opera. The quotation also segues into how Wilson and Glass decided to approach the meaning and subject matter of Einstein on the Beach.

            

When first deciding the main theme of Einstein on the Beach, Wilson would present an idea like Hitler and Glass would decide no, countering with Ghandi as the main theme. This juggling back and forth continued for a while until Wilson came up with the idea of Einstein. Immediately Glass liked Einstein as a main theme because most people already know at least something about Einstein. Understanding this, Wilson and Glass developed a “portrait opera” which does not have a coherent plot and has minimal story development. Eschewing the standard ways of story and opera, the creators of Einstein on the Beach used images which had a connection, regardless of how tangential, to Einstein. Using the style of a portrait opera already developed by Wilson, Glass and Wilson depended on the audience’s subjective knowledge to create their own meaning, guided by the imagery on stage, about the opera. I find the use of portrait opera to be interesting and unique, even by today’s standards. We could perhaps even draw a connection between Glass’s dependence on the audience to fill in the story of Einstein on the Beach to the impressionistic style of art prominent during the 20^th century, which also used an indirect and ambiguous way of conveying meaning to the audience.

           

Of all the logistics surrounding the production and performance of Einstein on the Beach, two things stood out most to me. First, the premiere of EOTB was in Paris at the Avignon Festival in August of 1976. With the arrangements made by Michel Guy, any future performances of the opera depended on successful execution of the play and a positive reaction from the audience. Thankfully, the performers were unaware of this pressure. The second striking aspect of performance was the preparation schedules for the performance. Glass and Wilson held rehearsals five days a week (which eventually became six) that lasted over 9hrs each day and divided the work-day into three hour blocks, one for choreography, one for the music, and one for stage movements. This intense rehearsal schedule also ties into the musical procedures of the opera. Glass composed the music of EOTB using techniques he had been developing which extended back to his work on Samuel Beckett’s Play. These techniques, additive process and cyclic structure, would take a number of notes and repeat them for a specified number of times and eventually add another note for the same process to be repeated again. Because cyclic structures were relatively foreign to the performers, along with the length of the opera, Glass chose to use a method he learned from Ravi Shankar while studying tabla to teach the performers of EOTB. Each day Glass would teach the performers a small portion of the music and then the next day they would review the previous material learned before moving on to new material. One last interesting aspect of the music of EOTB was that, initially, Glass had the performers learn the music using numbers and solfege as a memorization aid. Eventually these numbers and syllables became so ingrained that Glass decided to keep the solfege and counting in the final product.

            

After reading through the libretto one of the most obvious ideas regarding the text is the lack of continuity or plot. Instead, it seems, the authors of each portion used a similar process for the words as Glass used for the music. Many of the words and phrases throughout each portion of the libretto are repeated with some words being added and some being removed which imitates the additive process of the music that adds a note for a number of repeats and then adds another note. It also appears that the number of syllables in each portion takes precedence over the content of the words. One could argue that nonsense words could be inserted instead of real words, as long as the number of syllables remained the same, and the opera would not lose any important material. Two of the few coherent portions of the libretto were contributed by a man characterized by an air of sophistication: Samuel Johnson. This elderly man composed and delivered two speeches during the play which spoke of lovers sitting on a bench and the feeling which Paris imparts upon its visitors.