Philip Glass: ICARUS: Standing at the Edge of Time

Emile offered me the following sound-bite as we said goodbye after the concert:

"Einstein wasn't taken to the beach; he was taken to the cleaners."

Although I should say that I did speak to a few people who thought that it was a brilliant occasion. This led to me thinking long and hard about the sorts of criteria I was using to judge the music in the overall context of the whole project, a project that was celebrating the 350th anniversary of the Royal Society and, as such, promoting awareness of science. Was the music to be judged in terms of its functional role? Or was the whole experience to be judged as an attempt at artistic integration? I confess that I was still disappointed by the composition, even after trying to think things through from a different perspective. Would a piece of music that more directly engaged, on a musical level, with some of the ideas about bending time have been more suitable? More exciting? Less clichéd and naff? Or would it have distracted from the narrative of the story? I would have been interested to talk to different sections of the audience to get a greater diversity of responses compared to those so invested in contemporary music such as myself.