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Happy birthday Albert Einstein! To honor you, how about we listen to a 5-hour opera with no plot and no intermissions?

Minimalist composer Philip Glass‘ 1976 opera, Einstein on the Beach indeed doesn’t have an actual plot, but instead presents a repetitive music with counting numbers and repeated spoken phrases. You could say that it musically presents the inner clockwork of the mind of a genius – pondering and calculating things that most people can’t even begin to understand.

Having played a limited number of minimalist pieces myself, I can say that this opera requires the very best musicians. The concentration of mind and strength of muscle required is enough to give most players some PTSD.

I haven’t read the book Cold Mountain, nor have I seen the movie, but I do know that its soundtrack has some great Sacred Harp music on it!

In a nutshell, Sacred Harp is the degenerate, revolutionary child of English choral music. It’s raw, it’s rough, and it’s definitely not cultivated. But it’s beautiful in its own way, and the passion in which it’s sung makes it powerful to hear.

Cold Mountain is set in the heyday of Sacred Harp singing, the American Civil War. Some musicians criticized the movie soundtrack because it uses trained singers instead of the “authentic”, untrained amateurs that are associated with this tradition. Authentic or not, the music and text have the strength to really hit home.

I hate election season. It’s just another version of professional wrestling, only with more name-calling and slightly less chair-throwing. (My apologies to pro. wrestlers for the comparison. I hope you aren’t insulted. Please don’t throw a chair at me.)

American composer Steven Mark Kohn has written a piece which pokes playfully at a politician’s speech. If only the real thing were this enjoyable.