Carol and I arrived at Davies Symphony Hall. The Philip Glass Ensemble walked onstage at five o’clock and started playing.

1.
oceans fluid seas

2.
The singer stops singing, hurriedly takes a drink of water from the bottle beside her chair, wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, pauses just a moment, looks at the music, and begins singing again.

3.
clouds burst of rain sho–
EMTs walk quietly in one of the side doors that lead to the seats just behind the stage. They walk back and forth, someone comes out to meet them.
I lose track of the music for awhile. Eventually one of them pushes someone out in a wheelchair, the others carrying their kit bags quietly trooping along behind.
–wers sunburst through clouds

4.
stone ziggurats
stretching out in time
The man across the aisle from me holds a book, Acoustic Cultures, down in the dim light that lights the stairs, and reads from it.

5.
The abstract perfection of the music runs into humanity: a keyboard player has to shake out his hand, a singer has to breathe while repeating a phrase again and again, a saxophonist pushes back in his chair and drops a phrase. But the amplification — microphones, speakers, circuits — helps to obscure humanity.

6.
hot smoggy day and
rivulets of sweat
running down my spine

Dinner break. Carol’s cold is worse, so she heads home. The man across the aisle from me says: “I’ve been listening to Philip Glass for years.” He heard Einstein on the Beach early on, and before that he heard Glass’s music played in New York lofts. “This is loft music. People went to these loft concerts, they didn’t know what they were hearing. Half of them were stoned.” The ensemble comes back onstage to lusty applause. The singer is now wearing a pink dress instead of a blue dress. “Rock and roll!” calls out the main across the aisle from me.

7.
endless mountains
stretching to
green horizons

8.
modular music:
philip glass nods his head and
a new module starts

9.
The unfortunate thing about amplified music is that, because it comes from only a few essentially identical speaker cones in close proximity to one another — instead of from fleshy vocal chords, lips pursed against metal, warm air blowing past vibrating reeds, spread out among seven performers — the sound has a homogeneity that (in my imagination at least) causes it to occasionally collect in odd corners of the room and create unfortunate resonances.

10.
three saxophones and
three electric keyboards and
one sound technician

11.
Such a relief when the human voice re-enters the music.

12.
people don’t always
do what you want them to do.

The music ended at promptly at ten. I walked out through the tumultuous applause. By 10:09 I was sitting on the number 47 bus headed down Van Ness.