Ein(Stein) on the Beach (in Egypt): ‘Syncopated Time’ and the Formation of a ‘Continuous Present’ in Philip Glass’ Akhnaten
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In her 1935 lecture Plays, Gertrude Stein identifies a problem at the heart of the theatrical experience, that “your emotion concerning [the] play is always either behind or ahead of the play at which you are looking and to which you are listening” (Stein 58), creating an emotive and cognitive asynchronicity between the audience and the work, which she terms “syncopated time” (Stein 58). At the heart of this disconnect is her observation that “plays are either read or heard or seen” (Stein 59); the audience’s difficulty navigating this trialectic relationship is largely responsible for their desyncing from the emotional time-sense of the work. As the theatrical medium involving perhaps the most complex interplay of reading, hearing, and seeing, opera is an excellent subject for the application of Stein’s theories. This paper applies Stein’s questions of cognitive perception and emotional time to Akhnaten, Philip Glass’ third opera (which recently received its Metropolitan Opera premiere), in order to explore how the work navigates the problems which Stein identifies. This paper will argue that Glass’ iterative and ‘minimalist’ compositional style creates a synthesis of reading, hearing, and seeing to create a ‘continuous present,’ allowing the audience to remain in emotive and cognitive synchronicity with the work, and thus preventing them from falling into ‘syncopated time.’ In this way, contemporary opera offers novel approaches to the performative relationship between a work and its audience. Works Cited Stein, Gertrude. “Plays.” Writings and Lectures 1911-1945, edited by Patricia Meyerowitz, Peter Owen, 1967, pp. 58-81.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".