David Morgan

Einstein, Galileo, and Kepler: The Operas of Philip Glass

Abstract

Over the course of his career, contemporary composer Philip Glass has written three operas featuring physicists and astronomers as both symbolic inspiration and narrative vehicles. In addition to his influential 1976 minimalist work ‘Einstein on the Beach’, he has composed operas inspired by the lives of Galileo Galilei (2002) and Johannes Kepler (2009). In this presentation, I will try to convey a sense of these two more recent operas through audio, visual, and textual excerpts from the works. I will also discuss ways in which the technical astronomical achievements of Galileo and Kepler are presented by Glass, the ways in which their characters are portrayed through the music, and the ways in which the science of these two towering historical figures in astronomy is utilized for its symbolic and metaphorical value.

Biography

David Morgan has a Ph.D. in particle physics from The College of William and Mary and for 10 years was a professor of physics and astronomy at The New School in New York City. He is currently the academic director of the Ross School Innovation Lab, an academy for advanced high school students in STEM fields. In 2004, he received a Sloan Foundation/EST commission to co-author a play titled ‘The Osiander Preface’ which explored the publication of Copernicus’s ‘On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres’. He is also an amateur composer and pianist with a fondness of the solo piano repertoire of Philip Glass. Dr. Morgan was an attendee at the Second INSAP Conference in Malta.