Einstein’s Dream: At the Threshold Between Science and Art

This chapter explores the impetus behind my Einstein’s Dreams (1996), which includes a painting by Chagall, philosophical texts by Jonathan D. Kramer and Susanne Langer, physicist Alan Lightman, and the music of Edgard Varèse. This disparate array of thoughts on time informed my chamber work Einstein’s Dreams (1996) (the title borrowed from the Lightman book) and later Einstein’s Dream (2005) for computer music on CD, percussion, and string orchestra. The year 2005 marked the hundredth anniversary of Albert Einstein’s “miraculous year” in which he published his famous papers on relativity and other topics, when I underwent a radical rethinking about temporal organization in my music. I give an analytical account to elucidate how this plays out in the work, also describing the creative turn I took in the late 1900s—embracing acousmatic sound and composing computer pieces along with those for acoustic instruments, eventually combining both media in works such as Einstein’s Dream.