Minimal Legos

As a child, I spent many a happy hour exploring the depths of space with my Lego playsets. This was before the day of Star Wars Legos, Batman Legos, SpongeBob Legos, MC Escher Legos, and even the Bible as told by Legos. No, Lego hadn't sold out to the man in my youth. There was something pure in my gray and blue bricks with the occasional clear red or yellow cone thrown in to make it make it seem space-age. Something truly futuristic about all the Lego men wearing identical red, yellow, blue, black, or white suits and sporting a smile that said "I subsist on Soylent Green." Yes, something radical and, dare I say it, minimal, about the design.

In fact, this minimal design makes a lovely seque into today's video offering. In 1976, Philip Glass broke all operatic rules with his Einstein on the Beach. The work is five hours long with no intermission, the music is based on Glass's additive meters, where notes are slowly added and taken away in a remarkably consistent texture, the text is nothing but numbers and solfege syllables, and there is no plot. Einstein is simply a visual metaphor, nothing more. For a work that broke almost all theatrical conventions of the time, you might think it failed completely on its premiere.

It sold out the Metropolitan Opera House both nights it played there.

In fact, it has so entered the American Musical Consciousness that someone finally saw the tenuous connection between Legos and American minimalism that I've drawn here and did something about it. They performed a small scene from Einstein on the Beach with Legos:

I can't wait until I get to teach this opera again next year. I know what version I'll be showing.