In 1982, Glass wrote an opera called The Photographer. It’s based on the murder trial of Eadweard Muybridge. You know of Muybridge’s work even if you don’t know who Muybridge is. He was the person who came up with a way to use multiple cameras to capture motion in an object. He was an acquaintance of Leland Stanford the founder of Stanford University and eventual governor of California, and in 1872 Stanford, who also owned race horses, asked him to determine whether all four feet of a galloping horse were ever off the ground at the same time. He set up a series of cameras along the side of a race track, and rigged them so that they would take a picture when the horse was directly in front of them. In this way he proved that yes, all four feet were up off the ground at the same time at some point during a horse’s galloping stride.

I mentioned a murder trial. In 1874, Muybridge discovered that his wife had a lover, a man by the name of Major Harry Larkyns. Muybridge believed that his wife’s son was fathered by Larkyns, and on October 17 of 1874 he sought out Larkyns and said to him “Good evening, Major, my name is Muybridge and here is the answer to the letter you sent my wife"… and shot and killed him. Muybridge was put on trial, but acquitted on the grounds of “justifiable homicide”. (Remember this was in 1874, in the San Francisco Bay area of California… still very much a part of the Old West.) Stanford paid for Muybridge’s defense.

The transcript of the murder trial is of course public record, and Glass took snippets of the transcript for Act 1 of The Photographer:

(It’s prettier when sung.)

This was one of the first Philip Glass songs that I really, really liked. The phrase “And this is artificial moonlight… an artificial sky” just has a really cool ring to it, at least to me. After spending so much time on computers as I have, it has a certain philosophical ring to it too; very little on computers, from images to thoughts to impressions of other people, is real. It’s all vaguely artificial moonlight, and if one isn’t careful, one might mistake it for the real thing.