LISTENING TO THE BOOTLACE WORM

By Ben Greenman

from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled

A daring test of endurance, both for musicians and for those who enjoy listening to music, is being staged at the Sycamore Theater, where a week-long production has been mounted of the whole of Blitzstein’s “Worried Eyes.” Performances begin at midnight on Sunday and last through midnight the following Sunday. Three forty-minute intervals each day allow for the necessary consumption of food (coffee and eggs are served in the morning, and sandwiches and beer at other times), and there is a five-hour nightly adjournment during which spectators can run home, shower quickly, and even catch a quick nap if so inclined. This bold experiment has been tried only once before, in the Antipodes, where fully half of the audience stuck it out until the work’s last note, although more than two dozen players were treated for dehydration. Blitzstein himself will be in attendance for the first day and the last, though he is required to be in Berlin mid-week to receive an award for “Private Planes,” his second-most-celebrated work and in nearly every respect the diametric opposite of “Worried Eyes”: melodic where the other is atonal, written for a small ensemble where the other is written for a chamber orchestra, one minute long rather than more than seven thousand minutes long. “They are both my babies,” Blitzstein said in a statement yesterday, “though one baby is a ladybug and the other is a bootlace worm.”