tomorrow would have been morton feldman's 80th birthday





I'd known of Feldman for some time, certainly, but until 2004 had only heard one piece of his: Vertical Thoughts 2 for violin and piano from 1963. I heard that piece in a concert at a local church in the Hyde Park section of Chicago and really liked it. I looked at a number of Feldman's scores in the library during medical school, and vaguely remember reading something about his writing really long works, but that was about the extent of my knowledge of his music.

In 2004 I heard excerpts from his String Quartet No. 2 (FSQ2 for those "in the know"), and was blown away by it. So much so that, just as I did a long time ago when I would get interested in a particular composer's music, I had to listen to everything I could find. At this point, I have 2.84 GB of Feldman's music on my computer and iPod, and given that he was a very prolific composer, I know I'm not done acquiring music he wrote.

Overall, I'm most partial to the works he wrote in the last decade of his life, beginning in 1977. Many of these are the "long" works like FSQ2 (over 6 hours), For Philip Guston (over 4 hours) and Crippled Symmetry (an hour and a half). I'm still blown away by his 1977 work Piano, and am gradually appreciating his "concerti" from the 70's, like Violin and Orchestra, Flute and Orchestra, Piano and Orchestra, and Cello and Orchestra. His music tends to be very, very complex, with notations that use different note spellings from what is conventional (F-flat rather than E, D-double sharp rather than E, etc.). Some have suggested this indicated a desire of Feldman's to express microtones, but I don't think that is completely true.

Needless to say, Feldman's music is not for everyone. It tends to be long (but not always---most of his music is "normal length," even brief), innovative, stark and unegotistic. There are few driving rhythms, and while he has been considered to have minimalist tendencies, his music is a galaxy distant from that of Glass and Reich. True, Feldman did tend to repeat measures and certain figures over and over. But much of this stems from his concept of musical memory. He will repeat certain phrases, often very simple ones, at various times in a score, often ever so slightly altered. There is variation, but it takes place over a large scale. There are many points in FSQ2 where, after, say, four hours, one hears something and it seems familiar, but perhaps only had been heard two hours previously.

There are also moments in his music that are among the most incredibly ephemeral I've ever heard. One such moment comes in the last 40 minutes or so of FSQ2. There are similar moments in Piano and String Quartet and Violin and String Quartet as well as many other works. From what I've read, Feldman was a very boisterous, loud and even gruff person. Yet he wrote the most delicate, fragile music.

Feldman died of pancreatic carcinoma in 1987, and since his death has had a renaissance of sorts, in that much of his music has been recorded (in the case of a few works like Coptic Light and Triadic Memories, multiple times). While his music seems to get performed more often in Europe than in the US, there seems to be a much greater appreciation of his music over the past few years. Some evidence for this: there is a wonderful online resource run by Chris Villars, along with an e-mail list that many of us participate in. A two-CD set of Feldman's complete violin and viola music is about to come out on OgreOgress Productions performed by Christina Fong and Paul Hersey, and even an audio DVD of Feldman homages (along with my own mf and Feldman's 1956 Three Pieces for String Quartet). Charles Curtis has championed Patterns in a Chromatic Field, and the great recording of the String Quartet No. 1 by the Group for Contemporary Music is going to be re-released in the near future. And finally, Chris Villars has edited a collection of essays by Feldman that should be out in March.

People often think of Feldman for several things: his earlier graph-notated scores that had many elements of indeterminacy, his Webern-inspired short pieces from the 50's, and his really long pieces composed in the last decade of his life. People who knew him personally think of him as a teacher, and perhaps a bon-vivant. I think of Feldman for two things: his unique writings on music (including his book of essays Give My Regards to Eighth Street) and the composer of some of the most tragically beautiful music I know of: Piano Violin Viola Cello (his last known work).

Posted: Wed - January 11, 2006 at 11:34 AM          

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