a morton feldman day





My playlist yesterday, beginning with the drive into work:

Crippled Symmetry
For Philip Guston
For John Cage

That took up the day; Crippled Symmetry is around 80 minutes, For Philip Guston is 4 hours and For John Cage is a good hour and a half.

As if that wasn't wonderful enough, I'm now 42 minutes into disc one of String Quartet II. I can get through all 6+ hours of it and then some in the course of a work day.

Feldman's music, particularly his works since 1978 or thereabouts, are among the greatest works of the last century. They're still terribly underperformed in the US, but at least they do get heard. Kyle Gann recently wrote a detailed essay about Feldman that is dead on, and says much of what I've thought for some time. I also came across a partial transcript of a talk Feldman gave in Toronto that is absolutely hysterical (his Jewish mother joke alone is worth the lengthy read). To say that Feldman's music has had as significant an impact on my own work as did that of the early minimalists is no understatement.

Posted: Thu - January 31, 2008 at 08:48 AM          

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