Morton Feldman (1926-1987)

[Uhor]

Hi, I love Morton so I found these extreme mashups here on YouTube:


If you like the concertos, check this:

If you like the density, this:

Now, if you go for length:

[Mandryka]

I see that the discography at

https://www.cnvill.net/mfdiscog.htm

is no longer with us. Did anyone make a copy of it?

[wind-]

I see that the discography at

https://www.cnvill.net/mfdiscog.htm

is no longer with us. Did anyone make a copy of it?

Last ones I saved

6.21.23 Feldman works.pdf

7.29.23 Feldman labels.pdf 

[vers la flamme]

I see that the discography at

https://www.cnvill.net/mfdiscog.htm

is no longer with us. Did anyone make a copy of it?

Did he take down his site?! Damn!

[Mandryka]

Last ones I saved

6.21.23 Feldman works.pdf

7.29.23 Feldman labels.pdf 

Great.

@ritter and other moderators. Are these pdfs saved to the gmg website?  They're valuable resources and it would be a shame to lose them.

[DavidW]

Great.

@ritter and other moderators. Are these pdfs saved to the gmg website?  They're valuable resources and it would be a shame to lose them.

I wouldn't count on it.  This forum has a long history of losing data.  If it is valuable to you, download it.  Share it some place better like google drive.

[Mandryka]

Ralph Schnell presents For Bunita Marcus as a series of pieces with evocative titles like A Glimpse of Eternity, Church Bells, Unrest, Daydreaming, What If? . . .

No idea where he got the idea from - I don't have access to the booklet. I think it's a helpful idea actually.

[Atriod]

Not sure if the booklet has more than this:

Ralph Schnell: My first serious studies of contemporary piano music took place during my university years. The works of Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Hespos and others were still quite new, and playing them was no fun - not because of the music but because of the instructions given: everything 'old' was to be avoided. No phrasing, no rubato, no emotions, and most of all, nothing was supposed to sound beautiful! These rather intellectual studies ended when I met Darryl Rosenberg and witnessed his performance of 'For Bunita Marcus'. Darryl personally knew John Cage and was intimately familiar with the works of the New York School (to which both Cage and Feldman belonged), and the intense beauty and musicality of his performance swept all intellectual restrictions away and made me fall in love with contemporary music and particularly with the music of Morton Feldman.

'For Bunita Marcus', one of his late works, is a truly epic piece of music. Depending on the piano, the concert hall, and the audience, it lasts anywhere from 75 to 90 minutes. It is a continuous stream of music from beginning to end. Morton Feldman creates a space that appears to have no time, no metre, no specific rhythm. But Feldman achieves the illusion of the absence of a metre by writing immensely complex rhythms and mandating a specific tempo, so that the audience will not be able to recognize that structure. Very typically for Feldman, this complexity is also intended to keep the pianist alert and on the edge at all times. There are almost no instructions provided in the score: with only two exceptions (very soft, the sustain pedal to be held continuously), everything else is left for the pianist to figure out for themselves. But we do know that Feldman approved of pianists adding rubato and other interpretations; by no means did he expect his music to be played strictly reduced to what he wrote down in the score.

[Karl Henning]

[Atriod]

I've had Sabine Liebner's recording of For Bunita Marcus in my heavy rotation. This has now become my go to performance, replacing Hamelin and Takahashi. Incredible recording quality too, I learned to get used to Hamelin's recording but this one from Liebner is perfect. Liebner is expansive, like how late Feldman should be!

[Mandryka]

New book in pipeline



https://www.whsmith.co.uk/products/the-marvelous-illusion-morton-feldmans-the-viola-in-my-life-iiv/thomas-delio/paperback/9780197759936.html

[Mandryka]

Frank O'Hara's essay for Feldman's first LP - New Directions in Music 2

https://open.spotify.com/album/73lWnWYtvr8B41U4D8o7na

https://monoskop.org/images/f/f8/Vertical_Thoughts_Morton_Feldman_and_the_Visual_Arts_2010.pdf

The last ten years have seen American composers, painters
and poets assuming leading roles in the world of
international art to a degree hitherto unexpected. Led by
the painters, our whole cultural milieu has changed and is
still changing. The 'climate' for receptivity to the new in
art has improved correspondingly, and one of the most
important aspects of this change has been the interinvolvement of the individual arts with one another.
Public interest in the emergence of a major composer,
painter or poet has, in recent years, almost invariably been
preceded by his recognition among other painters, poets
and musicians. The influence of aesthetic ideas has also
been mutual: the very extremity of the differences between
the arts has thrown their technical analogies into sharp
relief. As an example of what I mean by this, we find that
making the analogy between certain allover paintings
of Jackson Pollock and the serial technique of Webern
clarifies the one by means of the other – a seemingly
'automatic' painting is seen to be as astutely controlled
by the sensibility of Pollock in its assemblage of detail
toward a unified experience as are certain of Webern's
serial pieces. And it is interesting to note that initial
public response to works by both artists was involved in
bewilderment at the seeming 'fragmentation' of experience.
Although these analogies cease to be helpful if carried too
far, it is in the framework of these mutual influences in
the arts that Morton Feldman could cite, along with the
playing of Fournier, Rachmaninoff and Tudor and the
friendship of John Cage, the paintings of Philip Guston as
important influences on his work. He adds, 'Guston made
me aware of the 'metaphorical place' which we all have
but which so many of us are not sensitive to by previous
conviction.'
I interpret this 'metaphysical place,' this land where
Feldman's pieces live, as the area where spiritual growth in
the work can occur, where the form of a work may develop
its inherent originality and the personal meaning of the
composer may become explicit. In a more literal way it is
the space which must be cleared if the sensibility is to be
free to express its individual preference for sound and to
explore the meaning of this preference. That the process
of finding this metaphysical place of unpredictability and
possibility can be a drastic one is witnessed by the necessity
Feldman felt a few years ago to avoid the academic
ramifications of serial technique. Like the artists involved
in the new American painting, he was pursuing a personal
search for expression which could not be limited by any
system.
This is in sharp contrast to the development of many of
Feldman's European contemporaries, for example Boulez
and Stockhausen, whose process has tended toward
elaboration and systemisation of method. Unlike Feldman's
their works are eminently suited to analysis and what they
have lacked in sensuousness they invariably may regain in
intellectual profundity and in the metaphysical implications
of their methods. But if we speak of a metaphysical place
in relation to Feldman, it is the condition under which the
work was created and which is left behind the moment a
given work has been completed.
Feldman's decision to avoid the serial technique was an
instinctive attempt to avoid the clichés of the International
School of present day avant-garde. He was not to become
an American composer in the historical-reminiscence
line, but to find himself free of the conceptualised and
self-conscious modernity of the international movement.
Paradoxically, it is precisely this freedom which places
Feldman in the front ranks of the advanced musical art of
our time.
A key work in the development away from serial technique
is the Intersection III for piano (1953). A graph piece, it is
totally abstract in its every dimension. Feldman here
successfully avoids the symbolic aspect of sound which
has so plagued the abstract works of his contemporaries
by employing unpredictability reinforced by spontaneity
– the score indicates 'indeterminacy of pitch' as a direction
for the performer. Where others have attempted to reverse or
nullify this aural symbolism (loud-passion, soft-tenderness,
and so on) to free themselves, Feldman has created a work
which exists without references outside itself, 'as if you're
not listening, but looking at something in nature.' This is
something serialism could not accomplish. This freedom
is shared by the performer to the extent that what he plays
is not dictated beyond the graph 'control' – the range of
a given passage and its temporal area and division are
indicated, but the actual notes heard must come from the
performer's response to the musical situation. To perform
Feldman's graph pieces at all, the musician must reach
the metaphysical place where each can occur, allying
necessity with unpredictability. Where a virtuoso work
places technical demands upon the performer, a Feldman
piece seeks to engage his improvisatory collaboration,
with its call on musical creativity as well as interpretative
understanding. The performance on this record is proof of
how beautifully this can all work out; yet, the performer
could doubtless find other beauties in Intersection III on
another occasion.
Projection IV for violin and piano (1951) explores an
entirely different area of musical experience. A graph
piece also (see illustration), its marvellous austerity is
achieved mainly through touch, and I will quote the note
to the performer as an example of how the individual
area of experience in these graph pieces is indicated to the
performers:

SNIP

A comparison of these two graph pieces, whose ambiances
are so totally dissimilar, gives an idea of the great compositional flexibility possible with graph notation.
Unpredictability is used in a different way still in the Piece
for Four Pianos (1957). This work, scored in notation
rather than graph, begins simultaneously for all four pianos,
after which the following notes may be played to the end
by each of the pianists at time intervals of their mutual or
individual choice. Feldman has said, 'The repeated notes
are not musical pointillism, as in Webern, but they are
where the mind rests on an image – the beginning of the
piece is like a recognition, not a motif, and by virtue of the
repetitions it conditions one to listen.' As we proceed
to experience the individual time-responses of the four
pianists we are moving inexorably toward the final
image where the mind can rest, which is the end of the
piece. In this particular performance it is as if one were
traversing an enormous plain at the opposite ends of which
were two huge monoliths, guarding its winds and grasses.
In all of Feldman's recent work the paramount image
is that of touch – 'The use of the instrument must be as
sensitive as the application of paint on canvas.' (Which
brings us back to Rachmaninoff, Fournier and Tudor.)
In some pieces the entrance into the rhythmic structure
is left entirely to the performer, and it is in this area that
unpredictability enters and the performer must create the
experience within the limits of the notation.
On the other hand, one of the most remarkable pieces
recorded here is Structures for string quartet (1951). It is
a classical string quartet without sonata development,
without serial development, in general without benefit of
clergy. Like Emily Dickinson's best poems, it does not
seem to be what it is until all questions of 'seeming' have
disappeared in its own projection. Its form reveals itself
after its meaning is revealed, as Dickinson's passion ignores
her dazzling technique. As with several other Feldman
pieces, if you cannot hear Structures, I doubt that studying
the score would be a help, though it is a thoroughly notated
field of dynamic incident, whose vertical elements are
linked by a sort of shy contrapuntal stimulation of great
delicacy and tautness.

In an oeuvre which so insistently provides unpredictability
with opportunities for expansion and breadth, the question
of notation at all arises, for the graph would seem to
provide an adequate control for the experience and a
maximum of differentiation. But differentiation is not
Feldman's point, even in the graph music: the structure
of the piece is never the image, nor in eschewing precise
notation of touch is Feldman leaving the field open for
dramatic incident whereby the structure could become an
image (as in Boulez). Notation is, then, not so much a
rigid exclusion of chance, but the means of preventing the
structure from becoming an image in these works, and an
indication of the composer's personal preference for where
unpredictability should operate. As John Cage remarked
in this connection, 'Feldman's conventionally notated
music is himself playing his graph music.' And of course
the degree of precision in the notation is directly related to
the nature of the musical experience Feldman is exposing.
This notation can be very precise, as in Extensions I for
violin and piano (1951), which indicates an increasing
tempo of inexorable development from beginning to end
by metronomic markers, as well as the dynamics and
expressive development.
Although the traditionally notated works are in the
majority on this record (Extensions I, Structures for
string quartet, Extensions IV, Two Pieces for Two Pianos,
Three Pieces for String Quartet), I have gone into the use
of unpredictability in this music at such length in order to
reach a distinction about its use in much contemporary
music. In Feldman's work unpredictability involves the
performer and the audience much in the same way it does
the composer, inviting an increase of sensitivity and
intensity. But in much of the extreme vanguard music in
America and Europe, particularly that utilising tape and
electronic devices along with elements of unpredictability,
the statistical unpredictability has occurred in the
traditional manner during the making of the piece; it has
been employed preconceptually as a logical outgrowth of
serial technique, and it is dead by the time you hear it,
though the music is alive in the traditional sense of
hearing. What Feldman is assuming, and it is a courageous
assumption, is that the performer is a sensitive and
inspired musician who has the best interests of the work at
heart. This attitude leaves him free to concentrate on the
main inspiration-area where the individual piece is centred.
What he finds in these centres – whether it is the
sensuousness of tone and the cantilena-like delicacy of
breathing in Three Pieces for String Quartet (1954–56),
or the finality of the 'dialogues' in Extensions IV for three
pianos (1952–53) – is on each occasion a personal and
profound revelation of the inner quality of sound. The works
recorded here already are an important contribution to the
music of the 20th century. Whether notated or graphic,
his music sets in motion a spiritual life which is rare in
any period and especially so in ours.

Frank O'Hara[/i]