Morton Feldman (1926-1987)

[Mandryka]

SQ2 in London next month, along with other suitably immersive things,  omicron willing, should I go or shouldn't I go?



https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2022/event/london-contemporary-orchestra-24?utm_campaign=CCOCON101221B_LCO24&utm_source=gdn&utm_medium=display&utm_content=banner&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI_JCx4snw9AIVsmQVCB36ugiLEAEYASAAEgIKxfD_BwE

[T. D.]

SQ2 in London next month, along with other suitably immersive things,  omicron willing, should I go or shouldn't I go?



https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2022/event/london-contemporary-orchestra-24?utm_campaign=CCOCON101221B_LCO24&utm_source=gdn&utm_medium=display&utm_content=banner&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI_JCx4snw9AIVsmQVCB36ugiLEAEYASAAEgIKxfD_BwE

That's an absolutely fantastic program! I would attend if at all possible. The visuals and ability to move around get overcome my main problems with enduring ultra-long works.

I expect the event to be cancelled, unfortunately.

[staxomega]

SQ2 in London next month, along with other suitably immersive things,  omicron willing, should I go or shouldn't I go?



https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2022/event/london-contemporary-orchestra-24?utm_campaign=CCOCON101221B_LCO24&utm_source=gdn&utm_medium=display&utm_content=banner&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI_JCx4snw9AIVsmQVCB36ugiLEAEYASAAEgIKxfD_BwE

I can only speak for myself but yes without question I would. I'm 3x vaccinated and I imagine they'd know how to socially distance properly. I highly doubt I'd be into the 24 hour concept, I'd stay for SQ2 and a handful of other things.

[Rinaldo]

Compared these two versions of Coptic Light. Capriccio longer version at 27:26 sounds more suited to this piece than CPO 23:51. Still, it is one piece that I have a problem with. It makes me physically uncomfortable and tense. I think one has to be in a kind of lucid state of mind to get into its psychedelic nature.

Late to the lucid party but this is exactly the effect Coptic Light has on me, although when I give into it, anxiety dissipates and I'm just, uh, vibin', man. In that sense, it's close to my experience with sleep paralysis – first it scared me as a teen but I've gradually learned to go with the flow, with interesting results. Gotta check out the Capriccio recording...

[Mandryka]

Very slow Palais de Mari - so for me, the most satisfying. Pavlos Antoniadis is a pianist worth following I think, I was also very impressed by his Radulescu.

https://soundcloud.com/katapataptwsi/palais-de-mari-morton-feldmanpavlos-antoniadis

[staxomega]

My go to recording for Triadic Memories has been Sabine Liebner (probably mentioned it in this thread), I've heard Marilyn Nonken a few times and she is very good. I knew her from a disc of Messiaen and now outdated complete Tristan Murail. An outstanding pianist.

[Mandryka]

My go to recording for Triadic Memories has been Sabine Liebner (probably mentioned it in this thread), I've heard Marilyn Nonken a few times and she is very good. I knew her from a disc of Messiaen and now outdated complete Tristan Murail. An outstanding pianist.

Pavlos Antoniadis on soundcloud. Ronnie Patterson

[Mandryka]

Feldman wrote Three Voices for two taped voices and one live voice. This recording uses three live voices. Does anyone have the CD? Does the booklet discuss their decision?

It also happens to be the longest on record, so the best, obvs.

[Mandryka]

Feldman wrote Three Voices for two taped voices and one live voice. This recording uses three live voices. Does anyone have the CD? Does the booklet discuss their decision?

It also happens to be the longest on record, so the best, obvs.

Answer: apparently it was a dream of Feldman's to have it played like this -- an essay by Catherine Peillon  in the booklet -- an assertion with no justification offered

Françoise Kubler a repris un rêve de Morton Feldman (compositeur'chez qui l'activité onirique affleure à la conscience et se mélange au réel). Elle l'a repris et prolongé, en proposant la version à trois chanteuses de l'oeuvre Three voices réalisée le plus souvent pour une voix live et deux voix pré-enregistrées. Cette pièce de Morton Feldman, l'une des dernières, est envoûtante et présente un aspect très particulier de la vocalité. Cette version a été donnée en concert par l'ensemble Accroche Note aux festivals Musica à Strasbourg et Archipel à Genève...

Three voices est une pièce de 1982, dédiée à la soprano Joan La Barbara, écrite pour trois sopranos ou une soprano live et deux voix pré-enregistrées sur bande. L'essentiel du matériau vocal se compose des premiers vers du poème Wind de Franck O'Hara, dédié au compositeur. Feldman y explore une tempo-ralité particulière par un jeu de ruptures et de répétitions. Pas d'indication de tempo, c'est le timbre et la respiration de l'interprète qui fixeront l'allant. «(...) Je suis un peu ennuyé du son sensuel, si ce n'est «somp-tueux», de l'ensemble, je ne m'y attendais pas » dit sa lettre du 23 avril 1982 adressée à Joan La Barbara.

[T. D.]

Answer: apparently it was a dream of Feldman's to have it played like this -- an essay by Catherine Peillon  in the booklet -- an assertion with no justification offered

I've got to hear this. I once had Joan LaBarbara's overdubbed New Albion recording but didn't like it. Three live voices appeals to me much more.

[Mandryka]

I've got to hear this. I once had Joan LaBarbara's overdubbed New Albion recording but didn't like it. Three live voices appeals to me much more.

It seems very repetitive and somehow static. I've taken refuge in Stockhausen's Stimmung.

[T. D.]

It seems very repetitive and somehow static. I've taken refuge in Stockhausen's Stimmung.

I owned the Singcircle (Hyperion) recording of Stimmung. Found it musically excellent and fascinating, but the lyrics (especially the "erotic poetry") so transcendentally awful that after a certain number of listens I felt compelled to sell it. 

[Karl Henning]

I've got to hear this. I once had Joan LaBarbara's overdubbed New Albion recording but didn't like it. Three live voices appeals to me much more.

My curiosity is piqued.

[Mirror Image]

This is my favorite vocal album of Feldman:

[Karl Henning]

It seems very repetitive and somehow static.

I'd say is, rather than seems. On the face of it, Howard, I should have supposed that the musical conception is right up your street.

At any rate, I like it.


Separately, it cracks me up (ever so slightly) that the notes feature the Franco-centric typo Franck O'Hara

[Mirror Image]

For those who aren't too familiar with Feldman and would like to learn more:

A Guide to Morton Feldman's Music

[Mandryka]

It seems very repetitive and somehow static. I've taken refuge in Stockhausen's Stimmung.

Juliet Fraser's Three Voices seems particularly spooky. A tense struggle, the living voice fighting to break away from the the two dead ones. Her voice is quite pure sounding, and somehow that "whiteness" seems to suit this still and haunting interpretation. This one has caught my imagination more than the others, as you can see.

[Mandryka]

Foreshadowing and Recollection:

Listening Through Morton Feldman's Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello

Bryn Harrison

Thirty years after its completion, Morton Feldman's last work Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello (1987) still seems radical in its approach to form and its handling of musical time. While there has been much experimental work created over the past three decades that deals directly with a reduction in materials and extended musical durations, there are few such works, to my mind, that are able to deal with notions of time so eloquently or as poetically. In this chapter I will discuss the ways in which the work confronts me with the limitations of my understanding and, ultimately, with my own sense of being.

The italicized sections below are transcriptions of notes taken during the hours spent listening to the piece. My notes are interleaved among more general reflections on the ways in which time can be seen to operate in this work. This interleaving occurred in a manner that happened to resemble the piece as I found myself moving between direct contemplation and broader musical issues. Where appropriate, quotations have been included from other authors as a means of expanding upon my own direct experiences as a listener.

***

The dense, closely voiced chords that open the work alternate between piano and strings, with both voices sharing harmonic material of similar pitch content and duration. However, I find the function of each voice is entirely different: the piano's attacks, with their transient qualities, are noticeably stronger than the strings, making marks in time, while the sustained qualities of the violin, viola, and cello appear to play through time, etching lines in space. Feldman is acutely aware of these timbral distinctions, and highlights their intrinsic differences. Meanwhile, the similarities in pitch content, rhythm, and register between the piano and strings result in an interleaving effect, like plates of glass placed on top of one another. Periodically, the order of the piano and string utterances is reversed, or reiterated with slight alterations. Any suggestion of a logical pattern is made redundant by the constant rearrangement of the same materials, which themselves have sometimes been varied.

This interplay of the near and exact repetition of single or two bar units promotes both familiarity and confusion, and I quickly become aware of my lack of ability, as a listener, to make sense of the experience. At first, I was on top of it; I could hear those slight variations, that moment of repose, the reintroduction of the same material, but now, less than three minutes into the piece, I am less sure. I am faced with a perplexing question, which manifests itself in constantly changing ways: How does what I am listening to now relate to what went before? What I am experiencing is utter confusion of the senses, which leaves me wondering where I am.

***

These opening remarks have come from a set of preliminary observations I made after one of a series of seminars on aspects of temporality in experimental music that I gave to students at the Escola Superior de Musica Catalunya (ESMuC) in Barcelona between October and December 2015. As a visiting professor, I had the privilege of teaching three-hour classes on two consecutive days each week. Wishing to take advantage of these longer sessions, I used the time available to play the class recordings of pieces of extended duration in their entirety. All of these seminars focused on music of the last forty years and, on more than one occasion, included pieces from Feldman's late period that last over an hour.

Following a session in which we listened to the Ives Ensemble's recording of Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello1 from beginning to end, much of the discussion with the group focused upon the very nature of the experience of listening attentively to the 76-minute work, with many students purporting to share my own sense of disorientation. Although I could have asked the students to listen to the piece prior to the class, what proved to be enormously rewarding was the experience of listening together as a group, of collectively witnessing time passing. I chose works with which few students were familiar, and encouraged them to make observations of the music after listening to the pieces without following or analyzing the scores. When we did analyze pieces using the score, this was done retrospectively, with the intention of relating what could be gained theoretically to the experience of prior listening. The students responded positively to these sessions, and I went on to prepare further seminars that dealt directly with the phenomenological experience of listening to this music: we talked about listening through rather than listening to these pieces. We also considered issues of recontextualization and how, for example, repetition might be used to provide different points of orientation and disorientation for the listener.

In this chapter, I will explore these aspects further and consider how a listener's apprehension of time passing in Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello is formed in response to what Feldman describes as his "conscious attempt at formalizing a disorientation of memory."2 As my understanding and appreciation of Feldman's late works has come primarily from the experience of listening to these pieces rather than through undertaking detailed analysis of the scores, I will draw on my own perceptual, subjective responses to listening to this piece and talk at length about the resultant sense of "memory disorientation." I have chosen to present my experiences as a series of personal encounters with the music to capture the experience of time passing, moment to moment. I have reflected on the difficulties inherent to the act of describing that experience and, at times, have found myself restating comments made previously. Since I aim to provide an honest account of the experience of listening through the work, I have resisted removing these duplications from the text. Indeed, one of the perplexing aspects of listening to this piece is that it relies largely on the interplay of that which is the same and that which is different. It is perhaps inevitable, then, that I should keep returning to the same thoughts, albeit in relation to a different moment in the piece. With hindsight, it seems appropriate that, as I have chosen to write about a piece that is mosaic-like in its construction, it is perhaps inevitable that the writing has ended up taking on a similar form. In the interest of clarity, I have chosen to present my own perceptual analysis in italics as a means of making this distinct from the context that supports it.

The last decade has seen an increasing number of publications on Feldman's work, and there are several excellent articles that cover certain aspects of these late works in detail. I have drawn upon some of these texts here, although a survey of the literature is beyond the scope of this chapter. I am indebted to Dora A. Hanninen and Catherine Laws, who have written so clearly and perceptively on the late works of Feldman, as well as to Brian Kane, whose excellent essay "Of Repetition, Habit and Involuntary Memory: An Analysis and Speculation upon Morton Feldman's Final Composition"3 provides the only in-depth commentary on this work in English, to my knowledge. Additionally, in order to clarify some issues relating to cognition and perception, I look to the work of music psychologist Bob Snyder, whose book Music and Memory4 offers particular insight. Beyond musicology, the work of anthropologist Tim Ingold has also been helpful in illuminating issues of temporal organization. His argument for "thinking through making"5 has some resonance, I feel, with Feldman's through-composed "intuitive" approach to form and structure, and with my own thoughts on listening through this work.

My listening sessions, in preparation for writing this chapter, were separated by a period of several months. Although this gap occurred through necessity, with hindsight it seems something of a blessing, inasmuch as it prevented me from becoming overly familiar with the music. While it is inevitable that I should become more accustomed to the events of the piece with repeated listenings, one of the continually perplexing aspects of my listening experiences is that Feldman's sequence of events, nonetheless, always remains somehow slightly beyond comprehension. The way in which duration operates when I listen to this work is both fascinating and frustrating; it seems that one cannot fail to get lost in the intricacies of its creation. Time passes in unpredictable ways, coaxing and teasing the memory into making associations, providing false anticipations and, in a Proustian sense, making one forget, if only to remember.

While actively engaged in the process of listening, I made copious notes. Admittedly, this is perhaps not the ideal way to listen, since information gets missed during the act of writing and, conversely, events become solidified through the act of note-taking. When my mind wandered, as it does from time to time in music of such demanding duration, these points were also duly noted.

Some of the following observations might also bear relevance to the other works from the last decade of Feldman's life. Indeed, the uniqueness of Feldman's approach is such that these works elicit responses that are unlike any other music that I have experienced. However, it is important to note that, although other commentators have often described these pieces collectively—as if there should be one, unified perceptual response to these works—there are, nonetheless, important distinctions to be made between one long late Feldman piece and the next, in terms of the experiential perspectives they provide. Especially notable is the differing degree to which segmentation operates in these works. While single-movement pieces such as Three Voices (1982) and String Quartet II (1983) have high degrees of segmentation, works such as Violin and String Quartet (1985) and For Samuel Beckett (1987) sound as if they have been hewn from one piece of material, leading commentators such as Sebastian Claren to describe them as "monolithic."6

Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello might be described as somewhere between the two; the various materials deployed provide clear points of differentiation, but in a manner wholly different to that in evidence in String Quartet II. In the latter, each page operates as a "frame" that "contains" musical materials. Each set of pages contains clearly contrasting materials and can be registered aurally as being significantly distinct from the last. In Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello, materials are also varied and, in some cases, highly distinct, but they are presented in close succession. Often, short phrases will be reintroduced alongside newer materials, or older materials will be reintroduced in new ways. The pages of the score offer no specific structural framework for the piece, and repeated sections occasionally go back to the previous page. While specific discussion of the score itself is largely absent from the following perceptual descriptions, knowledge of it provides a deeper contextual understanding of the work and highlights intrinsic differences to the block form approach of String Quartet II in which one page of material contrasts starkly to the next. The specificities of the integration of materials and the resultant sense of recontextualization that this provides are discussed further in the observations that follow later in the chapter.

Over the last decade of his life, Feldman composed single-movement works of long duration, including nine works that last over ninety minutes. The longest of these is String Quartet II (1983), which can last over six hours without an intermission. Working with such extended durations puts issues regarding the form and structure of these works into question. Once the graspable limits of the duration of the work are perceptually out of sight, part-to-whole relationships begin to take on new meanings and the differences between those aspects of the music that provide proximity and those that create segregation are difficult to discern. What Jonathan Kramer describes as "nondirected linearity"7 is supported by the use of a pitch language that is imbued with a sense of anticipation, but cleverly avoids the directional implications of functional, tonal harmony. Rhythm provides impetus while offering little indication of beat placement or meter. As Feldman has said:

My sense of time had been altered, so intently focused was I on the way the music changed from note to note and chord to chord. It created a living, breathing network of relationships that extended across its length. You don't really listen to these pieces, you live through them and with them. By the end of the Second String Quartet, I felt it was living inside me too.8

This sense of the material "living inside me" might be said to extend not only from moment to moment but from piece to piece. Although each work establishes its own sound world, its own working processes, and its own internal logic, a workable harmonic vocabulary is transferred from one piece to the next and through changes in instrumentation. The language of the music does not change dramatically from one piece to the next. Rather, there is a rethinking of the situation, in a manner not unlike the late Beckett novels such as Company (1980), Ill Seen Ill Said (1982), and Worstward Ho (1984) in which the same vocabulary, the same place, and the same types of characters enact the same scenario but from a new point of view.

In the case of Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello, it seems to have been Feldman's intention from the outset to create the work from two distinct timbral components: that of the different instrumental groupings of string trio and piano. Indeed, not only do the strings operate largely as a unit, but rarely do they sound at the same time as the piano. This dynamic interplay forms much of the dialogue and rhetorical underpinning of the piece.

***

From the opening moments of the piece, the bowed string chords emanate physicality. The act of drawing the bow in broad strokes from left to right and right to left gives the closely voiced harmonies a feeling of breadth. Each of these chords enters uniformly and quietly, and is sustained without deviating in volume, filling the spaces left from the piano's decaying resonance. I am reminded of the sheer beauty of hearing strings resonating harmoniously, without the need for vibrato or additional coloration. Against this, the piano's chords are endlessly reactivated, the onset of each chord being strikingly different to the softer but persistent entries of the strings, despite their quietude. Although the register that the lower notes of the opening piano chords occupy are the same as that of the strings, the higher notes are noticeably separated, with the highest voices an octave above.

Immediately following the interleaving of these two parts comes a brief moment of repose, with the piano and strings playing a held chord together. Then the opening figures return with slight variation—the piano chords revoiced and the left hand notes in a lower register. Immediately leading on from this comes another brief point of repose, this time with only single notes on the strings.

What follow are short events that closely resemble the opening bars, but already the ordering feels different. Feldman's use of material is economical; right from the start, materials are being reintroduced, reworked, but in a way that is difficult to discern. Sometimes short, complete phrases are repeated exactly but, most often, they are left incomplete, so that endings feel like the openings of new phrases and openings feel like endings.

***

Both Hanninen and Kane have commented on this aspect of recontextualization in late Feldman. Kane, taking his lead from Sebastian Claren, says, "The discourse produces essentially a richer and richer accumulation of relations, details and distinctions within a single musical entity."9 Hanninen, speaking in more general terms of the problems of recontextualization in late Feldman, writes, "Things change. Our perceptions of things change. Context changes our perceptions of things."10 Only a few minutes into the piece, Feldman has cultivated a situation of multiplicities, a complex web of syntactical relationships between the new and the half-remembered. A space has been opened up for dialogue between that which is made active in the mind and that which resides in our not-too-distant memory. Feldman has described the piece as a "rondo of everything," saying:

Everything is recycled. A lot of times it comes back just modulated a little bit, and that sounds very weird. Because you feel that it's the wrong notes. The fixed registration of the notes is like a stand and then the stand becomes a little bit blurred because you hear the pitches differently when they come back. There's just something peculiar about it.11

Hanninen, speaking of Why Patterns (1978), says, "recontextualization becomes a compositional technique; phenomenal transformation of repetition creates coherence and continuity, an autogenetic approach to musical form."12 In Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello, materials are being introduced and reworked almost from the start, but in a way that is difficult to discern. Sometimes short, complete phrases are repeated exactly but, most often, they are left incomplete, so that the ending feels like the opening of new phrases, and the openings feel like the ending. This effect is wholly disorientating and becomes a recurring theme through this chapter.

***

Four and a half minutes into the piece, the piano begins to play more widely spaced chords of varied harmonic content, seemingly at a slightly quicker pace. The pitch content is sufficiently varied to feel like a point of departure but not so different as to produce a distinct dislocation from what has gone before. What is more noticeable is a sense of opening up, of breaking away from the feeling of containment that has prevailed until now. Against the piano part, Feldman continually repeats a single, openly voiced chord on the strings. The simultaneous effect of motion and stasis is both stabilizing and unsettling, both anchoring and disorientating.

As this continues, I become aware of how Feldman continually revoices the static chord between the string trio. Although the pitch content remains unaltered, the assignation of instrument to the lowest, the middle, and the highest notes is constantly changing. As is characteristic of Feldman's compositional approach, each chord incorporates natural and artificial harmonics, which imbues each chord with subtle variations in timbre and weight. Sometimes the violin plays the highest note or, in other instances, it is the viola or cello sounding these as artificial harmonics.

As I become accustomed to this constant sense of variation within a single chord, Feldman brings in something new: an arpeggio, a single gesture consisting of a four-note piano figure spread over four octaves. Immediately the familiarity of the materials, which, until now, have consisted almost entirely of vertical relationships, is lost; the spell of an entirely chordal composition is broken. I realize in a moment that the piece can never be the same again; these single notes, spread out evenly across time, draw attention away from the repeated string chord and provide an entirely new point of focus. I register this as a distinctly new event but already Feldman has moved on, returning, albeit briefly, to the opening materials of the piece. This time each utterance is separated by a short pause, causing me to hear this material in a changed context. Did the arpeggiated figure mark a point of closure or an opening into an almost-familiar place?

I was going to say that what follows is a kind of alternation between the opening and secondary materials, but to describe this moment in the piece as a kind of alternation is perhaps a little misleading. The materials do interleave, but the relationship between them is complex and unpredictable, teasing the listener into observing false relationships and, in the process, taking me further and further into this enclosed sound world. I find that those moments that seemed to consist of differentiated materials now sound uncannily alike while, at the same time, I start to notice distinct differences between materials that had appeared similar to begin with. Registration does not seem to be the same thing it was five minutes ago; the occasional lower note played on the cello has a new vitality, a new significance. Events seem to be moving at different rates, and, already, my expectations have changed.

What opens up is a more active space in which I am encouraged to stop making sense of things and simply listen. Possibilities of what might follow arise momentarily, but almost always Feldman does something else. So little seems to have happened, and yet there are so many resources to fall back on: the opening material, the repeated string chords, solitary piano chords, silences, an isolated arpeggio. All of these elements are infused with the possibility of direct repetition or some micro-variation that always appears closely related. Through this complex web of interactions, a beautiful paradox comes into play: the music is wholly reliant upon memory and yet, with its insistence on each moment, offers no real opportunity to reflect.

***

In his book The Percussionist's Art: Same Bed Different Dreams (2006), percussionist Steven Schick speaks of this kind of affliction of memory in late Feldman. Discussing another late work, Crippled Symmetry (1983), Schick says:

the music seems to float forward in a perpetual state of balance between recollection and prefiguration. Listening to Crippled Symmetry evokes a forgotten vocabulary of memory: of foreshadowing and recollection, of being in and out of time.... A listener is left perpetually grasping for what is and what was, and both are tantalizingly just out of reach.13

Bob Snyder's perspective further illuminates this kind of listening experience:

It is possible to construct nonlinear music that makes use of primarily associative memory relationships. Although lacking linear progressions and "deep" hierarchical order, such music uses similar materials in different places to make associations across a piece. Its structure could be described as a "web," rather than a "line." Because it is non-progressive, however, at any given time this type of music gives listeners much less of a sense of location: the places where similar material appears are potentially confusable in memory.14

For Snyder, music that exists at the limits of this "nonlinear" approach enacts what he describes as "memory sabotage."15 Feldman himself spoke of erasing the memory of what we have heard before16 implying that, as we move from one event to next, the previous information must be stored in some incomplete form, only to be rediscovered and reencountered at a later moment.

***

As I continue to listen, twelve minutes into the piece, I become aware of a change: the piece seems to be getting slower but also more spacious. Prolonged moments in which the strings are entirely absent begin to emerge, and the activity of instrumental groupings crossing over one another like plates of glass has been replaced by isolated piano chords. The register of these chords seems relatively contained but the pitch content feels freely chromatic. Feldman never allows the strings to go far out of sight; they are always somewhere on the horizon, and I anticipate their entry. What emerges is a constant state of coming and going between piano and strings; now the opening chords, followed by the repeated string chord, then the opening again.

The first isolated string event emerges approximately sixteen minutes into the piece: a dyad consisting of a minor seventh on the viola and cello, closely followed by an ascent in pitch played on the violin, two octaves and a minor third higher. This short figure is then heard again, but this time as a variation to the previous entry and with the highest note on the violin sounding a tone lower. This variation appears as an answering phrase to, or an echo of the first. This question and answer is repeated three times to create an eight-bar unit. I am reminded of how balanced and stable this sounds in comparison to the off-centeredness of the oddly paced phrases observed previously in the piece.

Immediately following this string passage, I witness what might be described as the first real motif in the piece: an isolated mid-range piano gesture. The similarity in pitch and rhythm to the string passage emphasizes its connection to the preceding event, but the effect is wholly different. Here the pitches are reduced to a single octave on the piano, producing a figure that is distinctly melodic in character. To emphasize this further, Feldman repeats the figure, unvaried, and then sounds it again, a tone lower. All of this has the effect of accentuating the melodic profile of the motif. I have heard the piece on several occasions before, but am just as taken aback on this occasion by the contrast of this event to the preceding ones, and its signification as a structural marker on what I am observing. There is something odd and possibly out of place about this gesture. Is this because it has fewer of the characteristics of the preceding material?

The materials open up once more with an alternation of string material and the more open, sparser piano chords. A variation on the isolated string chords occurs and then, for the first time, high individual piano notes against more characteristically chordal materials in the strings. These isolated piano notes become more prominent and create, for me, one of the most introspective moments in the piece. It is almost as if the piano is given a moment of privacy, which is quickly overshadowed by the return of the strings.

I am now some twenty-two minutes into the piece. Each event feels more separated, as if framed as individual moments in time. I am becoming aware that there are fewer new ideas being introduced. My relationship with the piece continues to change; my listening experience is becoming a site of remembrance, wherein previous events are continually revisited.

***

While taking notes for the above, I observed that in the process of documenting this passage, the reduction in the number of new events gave rise to the amplification of existing ones, as each repetition was brought back into conscious awareness, often after a significant period of time had elapsed.

Bob Snyder says of the act of repetition in music:

When there is repetition present, each repeated occurrence of an element is somewhat like a rehearsal of its other occurrences.... Thus, in general, repetition greatly enhances chunkability, hence memorability ... Recycling a particular present ... can keep a particular chunk active in short-term memory, preserve its time order and details temporarily, and increase the chance that these will make it into permanent storage in long-term memory.17

In late Feldman pieces, repetition can be seen to operate on two principal levels, and the emphasis toward one of these types of repetition or the other varies quite considerably from piece to piece. The first level of repetition is principally structural and regards those whole sections of material that are repeated after a period of time has elapsed. In the case of a work such as Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello, this involves the reintroduction of particular phrases or blocks of material, while in other works such as String Quartet II it involves the repetition or near-repetition of entire pages of material.

The second level of repetition operates more on a micro-level and concerns the act of directly repeating a single unit by placing repeat marks around it. In Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello, Feldman makes use of this approach to repetition but, in marked contrast to many of his other late works, each passage that contains repeat marks is repeated once only. Feldman's principal interest here is in the first level of repetition: he continually reintroduces phrases and materials that differ in character back into the musical discourse, in order to manipulate the listener's perspective.

***

The reordering that I am witnessing as I write seems to continue for a significant period of time. It is accompanied by what feels like a marked slowing down in the music. Has the piece actually slowed down, or is this the result of a change in my perception of time passing? It becomes difficult to tell.

Some twenty-eight and a half minutes into the piece, new material is introduced; what I hear is a closely voiced triad played on the strings, followed by two dyads on the piano. The first of these dyads sounds in the same register as the strings and is in marked contrast to the upward and downward movement of notes of the second triad. The effect is of an arrested moment in the strings, followed by a blossoming outward of the notes from the piano. The fact that this event is repeated after a short period of silence gives the impression of the string chord retracting, after which the piano notes open up the gesture again. Each time, the note values are varied slightly—keeping me attentive to those small changes in patterning and pacing.

What follows is a succession of previously heard materials. The piano motif, which I had previously described as sounding so striking and novel, appears again. Its reappearance feels just as significant as a structural marker but Feldman chooses to only repeat this gesture once—it makes its appearance only to become absorbed within the more general musical discourse. There is an overbearing sense of sameness in the constant interplay of all these materials, and yet Feldman has the uncanny knack of giving each of these materials a renewed vitality each time they reappear. Somehow they just don't sound the same.

Some minutes later (around thirty-seven and a half minutes into the piece) a distinctly rhythmic passage is introduced on the strings—a repeated figure consisting of two shorter chords of equal value, followed by a longer one. Each of the shorter chords has weight, as if tenuto markings had been indicated in the score. This event is interspersed with the piano materials heard previously but, again, the context in which these piano notes are heard has changed. What I witness is what Hanninen would refer to as an "estranged repetition."18 Instead of providing a sense of blossoming, this time it is the rhythmic profile of the figure that I am drawn to, which seems to echo the shorter rhythmic values of the string chords.

Again, the music opens out and a succession of past events comes once more into play. It is interesting to note that even now, just over halfway through the piece, the opening materials are still reintroduced, albeit as threads or remembrances of what has passed. It occurs to me, momentarily, how the significance of these materials has changed over time. At the start, this material felt like an introduction, a means of establishing the directionality of the piece; it felt somehow solid and stable despite its ephemerality. Yet, hearing it now, I am not in the same place.

***

This sense of return to the opening material that is discussed above is reflected in the writing of Kane:

We, as listeners, are involved in the process of trying to assimilate ever new sense data—to test it, to spin it round, to place it into some order that will allow the inscrutability of all material to become clarified and legible—but, at certain moments, material insistently enforces its own dogmatism. We return to the opening bar of the piece, having suddenly arrived nowhere and beginning again, but the new beginning is not the same as the old one.19

Each return to the "start" is also a return to the last time this material was introduced and the time before that. This leads us to question the ways in which we remember these events and how we process the information we receive. Was I recalling the opening of the work when I heard this musical statement or the last time it was brought to consciousness, or some kind of amalgamation of all these past events?

***

Around thirty-two and a half minutes, a chord is played softly by the string trio, and immediately afterward, two isolated A flats are played in succession on the piano. Then the whole phrase is repeated. These isolated piano notes evoke a strong sense of intimacy. The sensuality of touch that such simple materials can evoke is striking. I am reminded of what Feldman said of Mondrian not wanting to paint bouquets but single flowers at a time.20 These two single notes convey so much eloquence. After a short alternation of piano and string chords, the event appears again and, once more, the solitary A flats reinstate their significance. Any slight significance that is attributed to any single event becomes magnified and imbued with meaning, but only to mark its own vanishing in the wake of another event at forty-four minutes and thirty-eight seconds: What follows is a series of quicker-paced passages that are presented as an alternation between the piano and strings. Each motif is confined to a pair of cluster chords, the second of which is higher in register. The difficulty I have in identifying the notes of the cluster and the sudden change of register draws attention to the rhythmic profile.

***

It is easy to talk about the parametric attributes that we are observing at this point as if we have just stepped into the piece without prior knowledge of all that has gone before. On the one hand, my aural faculties seem more acute at this stage of listening; I am immersed in this sound world and I feel as if I understand the conditions through which I am invited to listen. On the other hand, with this familiarity comes the possibility of not fully processing the information I am receiving. My sense of perception has become distorted through fatigue.

Is it that my recollection of a similar past event is interfering with what I am hearing now and creating a disturbed view of time continuity? I am certainly aware that the piece surpasses the limits of my concentration, and that the composition is larger than what I am able to comprehend. My perception of scale, it seems, is not just reliant on the sheer duration of the work, but is directly related to my ability to handle the information I am being given. As Catherine Laws has said of the work Neither (1977):

Eventfulness is minimised, ironically, through the very realisation of the proliferation of possibilities; the internal reflection of material through contextual variation and juxtaposition gives the effect of everything being the shadow of everything else: the original image, if it ever existed, is beyond reach.21

This sense of things being "beyond reach" or "being the shadow of everything else" has a strange paradoxical effect; all the events that have taken place up to now seem also to have a nearness to them; it is as if anything that has gone before could return at any moment. This sense of things feeling out-of-reach and yet close-at-hand has a disconcerting effect: I feel lost, but with a heightened awareness of that very environment that I am lost within. The degrees of magnification of individual events appear greater, and yet these details are only available to me at the time that they occur, since I find myself unable to directly recall the previous occurrence of this event with any certainty. It becomes impossible, with such high information content and long overall duration, to say whether what I perceive is the same material as before or whether some slight variation has occurred. Snyder tells us:

when we have any type of experience repeatedly, we have great difficulty remembering the details of any particular occurrence, unless they are fairly unusual. This is referred to as an "interference effect" and is based on the idea that similar memories interfere with each other. Interference effects are a direct result of the limits of categorization: we simply cannot retain all of the minute differences between different but very similar experiences.22

In Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello, this interference effect is felt not just as a result of having witnessed the same materials reoccurring, but from the confusion that arises from the ordering. The sequence of events follows no observable pattern and does not adhere to the principles of causality. We might say that form is created and does come into being, but arises through the process of writing, rather than being created out of some a priori design. Feldman has spoken on this, saying that he places his faith in intuition and that music shouldn't rely on formal processes and systems.23 This is not to say that Feldman is suggesting that the act of choosing which event will follow is entirely random or chance-determined. It is clear that Feldman makes discerning judgments based upon the immediately preceding sequence of events but that these are not the result of some predetermined, organizational system; an alternative decision would have led to a different set of associations between the materials and thus a new set of contextual relationships.

Feldman's approaches illustrate that each event is entirely dependent on all the others that have preceded them. Each "spur of the moment" decision made by the composer becomes part of a chain of events; each intuitive decision is a response to another made by the composer previously in the piece. Theoretically, it would be possible to trace the evolution of the work backward, viewing each event as a ramification of the preceding one a different momentary decision would have led to a different sequence of events. I have described this elsewhere as a kind of diary form—a form that unfolds out of itself, through the real-time process of composing.24

Anthropologist Tim Ingold has written extensively on what he sees as "the study of human becomings as they unfold in the weave of the world."25 In Making (2013), he states:

We are accustomed to think of making as a project. This is to start with an idea in mind, of what we want to achieve, and with a supply of raw material needed to achieve it. And it is to finish at the moment when the material has taken on the intended form ... I want to think of making, instead, as a process of growth. This is to place the maker from the outset as a participant amongst a world of active materials.26

Ingold reflects at length upon the differences between building and dwelling, describing how the notion of building usually manifests itself in an architectural prior design, while dwelling is more transitive or the result of being. Crucially, he draws on the notion that dwelling emerges from the very process of working, whereas building presupposes the completion of the design of work prior to its execution.

A comparison might be made between this idea and Penelope Reed Doob's thoughts on the construction of mazes in The Idea of the Labyrinth: From Classical Antiquity Through the Middle Ages (1994):

Maze-treaders, whose vision ahead and behind is severely constricted and fragmented, suffer confusion, whereas maze-viewers who see the pattern whole, from above or in a diagram, are dazzled by its complex artistry. What you see depends on where you stand, and thus, at one and the same time, labyrinths are single (there is one physical structure) and double: they simultaneously incorporate order and disorder, clarity and confusion, unity and multiplicity, artistry and chaos. They may be perceived as a path (a linear but circuitous passage to a goal) or as a pattern (a complete symmetrical design).... Our perception of labyrinths is thus intrinsically unstable: change your perspective and the labyrinth seems to change.27

We might think of the designer of the maze, looking down on his or her immaculate, symmetrical design as being comparable to Ingold's notion of the architect or the builder, who takes delight in the abstract construction of its making. Similarly, we might think of Doob's maze-treader as Ingold's dweller, unaware, principally of the particularities of the construction of the maze but taking delight in the experience of confusion that comes from living in and as part of its design. The crucial difference, of course, is that the maze-viewer can see and appreciate the whole picture at once, whereas the maze-treader must discover the design for themselves, as a lived experience, born out of a sense of discovery and reliant on the passing of time and their constructed sense of memory. The maze-dweller, on the other hand, learns about their surroundings through a process of trial and error that is wholly distinct from the trials and errors that the maze-designer undergoes. Indeed, the classical symmetry that may be important to the maze-designer might not be in any way known to the maze-treader from their on-the-grid perspective. And yet, the proportional, symmetrical design of that particular maze still remains an intrinsic part of the experience of the maze-treader—even if an understanding of that design remains firmly out of reach. A different design to the maze would lead to a different lived experience.

Similarly, in Feldman—to borrow a phrase from Ingold—we "learn to learn"28 from the very act of listening. Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello does not offer the listener a framework to guide them along the way, but, instead, it sets up an experience within which we learn to form our own narrative time. In some instances, our sense of anticipation—my sense of predicting what will happen next—is fulfilled, but just as often I get it wrong. Just as Feldman creates his own knowledge of the work from a process of going along, we too, as listeners, must build up our own understanding and appreciation of the work as it unfolds before us. Through this approach we build up our own perspectival view of the piece, while having to acknowledge that it is a view that is constantly changing, forcing us to reorientate ourselves constantly. As the contextualization changes so must we.

Brian Kane explains this further:

Feldman's compositional strategies present a unique formal problem: while suggesting the possibility of being read according to conventional narrative organization, the roles of key musical signifiers shift as the piece unfolds and produce an inscrutable logic of development that is simultaneously motivated and ambiguous.29

Clark Lundberry, discussing photographer Steven Foster's relationship to Feldman's work Triadic Memories (1981), has articulated similar responses:

For there is, built into one's very hard-driven desire to be present—and to pay attention—so often what feels like staticky interference, a kind of delayed or dispersed reaction to one's experiences in which it seems that one is somehow always slightly out of sync with oneself—not fully focused upon what one is hoping to see, nor completely attuned to what one is trying to hear—never quite where one wants to be, when one wants to be there. And, compounding the problem, to be present, one must somehow paradoxically remember being present, or anticipate being present, both of which, however, are not quite the same as being present.30

Trying to stay present is indeed difficult, and the act of describing events as they continue to unfold becomes more so. One of the challenges in continuing to write about my perceptual responses to the work is in trying to discern which events are the most meaningful to describe. It would be possible from here to focus mainly on those few events that are novel and new but I begin to doubt which events I am hearing for the first time. Similarly, the aforementioned multiperspectival view makes it difficult to know which past events to relate newer events to. My sense of memory is thrown into disarray; I am still trying to just listen but somehow the resignation into what would seem to be such a simple act still remains so difficult. It is the difficulty that comes from not understanding where I am in the music.

Gary Kose, commenting on Samuel Beckett's Texts for Nothing (1967), makes a similar remark, saying:

A problem that emerges concerns transcendence and the difficulty of establishing a perspective. Being able to see clearly and to comprehend such things as setting and event, character and goals ... is for the narrators of the texts an inescapable plague. The effect is an illustration of the difficulty of beginning a narrative without perspective, which would ordinarily implicate a place, characters, events, and ending.31

Without a preordained sequential ordering, I must create my own narrative out of what is there. I perform the piece just as it performs upon me. Such long temporal spans influence my physical and mental condition. It inscribes in me its own sense of the past, its own history. I am reminded of the rather beautiful quote by Bergson, who said that "wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed."32 But knowing where that "somewhere" is over prolonged durations is so difficult; any sense of recollection is out of reach. The music continues to renew itself and I continue to live through it.

***

[Mandryka]

In the following passage, forty-six and a half minutes into the track, the strings no longer play as a unit. Instead, their entries are staggered, with each note sounding as if it is gliding across the entry of the last. Given the relatively homophonic nature of the string writing up to now, this event feels significantly different. I am reminded once more of the physicality that is evoked from drawing the hair of the bow across the strings, although here it is not the collective sound of a string chord against the piano but individual string notes that are juxtaposed with each other. Against this, Feldman reintroduces a single repeated note on the piano. Here, these isolated pitches create a wholly different effect to when this kind of material last appeared in the piece, providing points of fixity or an anchor against the freer orientation of the strings. The spell is broken momentarily by a single piano chord leaping up to an isolated high note before the closely voiced gliding effect between the strings returns. I observe how the notes in the strings continually cross over, sometimes creating slight beating patterns as they conflict with the same pitch on the piano.

I am reminded of what a significant role registration plays in this piece. These chordal textures on the strings inhabit a narrow register and blend together. I find myself comparing this to the open, widely spaced piano chords that ensue and, in particular, to the two and a half octave arpeggio that has made its appearance once again. What registration helps support is the overall sense of distinction between the materials at play. At the same time, Feldman manipulates our ability to identify these materials through the use of octave transposition. Motifs sound distinct from one another, yet they are based on the same musical figure. At times, I am drawn to the content of the pitches, at other times register becomes the crucial element, providing marked territories in which materials open and close, blossom and retract.

Slightly later (fifty-three and a half minutes), an event takes place that is characteristic of other Feldman pieces from this period, which, to my knowledge, has not occurred up to now in this work: a rising chromatic figure, unaccompanied in the piano. As is typical of Feldman's approach when working with this kind of material, the pattern sounds almost even, but with certain durations subjected to a process of augmentation or diminution. Any semblance of evenness is obscured by this process, which results in what Feldman liked to refer to as "a crippled symmetry,"33 an irregularity that disturbs the otherwise evenness and predictability of the pattern. In other pieces from this period such as Triadic Memories, these figures are often subjected to high levels of repetition, allowing the composer to present a series of near and exact repetitions in close succession. Here though, the figure sounds only once, and is followed by a new event: a broken chord. The rolling action of producing such a chord is unlike anything else that has occurred in the piece so far and, like the preceding chromatic figure, is registered as sounding significantly new.

Before I have chance to really respond to these newer events, Feldman reintroduces the chromatic figure again but this time on the strings as a variation on the original. As with the opening bars of the piece, I am reminded once again of the differences at play between the piano timbres and those of the strings, the onset of the piano notes with their stronger, transient attacks, compared to the softer entries of the strings and their abilities to sustain and control each note throughout its duration. Hearing these chromatic notes in succession on the strings affects its parametric attributes; on the piano I heard each note separately as a rising melody, but here the notes are built on top of one another, resulting in a closely voiced texture reminiscent of the "gliding" string section (forty-six and a half minutes).

What follows are further reminiscences; repetitions of repetitions, threads of memories, literal descriptions, comings and goings, changes of pace, orientations and disorientations. One senses that an ending might be on the horizon, somewhere, somehow, but there is nothing within the structure of the work to support this. This lack of teleology sets up its own conditions in which I experience time passing. It is not an absence of time that I witness, rather, I feel the weight of time bearing down on me at every instance. This sense of time "bearing down on me" confronts me with my own condition of being. While, on the one hand, I feel acted upon by time itself, on the other I am reminded that time has no agency of its own.

***

The closing moments encapsulate the transient nature of this work. There is nothing to reach for and no immediate conclusions to draw from the seventy-six-minute duration. What I have witnessed and attempted to describe in the reflective commentary above has been brought about through the very act of listening and of living through Feldman's world of phenomenal transformations.

Notes

1    Morton Feldman, Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello, John Snijders, Josje Ter Haar, Ruben Sanderse, Job Ter Haar, Hat Hut Records HatART CD 6158, 1995, compact disc.

2    Morton Feldman, Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman, ed. Bernard Harper Friedman (Boston, MA: Exact Change, 2000), 137.

3    Brian Kane, "Of Repetition, Habit and Involuntary Memory: An Analysis and Speculation Upon Morton Feldman's Final Composition," accessed November 19, 2017, http://www.cnvill.net/mfkane.pdf.

4    Bob Snyder, Music and Memory: An Introduction (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000).

5    Tim Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2013), xi.

6    Sebastian Claren, Neither, Die Musik Morton Feldmans (Hofheim: Wolke Verlag, 2000) as discussed in Kane, "Of Repetition," 1.

7    Jonathan Kramer, The Time of Music (New York: Schirmer Books, 1988), 61–62.

8    Tom Service, "A Guide to Morton Feldman's Music," The Guardian, November 12, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2012/nov/12/morton-feldman-contemporary-music-guide.

9    Kane, "Of Repetition," 1.

10  Dora A. Hanninen, "A Theory of Recontextualization in Music: Analyzing Phenomenal Transformations of Repetition," Music Theory Spectrum 25, no. 1 (March 2003): 59, https://doi.org/10.1525/mts.2003.25.1.59.

11  Morton Feldman, "Feldman-Lecture," July 2, 1987, quoted in Dora A. Hanninen, "Feldman, Analysis, Experience," Twentieth-Century Music 1, no. 2 (September 2004): 238, doi:10.1017/S1478572205000137.

12  Hanninen, "A Theory of Recontextualization," 61.

13  Steven Schick, The Percussionist's Art: Same Bed Different Dreams (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2006), 119–120.

14  Snyder, Music and Memory, 233–234.

15  Ibid., 66.

16  Morton Feldman, Morton Feldman Essays, ed. Walter Zimmermann (Kerpen: Beginner Press, 1985), 230.

17  Snyder, Music and Memory, 226.

18  Hanninen, "A Theory of Recontextualization," 61.

19  Kane, "Of Repetition," 27.

20  Feldman, Morton Feldman Essays, 124.

21  Catherine Laws, "Music and Language in the Work of Samuel Beckett" (D.Phil. diss., University of York, 1996), 211.

22  Snyder, Music and Memory, 99.

23  Feldman, Morton Feldman Essays.

24  Richard Glover and Bryn Harrison, Overcoming Form: Reflections on Immersive Listening (Huddersfield: University of Huddersfield Press, 2013), 48.

25  Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (London: Routledge, 2011), 9.

26  Tim Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (London: Routledge, 2013), 20.

27  Penelope Reed Doob, The Idea of the Labyrinth: From Classical Antiquity Through the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 1.

28  Ingold, Making, 11.

29  Kane, "Of Repetition," 10.

30  Clark Lunberry, "Remembrance of Things Present: Steven Foster's Repetition Series Photographs, Morton Feldman's Triadic Memories," accessed November 19, 2017, http://www.cnvill.net/mflunberry.pdf, 2.

31  Gary Kose, "The Quest for Self-Identity: Time, Narrative, and the Late Prose of Samuel Beckett," Journal of Constructivist Psychology 15, no. 3 (2002): 177, http://dx.doi.org.libaccess.hud.ac.uk/10.1080/10720530290100415.

32  Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (New York: Henry Holt, 1911), 16.

33  Morton Feldman, "Crippled Symmetry" (1981), in Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman, ed. Bernard Harper Friedman (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 2000), 134–149.

[Mandryka]

"Of Repetition, Habit and Involuntary Memory: An Analysis and Speculation upon Morton Feldman's Final Composition" by Brian Kane

https://www.cnvill.net/mfkane.pdf