Morton Feldman (1926-1987)

[Karl Henning]

From the latest UB alumni mag.

You've all heard of "the internationally renowned new music festival," June in Buffalo?  It's world-famous in Poland.

[milk]

Yes I think you should. I've found 16 recordings of Palais de Mari and there's a lot of differences.

I've been listening to this, it is very bleak indeed, and very good. Feldman was dying in 1987 and I'd say he wrote some extraordinary music at that time.

I have this also: but I think it's the only recording of this work I have. Strike that: I also have the Bridge recording. Hmm...I'll have to compare. I realize for Palais I also have Sabine Liebner. She's sparse with already sparse music. Like a desert at night. I think I like it better than Takahashi. I like Liebner's palette.

[milk]

Yes I think you should. I've found 16 recordings of Palais de Mari and there's a lot of differences.

I've been listening to this, it is very bleak indeed, and very good. Feldman was dying in 1987 and I'd say he wrote some extraordinary music at that time.

Feldman inspired rant: The bridge recording is also quite good I think. I think Klimt is a little smoother sounding - maybe a bit more polished? And the bridge is a slightly more present or up front in the recording and slightly more brittle. They'e both quite good and really worth spending time with. Yeah, I haven't spent enough time with this piece. It's great. The piano quartet had me so enthralled and I think I rated this as lesser. The piano quintet is almost ambient music. But this piece is darker I think. But also satisfying in a different way. I feel Feldman doesn't get his proper due. Maybe it's because people think he's so same-y. I've always liked artists like that. People say Eric Rohmer and Ozu made the same films over and over. But it's a kind of focus. There's a pianist here in Japan that plays a lot of modern French stuff. I convinced her to play Why Patterns with her ensemble (it's a length they can handle). But they only played it once in Kyoto to a very small crowd. I don't quite get why they go through weeks or months of practice just to do something once. Why not play it 2 or three times? Anyway...I can't get them to do more Feldman. Palais would be a good piece for her to do solo, though. Although, no one wants to hear this music and she spends months practicing obscure modern French stuff for some visiting composer at a museum for no pay. But Japan has gotten really bad. There's all this terrible crap now like painting performances where someone plays and some schmuck paints something at the same time. There's a video on youtube of a terrible Japanese pianist playing Bach with a chain in her piano.   

[San Antone]

Imo, Feldman is a 20th century composer who has a healthy audience.  Of course, no "modern" composer will have the fanbase as Bach, Beethoven or Wagner, but relatively speaking, his recordings are generally inprint and new ones appear fairly regularly.

[Mandryka]

I counted that there are 16 recordings available now of Palais de Mari. I don't know what that shows, but it may show something. Or it may not.

The music from his last couple of years is not the same as the rest, more austere.

[milk]

I counted that there are 16 recordings available now of Palais de Mari. I don't know what that shows, but it may show something. Or it may not.

The music from his last couple of years is not the same as the rest, more austere.

I think it's about the length of the piece? Easy to stick on a recording? Triadic memories is more of a commitment. When I was talking to my friend here in Japan (friend's wife) they had a hard time finding a manageable Feldman piece. They weren't willing to do, like, 4 hours.

[bwv 1080]

great Feldman recording and also a good intro to the music of Christopher Fox

[millionrainbows]

Listen to this and compare it to Feldman. It's just not the same; it has no 'emotional' content or identity as Feldman does. That's not a criticism; this just sound more detached and objective. Maybe, by comparison, this will 'humanize' Feldman for some.

[Mandryka]

great Feldman recording and also a good intro to the music of Christopher Fox

You know, it's so strange listening to music from the early 80s after focusing on the last pieces, that clarinet+String quartet sounds nervous, agitated, dramatic! I'm clear now that my main interest in Feldman is what I've baptised the "death music"

[San Antone]

Who are the composers whose music was influenced by Feldman's ideas?

This is just a guess, but I think many composers have been influenced by his aesthetic but you won't hear it overtly in their music.  Feldman is somewhat like Thelonius Monk in this regard, i.e. his voice is so distinctive that it would be next to impossible to show an influence without it being obvious.

[Karl Henning]

This is just a guess, but I think many composers have been influenced by his aesthetic but you won't hear it overtly in their music.  Feldman is somewhat like Thelonius Monk in this regard, i.e. his voice is so distinctive that it would be next to impossible to show an influence without it being obvious.

I think that's fair.

[Mandryka]

This is just a guess, but I think many composers have been influenced by his aesthetic

I'm trying to make sense of this, the aesthetic ideas which were influential but not audible in the music.

Feldman is somewhat like Thelonius Monk in this regard, i.e. his voice is so distinctive that it would be next to impossible to show an influence without it being obvious.

The superficial characteristics like length, music proceeding by slight variations to a simple idea, quietness, no flamboyance or virtuosity -- there's scope there to be take up some of these principles and still be original. Listen for example to the start of Merzbow's "I'm Coming to the Garden... No Sound, No Memory"

https://www.youtube.com/v/fS17rszgSNM

Barry Truax's Riverrun also, what he says about it sounds totally Feldman to me, apart from "larger textures and masses"

Riverrun creates a sound environment in which stasis and flux, solidity and movement co-exist in a dynamic balance. The corresponding metaphor is that of a river, always moving yet seemingly permanent. From the smallest rivulet to the fullest force of its mass, a river is formed from a collection of countless droplets and sources. So too with the sound in this composition which bases itself on the smallest possible 'unit' of sound in order to create larger textures and masses. The title is the first word in James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake.

https://www.youtube.com/v/u81IGEFt7dM

[milk]

I've been listening to Why Patters from this today:

as opposed to this:

Are these the best versions out there? I like this piece a lot. Is this the beginning of his late period? It's said to have something to do with rugs. That's right, rugs. I like this last period and all these small ensemble pieces with piano and other instruments.
I came across an article today that I like. I understand that Feldman was NOT inspired by Buddhism. Nevertheless:
Can Morton Feldman's Music be a Key to Meditation?
https://drgeraldstein.wordpress.com/2014/01/11/can-morton-feldmans-music-be-a-key-to-meditation/

[San Antone]

I'm trying to make sense of this, the aesthetic ideas which were influential but not audible in the music.



The superficial characteristics like length, music proceeding by slight variations to a simple idea, quietness, no flamboyance or virtuosity -- there's scope there to be take up some of these principles and still be original. Listen for example to the start of Merzbow's "I'm Coming to the Garden... No Sound, No Memory"

https://www.youtube.com/v/fS17rszgSNM

Barry Truax's Riverrun also, what he says about it sounds totally Feldman to me, apart from "larger textures and masses"

https://www.youtube.com/v/u81IGEFt7dM

Yes - those are examples of what I meant.

[San Antone]

Some quotes from Feldman about his music:

I have no secret. And if I tell you why I have no secret you will think that it is the most audacious, the most arrogant remark you could hear from a musician either in or out of South Africa. The reason I have no secret, and a secret really means a system, is that I don't need it. For me to have a system would be would be like Rockefeller selling newspapers on the streets of Johannesburg. It's as simple as that. My ideas, my notes, for whatever reason, just come to me. The only time I do have a system is when I'm stuck and it's almost like a little gasoline or a little push of the car to get it going. I do have other things, for example, a lot to do with a different kind of terminology. Rather than system I would use the word "strategy". Or "format" a simple word like "format" or "presentation", I don't even have a word like "process" in my thinking. But strategy, and a strategy usually comes about in terms of the same kind of thinking that any other composer would have. Like anybody else the opening measure and its potential and its flexibility. But what I don't do is try to make a system out of it. But in that sense like almost any other professional composer it is the opening ideas. In that sense I am just as conventional as everybody else.

Re: rugs

WHY PATTERNS? Oh there's another piece, the first piece that opens up the programme. INSTRUMENTS 1 is part of a trilogy. I do write sometimes sets of pieces where I wanna take essentially where I'm at into another kind of instrumentation, or into a different kind of colour, or a different kind of instrumentation. I don't want to explore it all in one piece. I feel that it wouldn't be appropriate. And this was the first. The whole, this is absolutely unlike like WHY PATTERNS? and BETWEEN CATEGORIES, this is precisely notated. In this piece the focus as I remember it had to do with breathing. Breathing in terms of a kind of breathing timbre. Listening to the instruments and trying to clock what I feel their own timbral rhythm would be. That's essentially what the whole series of these three pieces were concerned with. Breathing, rhythm as breathing.

WHY PATTERNS? ... the instrumentation is very important. WHY PATTERNS? is one of the few pieces that I ever wrote where I was actually inspired by an extraneous idea, outside of the music itself. As I mentioned a few times I'm involved with a certain area of oriental rugs, older rugs, with old colours, and I had a rug and I happened to catch, well actually it was an interesting rug because there was no field in the rug. The rug was made up of just a series of borders. Just like a Jack in the Box, just getting, some were wider, some were, ... and rugs are no different for example than musical scales. For the most part a lot of them, at least the ones I like, only have about seven or eight possible ... basic colours. There's a variation of colours, it's called "abrash", that is - the dyes are done in small batches and what happens is that the colour, the gradation of the colour changes, sometimes imperceptibly and sometimes quite noticeably. It adds to the rug especially in the refraction of the light on it. And that's what I caught, looking down just haphazardly at this rug of just patterns, and how the patterns are just going around, and what's interesting about these particular rugs unlike the kind of more commercial Persian rug is that the pattern repeats itself, but it's never really exact. It's as if every time they do it again it's done idiomatically. It's quite different. In fact I actually measured one pattern that seemed the same all over, and it was different. And the colour actually changes, because of this dying thing, this "abrash".

Entire lecture can be read here.

[milk]

Some quotes from Feldman about his music:

Re: rugs

Entire lecture can be read here.

Good stuff. Thanks.

[snyprrr]

great Feldman recording and also a good intro to the music of Christopher Fox

I personally think that is the best version of the CQ,... here, one can hear the violin(?) play along with the clarinet; in others, I only hear the clarinet... I think the sound here is scintillating, also a difference with comparisons...

Couldn't staaand the Christopher Fox piece...


And I do like the KLIMPT on Stradivarius...




...also thinking about fellow NY chutzpuhnik Weinstein this morning... is there a pattern here??...

[Mandryka]

I've been listening to Why Patters from this today:

as opposed to this:

Is this the beginning of his late period?

Not, IMO, the beginning of his last period. I'm not keen on that sort of music, too much like holy minimalism, Part.

[milk]

Not, IMO, the beginning of his last period. I'm not keen on that sort of music, too much like holy minimalism, Part.

How do you feel about the trio? It's a bit more fraught.

[Mandryka]

How do you feel about the trio? It's a bit more fraught.

Yes it seems to have lots of interesting harmonies. I like the trio.