aworks :: "new" american classical music

Only (1947). Morton Feldman /only when flight shall soar not for its own sake only/

Morton Feldman (via last.fm)

As I continue to try to use my ears rather than my eyes in my quest for interesting music, I managed to surprise myself with Morton Feldman's Only. With only a too-small-to-quickly-read album cover on lala as my guide, earlier today, I queued up a Feldman album I'd never seen before.

When the first track, Only, finally played, my first thought:

Why is there a vocal in the Berio piano album I was streaming at the time?

my second thought:

Hmm, lala has screwed up the track and this isn't really a Feldman album.

my third thought:

Feldman wrote songs. Cool.

Only - Morton Feldman

Piano Three Hands (1957). Morton Feldman

Rodger Coleman at NuVoid didn't get Morton Feldman at first but it was the composer's Piano Three Hands that triggered the understanding this music has soul.

I never had that struggle with Feldman's music -- I either liked individual pieces or didn't. I did have to work to see that at least some of Elliott Carter's music was beyond just "interesting."

Violin and Orchestra (1979). Morton Feldman

I'm listening to some emusic downloads back-to-back. First, it was Max Richter's recently released Songs from Before and then Morton Feldman's Violin and Orchestra. The former is arty and fresh sounding; the latter is truly artful i.e. with sentimentality and artifice removed. What an interesting contrast and yet I'll want to hear both again.

For Philip Guston (1984). Morton Feldman

David Toub suggests Morton Feldman's For Philip Guston as driving music and comments:

I've been in love with this piece for some time now, but it struck me yesterday that Feldman was able to take a four-note chromatic scale and make it sound heavenly.

He also pans a Feldman organ piece I haven't heard, Principal Sound (emusic).

Rothko Chapel (1971). Morton Feldman

Seeking some meditative clarity, Jason at I Am Sitting in a Room visits the Rothko Chapel in Houston:

On first sight, the Rothkos might seem to be solid colors. But they’ve been painted; they have texture, irregularities, varied hues. Hanging for thirty-five years has given some wave to the canvases, too. So there’s a lot to look at in these paintings.

From the Rothko Chapel web site:

The Rothko Chapel is alive with religious ceremonies of all faiths and diverse programs to engage audiences intellectually, artistically and spiritually. It is a place where the experience and understanding of all traditions and cultures are encouraged and made available....

William Winant and David Abel play on the recording. Alex Ross and Tim Rutherford-Johnson both blogged about the work earlier this year. Dan Warburton reviews a 1997 performance in Paris Transatlantic:

“Rothko Chapel” (1971), however, was breathtaking. I suppose this has to be Feldman’s most accessible piece, due probably to the inclusion near the end of a haunting melody on the solo viola which Feldman tells us he wrote when he was fifteen. This strange timeless melody arrives from nowhere, but somehow reflects on the work’s eerie floating chords. (Where did he get these amazing pitches from? What an ear!) Inevitably, the title leads us to think of death and matters spiritual--I wonder if we would react as intensely had he followed his usual practice of naming the piece after its instrumental forces: “

Rothko Chapel (1971). Morton Feldman /love-hate/

John Perkins on afterPostModern reflects on the music of Morton Feldman and also recommends Rothko Chapel.

Feldman's music is quiet and slow and atonal. He became inextricably associated with one musical direction often written in his scores: "as softly as possible." People will either love his music or hate it, I would guess. I'm in the former camp.

And I am in both camps -- I love Rothko Chapel and say, his sparse works for two pianos but don't care much for Coptic Light and am struggling right now with Patterns in a Chromatic Field (despite the new release on Tzadik with Aleck Karis).

Tim Rutherford-Johnson's take on Rothko Chapel.

American Classical Music MFeldman

Intersection 1 (1951). Morton Feldman

Singularity mystery solved...

Although no one had ever seen Morton Feldman and Alex Ross together, Alex Ross has confirmed he and Morton Feldman are not the same person.

Via further photographic evidence, we also know Morton Feldman was not Elliott Carter, Aaron Copland, Barbara Monk Feldman, John Cage, David Del Tredici, Leo Smit, Lejaren Hiller, the Kronos Quartet...

Oh, and it's Leo Smit's birthday as well.

Chris Villars' Morton Feldman page.

Three Voices (1982). Morton Feldman

Steven Yi, a fan of the work, pans a performance in San Francisco of Morton Feldman's Three Voices: The use of different families of timbres didn’t work at all for me; the fluctuations in tempo really lost the continuity of the piece; the use of whispered words didn’t come close to the effect of the original.

For John Cage (1982), for violin and piano. Morton Feldman

In Larry Sitsky's Music of the Twentieth-Century: A Biocritical Sourcebook, Jonathan Kramer offers that Morton Feldman was a modernist, but may or may not have been an avant-gardist. By his definition, a modernist is producing "art for art's sake", with an emphasis on elitism. An avant-gardist on the other hand is trying to provoke the conventional music world, often in a brash and aggressive manner, and where reaching a larger audience helps the cause. In the case of Feldman, independent of any aspirations of a broader audience, his music may be the opposite of aggressive, which in turn might have been a way of challenging the status quo given the norms of late twentieth-century art music.

I am listening to the performance of Feldman's For John Cage by Paul Zukofsky and Marianne Schroeder. From an abstract of a paper, Catherine Costello Hirata (who also authored the Feldman entry in Sitsky's book) writes:

On the largest scale, Morton Feldman's For John Cage (1982) for violin and piano is shaped by the contrast between passages which adhere rather strictly to the form 'aa . . .bb . . . cc' -- where each letter stands for what I will term a musical figure (usually comprised of but a handful of notes)-and passages which exhibit looser or more elaborate constructions...

And by the way, John Cage is clearly a member of the avant-garde, but even he has music that transcends the avant-garde ghetto; for me, his percussion music, his prepared piano music, or his simple piano music.

Rothko Chapel (1971). Morton Feldman

Morton Feldman, in a 1989 interview, says that his painter associates all listened to his work but had conventional tastes in music:

When I first met [Mark] Rothko, he said, "You know, Morty, my favorite composer is Mendelssohn." Actually that's what the Japanese philosopher [D.T.] Suzuki said to John Cage - that his favorite composer was Mendelssohn.