Today's Listening: Morton Feldman

Here you go, the perfect antidote to too much pop music: For Bunita Marcus by Morton Feldman.

 You didn't have any plans for the next hour and a bit, did you?

What Do Elliott Carter and Morton Feldman Chat About?

 

Listening/Not Listening

Samuel Andreyev is a Canadian composer, resident in Europe, for whom I have a great deal of respect. He has done a lot of very serious analyses of some important modern compositions, such as this:

Plus, to show how hip or post-modern he is, he has also done tributes to Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart:

But the Second String Quartet of Morton Feldman was, apparently, a bridge too far as today he put up a clip of him listening to all six hours of the piece, on headphones. We can see him and hear his comments, but not the piece itself. It is like a bizarre version of one of those strange "reaction" clips where someone who normally doesn't listen to classical music listens to something by Mozart and is visibly amazed.

I've listened to a lot of Feldman--have I listened to all of this? I don't think I have. I have listened to large sections of it, but I'm pretty sure I skipped ahead. A lot. This German quartet zip through it pretty quickly.

At this point a few questions come to mind: what was the point of the piece, especially it's very long duration? And, apart from a simple test of endurance, what was the point of Andreyev's listening to it while videoing himself? Feldman wrote a lot of good and interesting music. Did he wander a bit far off into the mystic in his later years? I dunno, let's wait a hundred years and see what people think. He might be totally forgotten or as widely loved as Mozart... Who knows?

Feldman: Neither

Last night was the last of the four concerts focussing on the music of Morton Feldman and, for me at least, it was the first concert here at the festival that was a bit of a disappointment. There was a full house, as always. Here are the audience members lining up to enter the church:

The performers were soprano Sarah Aristidou with the Vienna Radio Symphony conducted by Ilan Volkov. I don't know why the two works last night--in addition to the opera Neither, we heard String Quartet and Orchestra, written in 1973--did not create the magical atmosphere the works for chorus and orchestra did a few nights ago, but that was my impression. Very competently played and sung, yes, but the result was dreary sameness instead of delightful continuing on and on. I sensed the audience might be in agreement as there was not nearly the enthusiasm as in the other concert and people started filing out quite quickly.

The notes don't provide many clues as to how the opera might be staged even though there have been a number of staged performances. This was a concert presentation. At the end, my feeling was that Morton Feldman is perhaps the least dramatic composer ever and, if opera requires some drama, he is unlikely to provide it!

Here are the performers acknowledging applause at the end:

To give you a bit of an idea, here is a clip of the first ten minutes of the opera in a performance by soprano Sarah Leonard with the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra conducted by Zoltan Pesko.

I suppose the comparable work might be Schoenberg's Erwartung.

Follow-up on Feldman

I meant to post a couple of clips of music from the concert on Sunday, but it just slipped my mind! Here, to give you an idea of how this music sounds are two examples. The first is De Kooning (1963) for horn, percussion, piano, violin and cello:

And this is Chorus and Instruments I, also from 1963:

Analysis is Paralysis?

That used to be the byword among performers: don't analyse! "You will only make yourself wretched!" --that's a quote from the first of Britten's Songs from the Chinese. So let's talk about analysis a bit. Just yesterday I gave my composition student an assignment: analyze the Prelude and Fugue in C major from the Well-Tempered Clavier. He replied, "harmonic analysis"? Good place to start, I said. Analysis can be an interesting and creative endeavor. You look at a piece and say "what is going on here"? What is the composer up to and how is he or she doing it? One of the last analysis assignments I had in graduate school was to analyze Rothko Chapel by Morton Feldman. Here's the piece:

I don't recall now what I said about it, but I loved the challenge. In a sense, good analysis is nothing but heightened good listening. I remember asking someone who was playing annoying music loud on her computer in an office to turn it down and she replied "I'm listening to it!" I wanted to reply, "oh yeah? well write down the bass line for me"!

What I like about Feldman is the rhythmic space: he takes things slow. And the soft dynamic. I get tired of big, bombastic orchestral stuff pretty quickly because it is rarely worth the trouble. Here's an example.

But music like Rothko Chapel draws you in...

Perhaps, to understand it, you have to invent something. Take the harmony, for example: whatever is going on with the harmony here, and there certainly seems to be something, it isn't something you can put V7 - I underneath.