Finding out
who exactly Feldman was became a quest unto itself. I was fascinated to learn
that he was a native of Woodhaven, Queens, and later a professor at SUNY
Buffalo until his untimely death in 1987. As a 1982 interview with Feldman
explains: “…interacting with New York’s abstract expressionist painters, as
well as such composers as John Cage, Earle Brown, and Christian Wolff, Feldman
began writing music that would, in his words, ‘project sounds into time, free
from a compositional rhetoric.’ “1 Elsewhere,
Feldman tells us that he has “always been interested in touch
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’> rather than musical forms."2
In
order to appreciate Feldman’s music on a deeper level, I had to first discover
his sources in painting and the visual arts and, later, in the textural physics
and hypnotic patterns of oriental rugs. Rothko Chapel
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>(1971), one of his early master
works, was dedicated to and inspired by Mark Rothko, a friend of Feldman’s from
the New York School. Similarly, String Quartet II
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>(1983) culminates Feldman’s
ambitions in a musical, visual and temporal synergy, transporting one field of
reality into another. Feldman famously said that he and Cage both felt, in the
1950s and ‘60s, the need to escape from the “clich� of the 20-25 minute piece,”3
feeling it to be a modernist creative prison; String Quartet II
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>, a monumental six hours long,
represents the ultimate prison break. Performing this piece,The Flux Quartet
were faced with music that presented a sheer physical challenge in addition to
its mind-bending temporal qualities.
Zankel Hall, a newly renovated all-wood recital room, lent
an extra warmth to the music. The Flux players were seated stage left, with
their chairs turned slightly inwards to almost face one another. There was a
small desk in the middle for libations and other marathon materials. An
oriental rug was placed stage right, and the audience were invited at the start
of the concert to come onstage whenever they felt like: as violinist Tom Chiu
exclaimed, “It’s fun!” Many took him up on this offer, and this added yet
another visual layer of audience participation to what could have been a static
experience. Thus String Quartet II was a performance that you had to get involved in if you
stayed for the duration, even if you were only meditating on or dozing into the
sound. The quartet and the audience became a symbiotic unit, and the audience
was compelled to come to grips with the music. The piece was a total
environment to “inhabit.”
String Quartet II shares some thematic similarities with Feldman’s Piano
and String Quartet (1985)
and is a staggering achievement that hangs together better than it should at
six hours. In it, Feldman frequently employs oscillating violin and viola
phrases alongside percussive cello pizzicato interludes. The Flux Quartet
performed it exquisitely, never looking or sounding fatigued. Finally, by
12:10 a.m., after the music decayed into a few quiet final note clusters. The
quartet stood up, and received at least four rousing standing ovations. One of
the players taking a swig of his special Feldman marathon “Gatorade” (or what
looked like it) from a bottle on the desk. He’d earned it, and so had we. We
had witnessed and participated in a true work of art that had engulfed our
senses.
Morton Feldman once exclaimed about his chosen form, “I
don’t feel that music has been and I don’t feel that music to this day is
involved with the real world. The people are involved with the real world, and
that’s why we have names like Philip Guston or Rothko or Bob Rauschenberg or
Jasper Johns or Jackson Pollock.”4 String Quartet II
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’> is an escape that matters.
Morton
Feldman
String
Quartet II (1983)
Part of
the “When Morty Met John” festival, October 25-26, 2003
A John
Cage/Morton Feldman Festival
Performed
by The Flux Quartet:
Tom Chiu, Violin, Jesse Mills, Violin, Max Mandel, Viola, Dave Eggar, Cello
Notes
and Works Cited
1.
Soundpieces: Interviews with
American Composers by Cole Gagne and Tracy Caras (Metuchen,
New Jersey: The Scarecrow Press Inc, 1982) pp 164-177.
2. Frank
O’Hara, jacket essay for New Directions in Music 2/ Morton Feldman
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black’>, Columbia Masterworks
#MS 6090 (sound recording; Columbia CBS Odyssey, 1960).
3.
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black’>The Morton Feldman Page
web site.
href="http://www.cnvill.demon.co.uk/mfhome.htm">http://www.cnvill.demon.co.uk/mfhome.htm
name="_Hlt126161943">
http://www.cnvill.demon.co.uk/mfbio.htm
4.
Thomas Moore, pianist, Web site:
href="http://research.umbc.edu/~tmoore/interview_frame.html">
style=’color:black’>http://research.umbc.edu/~tmoore/interview_frame.html
5. Interview
with Morton Feldman, published in Sonus (Volume 4, Number 2, Spring 1984)
6. Give
My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black’>, edited and with
an introduction by B.H. Friedman, afterword by Frank O’Hara (Boston: Exact
Change,
2000) |
