Review: Imperfection and Colour

Reviewed Work(s): Morton Feldman Says by Chris Villars

Review by: Christopher Fox
Source: The Musical Times , Autumn, 2006, Vol. 147, No. 1896 (Autumn, 2006), pp. 102-
108
Published by: Musical Times Publications Ltd.

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25434408

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 102

Review-article
CHRISTOPHER FOX

Imperfection and colour

Ml
Morton Feldman says ORTON Feldman appreciated fine things - great paintings,
Edited by Chris Villars
Hyphen Press (London
good food, attractive companions - and I suspect he would have
2006); 302pp; ?25, $50 PBK. . enjoyed this latest addition to the Feldman fan's library as much
isbn o 907259 31 6.
for the tactile and visual pleasure it gives as for its record of his verbal
gifts. Since 1997 Chris Villars has edited the Morton Feldman web-page
(www.cnvill.demon.co.uk/mfliome.htm) but useful as that is as a source of
Feldmania there is something so much more satisfying about having material
from the site in book form. Hyphen Press approached Villars with the idea
of such a book and the result is a celebration of the subtle arts of book con

struction. 240 pages of essays, interviews and lectures, interspersed with

photographs, are printed on white paper; then there are 12 pages of score
extracts from across Feldman's output, one piece to a page, followed by a
chronology of the composer's life, a bibliography, notes on the contributors
and a good index, all printed on grey paper. The book is paper-backed and
beautifully bound, with a colour photograph of Feldman, intently examining
an antique relief, on the front of the book jacket.
Does this matter? For a book about Feldman I think it does. He was after
all a composer who said 'I'd stop writing music unless I had a beautiful piano'
and elsewhere that 'pitch is a gorgeous thing. If you have a feeling, a tactile
feeling for the instrument'. Of course all the information in Morton Feldman
says can be got from a computer screen but how much more appropriate to
its subject that it should be elegantly presented on paper in a book that has a
good weight in the hand. The page layout is also easy on the eye, again some
thing Feldman would have appreciated. He describes learning from Cage
how to set out his music in score: 'It was through John Cage that I learned
about a great German pen, the Rapidograph... my early graph music, three
graphic pieces, he copied it... He spent the whole week copying things,
showing me how to set up a page.'
There have been two previous collections of Feldman's words, Give my
regards to Eighth Street, edited by BH Friedman and first published by the
American imprint Exact Change in 2000, and Morton Feldman: essays, edited
by the German composer Walter Zimmermann and published by his Begin
ner Press in 1985, and there is some overlap, both between the material
presented in Morton Feldman says and the Zimmermann volume, and bet
ween the Friedman and Zimmermann. Zimmermann's book is long out of

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 print but anyone who has both Give my regards and Morton Feldman says will
have an almost comprehensive Feldman archive, since the earlier book con
sists of Feldman's writings while Villars has concentrated on Feldman talk
ing. As the bibliography in the new book shows, there are still some Feldman
lectures to be transcribed and published in English, particularly the lectures
he gave as part of the composition course in Middleburg in the Netherlands
near the end of his life, but a reading of Give my regards and Morton Feldman
says will give a very good sense of Feldman's artistic preoccupations.
What mere text cannot provide, of course, is a sense of Feldman's extra
ordinary physical presence or the sound of the grating New York twang in
which his pronouncements were delivered. The photographs in the book are
an objective depiction of the man ? jutting jaw, protruding lower lip, heavy
framed glasses, slicked-back hair ? but they suggest a persona rather more
benign than the street-wise, razor-sharp character Feldman chose to present
in public. Morton Feldman says does however include the lecture he gave
during the 1984 Darmstadt courses and there is a hint here of the hard-boiled
Feldman. I was in that swelteringly hot classroom as Feldman paced the floor,
firing off a stream of unforgettably perceptive remarks on music, art, time
and creativity, and I can still recall the moment when the British composer
James Erber innocently asked whether Feldman was going to say anything
about the Second String Quartet which we had heard the Kronos Quartet
play the night before. 'You're not nice... I wouldn't answer anything you
asked me. You're horrible! You're hostile!', replied Feldman. When Erber
responded, 'Oh come, buy me a drink and then you'll get to know me better',
Feldman retorted, 'I don't want to get to know you at all!'. Morton Feldman
says records the words and square brackets record that there was [laughter]
but this does not capture the palpable menace in Feldman's tone and manner.
Nor is Morton Feldman says able to add much more to the vexed debate
over performance practice in Feldman's music. Feldman's late scores make
extensive use of double sharps and double flats; in a lecture in Toronto he
described them as 'adding a little turpentine to the chromatic field' and in
Darmstadt he told us variously that these spellings were 'microtonal' but that
he didn't 'use it conceptually', that 'people think they're leading tones' but
that we could 'think what you want'. What does this all mean? For Paul
Zukofsky in his recording of the 75-minute-long violin and piano piece For
John Cage (1982) it means thoroughly microtonal playing, double sharps
three-quarter tones sharp; for Josje ter Haar in her recording of the same
music it means the subtlest of inflection. I find the former excruciatingly ugly
and the latter entrancingly beautiful but I know other listeners whose re
sponse is quite different. Perhaps Feldman savoured this ambiguity? My own
view is that Feldman the pragmatist chose to tolerate some questionable per
formances from people he felt were worth cultivating but that Feldman the

THE MUSICAL TIMES Autumn 2006 IO3

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104 Imperfection and colour

musical philosopher imagined a more or less conventionally beautiful sound

for his music. He loved the sophistication of modern western instruments
and generally wrote for them in their most secure registers; when he departs
from this world, either for more remote registers or through chromatic re
spelling, it is 'in search of an orchestration', to quote the title of his 1967
orchestral score, or, as he said in Toronto, 'just an orchestration of a chro
matic tone'.
In the later lectures collected in Morton Feldman says, from Toronto to
Darmstadt, Darmstadt to Johannesburg, one has a sense too of Feldman the
showman, tempering his performance to suit his audience. In Johannesburg
in 1983 (quite why Feldman was in South Africa during the period of the anti
apartheid boycott is a question his lecture does not address) he gave two
lectures and talked about a far wider range of American music than in any
other published work, doing his patriotic duty to bring enlightenment to a
distant land. He is surprisingly generous about Philip Glass, remarking that
the then recent Satyagraha (1980) is 'a fantastic thing to hear' and 'terrific
theatre', although he adds that 'Phil Glass is a media rather than an artistic
phenomena' [sic]. In Darmstadt in 1984 he is combative, keen to establish his
credentials as an artist whose knowledge and sophistication exceed those of
any of his European listeners. In Toronto in 1982 he is relaxed, just a border
line away from his home in Buffalo and maintaining a running gag about
which piece he will or will not play during a lecture whose conclusion is
appropriately informal ? the tape runs out.
It is fascinating to be able to read these four lectures together. The Toronto
lecture, here in print for the first time, is perhaps the key text since in it Feld
man discusses his decision to write music of a length previously unpre
cedented in western art music. In later lectures Feldman would talk about the

aesthetic implications of writing single spans of music hours longer than the
conventional 25 minutes which is the time-frame for most new concert music,
but in Toronto he is engagingly open in acknowledging that there were ca
reerist motivations too. He describes a meal in the Russian Tea Room in New

York with 'a big-time publisher... multi-millionaire, big Cadillac, big

Cadillac... And he looks over to me and he says, "Feldman, you mind if I tell
you something." I said, "Go ahead." He said, "You're not going to make it
unless." I said, "Unless what?" He said, You're a fabulous composer, but
you're not... unless." "Unless what?" "You need a little drama. Not much.
Just a little drama. Just a little bit".'
Feldman does not give the exact date for this encounter but it is evidently
in the late-i970s and, as he says, 'I decided I wanted to become competitive,
essentially that's what it amounts to. And by being competitive means that
you more or less get involved in mainstream. But what the mainstream was
to me was something very, very special. The mainstream wasn't any kind of

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 intellectual ideas... What was mainstream to me was only production value.'
This is not the usual vocabulary of the artist, or at least it was not in the days
before the language of marketing pervaded every corner of life, but Feldman
had supported the first half of his compositional career by working in his
father's garment business and he understood commerce. The result was one
of the most successful exercise in brand re-positioning in music history. As
the Cage disciple who wrote slow quiet music Feldman had established a
niche market position during the 1950s and 1960s which he had later con
solidated and expanded in the 1970s with a series of orchestral pieces, lavishly
scored but still slow, quiet and bounded by the expected attention span of a
concert audience. His music was attractive, if you liked that sort of thing,
mildly controversial if you did not, but it did not represent an unavoidable
aesthetic challenge, unlike that of John Cage and, although Feldman never
acknowledges this, it is clear that part of his desire to become 'competitive '
was to make a mark in musical history as significant as that made by Cage.
As the composer of the long pieces of his last period, Feldman achieved
this, at least to his own satisfaction. Where Cage in 1952 challenged his audi
ence to hear differently by removing his own taste from the compositional
process, Feldman's challenge was to 'get rid of the audience'. In Toronto he
pleaded, 'Give us six weeks without an audience, and maybe something else
could happen' and in the music which he created in the last decade of his life
he made it clear that for him this 'something else' was a reassessment of the
ways in which music can be an art-form. Above all, if musical form was no
longer to be bounded by expectations of how long an audience might listen
attentively, the material essences of music ? time, patterns of notes,
instrumentation ? could undergo the same sort of abstract exploration that
Feldman saw as the subject of his beloved Rothko, Pollock and Turkish rug
makers.
The paradox of the late works is that as Feldman refined his methods of
exploration he seems to have discovered that longevity was not the most
important formal factor: there some very long pieces but many are over in
about 80 minutes and the experience of 'short' pieces like the 20 minutes
Palais de Mari is not one of time being in any way compressed. If Feldman
set out to examine 'time and the instrumental factor', to quote another of his
titles, then by his death in 1987 he had demonstrated that the question of time
was about more than just duration. To me this suggests there is unfinished
business in the project Feldman began, unfinished not just because cancer cut
his life cruelly short, but because late Feldman turns out to have been early
Feldman with added repetition and more intricate rhythms and patterns,
rather than the 'something else ' he was looking for.
The challenge presented by Feldman's publisher acquaintance had been
for him to introduce a little more 'drama' into his music and there will be

THE MUSICAL TIMES Autumn 2006 105

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106 Imperfection and colour

those listeners to the late music who will question to what extent this pro
foundly calm, measured music can be described as 'dramatic'. But for Feld
man 'drama' and 'dramatic' were loaded terms. In Give my regards to Eighth
Street there is a deliciously acidic concert review from 1963 in which Feldman
concludes that a programme of Webern, Milhaud, Messiaen, Stravinsky and
Schoenberg 'had one thing in common: drama'. 'Was everything since 1900
so flashy?' he asks. 'Was everything an audition for Diaghilev?' So con
ventional notions of the dramatic were not going to be part of Feldman's bid
to be competitive; indeed, as he told his Toronto audience, he had been
'living for about twenty-five years with absolutely no drama, at least in my
music -1 had all the drama in my livelihood and in my domestic life '.
The drama of Feldman's life is distilled in the latter pages of Morton
Feldman says into a set of brief autobiographical notes by the German com
poser and Feldman scholar, Sebastian Claren, whose own book, Neither: die
Musik Morton Feldmans (Hofheim, 2000), offers German readers the most
penetrating analyses of Feldman's music yet published. With no more than
a few paragraphs for most years of Feldman's life Claren none the less pro
vides a telling account of the composer's life, tracking the intimate cross
referencing between his domestic and compositional worlds. Feldman's
fondness for female companions, often rather younger than him, is well
known, but reading Claren's series of annual entries emphasises how influ
ential these partnerships were on Feldman's output. In 1970 Claren com
presses into a single sentence events that were presumably rather more
dramatic to live through: 'After separating from his second wife Cynthia and
breaking off his affair with Lulla Adler, he [Feldman] begins a new affair with
the viola player Karen Phillips.' The three pieces entitled The viola in my life
(1970) were written for Phillips; Oboe and orchestra (1976) was inspired by the
playing of the oboist Nora Post, who became what Claren describes as 'Feld
man's constant companion' in 1973, and is a wonderful portrait of the refined
tone she produced across the range of the instrument but exceptionally so in
the upper registers. Later the composers Bunita Marcus and Barbara Monk
were to have a significant influence on Feldman and were, as Claren deli
cately puts it, 'his inspiration and his intimate companion^]'. Barbara Monk
and Feldman married in 1987; Bunita Marcus turned down Feldman's
proposal of marriage in 1981 and is acclaimed by Feldman in his first
Johannesburg lecture as 'the most gifted young composer that I know of, cer
tainly in America'; she was both the dedicatee of the piano piece For Bunita
Marcus (1985) and the commissioner and first performer of Feldman's last
piano piece Palais de Mari (1986).
If the biography provides evidence of the extent to which a composer's
output can be subject to affairs of the heart, it also demonstrates the influence
of patronage. John Cage was of course the most important figure, a sort of

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 aesthetic patron, in Feldman's early years. Give my regards to Eighth Street
includes the 1962 essay in which Feldman describes their first meeting and
Cage's enthusiasm for his work: 'John jumped up and down, and with a kind
of high monkey squeal, screeched, "Isn't that marvelous. Isn't that wonder
ful. It's so beautiful, and he doesn't know how he made it." Quite frankly, I
sometimes wonder how my music would have turned out if John had not
given me those early permissions to have confidence in my instincts.' The
importance of Cage's aesthetic patronage is reiterated throughout Morton
Feldman says. In an interview given in 1966 Feldman talked about his first
visit to Cage's apartment: 'It was an unusual experience for me because I was
brought up in a wonderfully middle-class environment'. He describes
Cage's 'West coast Bohemian' taste, concluding by saying, 'I dwell on how
he lived because it opened up a certain alternative that was completely un
known to me... With Cage I entered the world on non-things.'
Later the composer/conductor Lukas Foss was a great Feldman sup
porter, advocating him to universities for many years before Feldman finally
got a post at the State University of New York in Buffalo, and it was in part
the financial security of his academic salary that allowed Feldman to imagine
how a composer might 'get rid of the audience'. In the 1984 Darmstadt
lecture he is perhaps only half joking when he says, 'I think the reason I write
long pieces is that I have the time and the money... it's all a question of
economics.' European institutional patronage also played a vital role on the
shape of Feldman's later career. From September 1971 to October 1972
Feldman had a grant from the DAAD Berlin Artists' Programme and for that
year he lived in Berlin, the only extended period spent away from New York
or New York State in his life. A glance through Feldman's work-list reveals
a significant increase in the number of European performances in the years
that followed and a burgeoning of commissions from those great patrons
of new music during the second half of the 20th century, the German radio
stations. Flute and orchestra (1977/78) was commissioned by the Saar
landischer Rundfunk, Voices and instruments (1972) by Sender Freies Berlin,
Elemental procedures (1976) and Violin and string quartet (1985) by
Westdeutscher Rundfunk. The later 1970s and the 1980s were also the period
in which Feldman enjoyed great success in the Netherlands, his influence
there still evident today in the work of the Ives Ensemble and their revelatory
series of Feldman recordings on the HatHut label.
British patronage for Feldman's work is less obvious in the Feldman
oeuvre but Morton Feldman says reveals some significant support for him
here in the late 1960s and into the 1970s. Feldman came to Europe for the first
time in 1966 and was well received in London new musical circles; Morton
Feldman says opens with three supportive articles from English journals of
the period and later a 1972 article from Music and Musicians tells us that

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io8 Imperfection and colour

'Morton Feldman likes London. He has been casting about for a flat here for
some time'. His Buffalo professorship, made permanent in 1974, put an end
to this idea, but the English period resulted in Feldman changing his pub
lisher, from the New York offices of Peters Edition to the London branch of
Universal Edition, and in some significant artistic alliances with, among
others, Cornelius Cardew, Harrison Birtwistle, John Tilbury and Alan
Hacker. Tilbury remains a wonderful interpreter of Feldman's piano works,
music in which he will feature in the Feldman retrospective which will be part
of this autumn's Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. Hacker's role
as a Feldman advocate is probably less well known now but he conducted
the premiere of Chorus and orchestra //(1972) and is the dedicatee of Three
clarinets, cello and piano (1971) and Clarinet and string quartet (1983).
The Huddersfield Feldman portrait and Villars's book are then both part
of an abiding English fascination with this abrasive New Yorker and his
quiet, quietist music. Feldman's influence can also be detected in the work of
a number of English composers across the generations, more obviously in
Howard Skempton and Laurence Crane but also in Harrison Birtwistle and
Bryn Harrison. I have a theory that one can test an artist's worth by the sort
of company that gathers around their work; Cage conferences, for example,
are cheery, iconoclastic affairs, whereas Boulez conferences tend to be chilly
and fractious. On this rating Feldman has the hallmarks of a great artist and
Chris Villars's book provides both further evidence of our continuing
attachment to Feldman's exquisite music and an opportunity to spend more
time in its composer's exhilarating company.

Christopher Fox is Professor of Music at Brunei University.

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