A Guide to Morton Feldman's music

Don't be daunted by his five-hour-long string quartet –

Feldman offers a truly intimate encounter with the substance
of sound

Something strange starts to happen when you listen to American

composer Morton Feldman's long, long – and I mean long – late
chamber pieces. I'm talking about the 80-minute Piano and String
Quartet, the four and a half hours of For Philip Guston (which you can
hear live at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music festival on 21
November 2012) or the biggest of them all, the five-hour Second String
Quartet. By the end of these works, composed a few years before
Feldman's death in 1987, I was left wanting more, not less. My sense of
time had been altered, so intently focused was I on the way the music
changed from note to note and chord to chord. It created a living,
breathing network of relationships that extended across its length. You
don't really listen to these pieces, you live through them and with them.
By the end of the Second String Quartet, I felt it was living inside me
too.

Feldman put it thus: "My whole generation was hung up on the 20- to
25-minute piece. It was our clock. We all got to know it, and how to
handle it. As soon as you leave the 20- to 25-minute piece behind, in a
one-movement work, different problems arise. Up to one hour you
think about form, but after an hour and a half it's scale. Form is easy:
just the division of things into parts. But scale is another matter." This
might suggest there is something epic in Feldman's music, in its
rhetoric or ambition. The reality is just the opposite. His music is
intimate, quiet, small and often slow. For Philip Guston is scored for
piano, flute and percussion; its gently dissonant chiming never reaches
beyond a softly reverberant shimmer. It is music written on the same
scale as our ears, composed to fit our brains and bodies.

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Feldman's compositions don't impose themselves on you, and they

refuse to shout about their meaning or importance – even their length.
They also resist your attempts to predict what might happen next. His
music is full of repetition, and yet nothing ever repeats. What I mean is
that individual chords, textures and rhythmic ideas reoccur, but they
are never (or very rarely) the same. Patterns don't progress in a
predictable way, which makes Feldman's aesthetic radically different
from minimalists such as Steve Reich or Philip Glass. You'll search in
vain for an underlying system or structure to explain what's happening
in, say, Crippled Symmetry, another huge piece for flute, percussion
and piano. Instead, you should give yourself over to absolute
concentration. Notice the surface of the music, the way it changes
subtly and slowly as if reacting to your attention. That's the point about
Feldman's long pieces: they don't hypnotise or immerse you in a
comforting sonic bath, they call for your attention and, through that,
change you. Again, Feldman's words are enlightening; he says that his
"patterns are 'complete' in themselves and in no need of development –
only of extension. My concern is: what is its scale when prolonged, and
what is the best method to arrive at it? My past experience was not to
'meddle' with the material, but use my concentration as a guide to what
might transpire. I mentioned this to Stockhausen once when he had
asked me what my secret was. 'I don't push the sounds around.'
Stockhausen mulled this over and asked: 'Not even a little bit?'"

During his formative years in New York, Feldman's creative pole-stars

were John Cage, Earle Brown and Christian Wolff, and a galaxy of
painters including Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns, Robert
Rauschenberg and above all his close friend Philip Guston (even
though they fell out when Guston's style changed from abstract to
figurative; a perceived slight by Feldman at an exhibition of Guston's
work meant they never spoke again). In the 50s and 60s, Feldman
developed a kind of graphic notation, allowing the performers to
choose the pitches and rhythms in pieces
called Projections and Intersections. But Feldman never wanted to
release an improvisational creativity from his musicians or to come up
with scores-as-art as Cage did. Instead, he wanted to fix an idea as
completely as possible. "The new structure," he wrote, "required a
concentration more demanding than if the technique were that of still
photography, which for me is what precise notation has come to
imply." That concern for precision was one of the reasons Feldman
could not go along with Cage's dictum that "everything is music", and it
was also one of the reasons he returned to conventional notation in the
60s.

Luciano Berio once said that the quietness of Feldman's music

expressed a kind of existential terror of going off the map lest he
encounter those regions where there be monsters – as if Feldman were
frightened of loud music (despite the fact that one of his most
important influences was the genius noise-artist Edgard Varèse). It's a
mis-hearing of Feldman's music. You can only really understand what I
mean by living through a piece like the 80-minute For Bunita
Marcus for solo piano. What happens is the opposite of quietness, of
not much happening: it's as if your ears extend outwards to meet the
sound. Of course it's an illusion, but you feel you're touching the sound
with your ears. Far from the disengagement with experience that Berio
suggests, Feldman's music is a more direct encounter with the
substance of sound than most composers have achieved. (There's a
searching compositional reason for Feldman's quietness. As he says:
"In my music I am … involved with the decay of each sound, and try to
make its attack sourceless. The attack of a sound is not its character.
Actually, what we hear is the attack and not the sound. Decay, however,
this departing landscape, this expresses where the sound exists in our
hearing – leaving us rather than coming towards us.")

Another side of Feldman's boldness is his polemic against the

dominant system of composing in 50s and 60s Europe, and musical
academia in America. 'If the pedant wants to understand me, he must
understand my past. I'll take on all comers … There will be no
embarrassment as to my intellectual abilities. In fact, there will be
surprises! Pierre [Boulez] … Karlheinz [Stockhausen] … Milton
[Babbitt] … are you ready?'

And are you? Other things to prepare you for Feldman and his music:
the massive physicality of the man, his thick glasses and unquenchable
appetite for life's sensuality; his fascination with the crippled
symmetries of central Asian rugs; the fact that there is loud music in
his output, as in parts of the 1979 String Quartet, and the sheer
blinding dazzle of his last orchestral piece, Coptic Light, a vision of
"what aspects of music since Monteverdi might determine its
atmosphere if heard 2,000 years from now" – and, at about half an
hour long, it's a good place to start your Feldman journey.