The Brooklyn Rail

I never met anyone with greater respect and admiration for fame and money than Morton Feldman. Yet, there is not a single measure in Feldman’s music or sentence in his writings that he composed to help him getting rich or famous.

I first met Feldman in the spring of 1966 in London. I traveled from Birmingham to Vienna, where I studied, and stopped in London for a week to see my friends Cornelius Cardew and John Tilbury. One evening, Cornelius suggested that we go to hear Feldman’s lecture. This is how we met for the first time. A handful of people were in attendance and afterwards we talked—Cornelius, Feldman, and myself. Feldman knew who I was because of the performances of his music that I did in Prague since the early sixties. There, I founded and directed two ensembles, the Musica viva pragensis (1960–64) and the QUaX Ensemble (1966–69). We exchanged addresses when we met, and Feldman sent me suggestions for his pieces to be performed, but they were beyond our possibilities.

When I came to the US in November 1969 to become a Creative Associate at the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts at the State University of New York at Buffalo, my colleague, the soprano Gwendolyn Sims, asked me to help her with the program for her solo recital. I suggested Feldman, four ensemble pieces with a soprano. At the end of December, we both traveled to New York City, and I called Feldman. He asked me to come to the Studio School on 8th Street where he was the dean. He was very happy about the program and invited Gwendolyn and me to return the same evening for an end-of-year party at the school.

When we arrived, still in the door, I waved my hand in a greeting to Feldman. He was standing a few feet away and didn’t react at all. Only when we came closer, he recognized who we were. I will never forget this moment. I realized then how poor his vision was. He wore very thick glasses, and it was clear that only from a few feet away could he recognize whom he was looking at. Despite his poor vision, he had a sharp eye. His ability “to see” had nothing to do with his inability to look. Feldman’s writing about visual art, be it about Caravaggio or Jackson Pollock, is among the most eloquent by any standards. He demonstrates a deep understanding by someone who can see (and think, of course). This proves that seeing is not the same as looking, as much as hearing is not the same as listening.

On January 28, 1970, I conducted Gwendolyn Sims’s recital at Baird Hall, SUNY/Buffalo. The program included, among other pieces, Feldman’s Journey to the End of the Night, Vertical Thoughts III, Rabbi Akiba, and For Franz Klein. Shortly after this concert, together with Gwendolyn Sims and Jan Williams, I started the S.E.M. Ensemble. Julius Eastman joined us soon after.

In 1971, the University at Buffalo invited Feldman to teach, soon changing his status from visiting professor to the Varèse Professor of Composition, a chair specially created for him. We saw each other very often, and in 1973, I commissioned Feldman to compose a piece for the S.E.M. Ensemble. Feldman wrote Instruments I (flute, Petr Kotik; oboe, Nora Post; trombone, Garret List; percussion, Jan Williams; and celeste, Julius Eastman).

The day after the premiere at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery of Instruments I, Feldman and I walked down Elmwood Avenue toward his home. It was early noon and as we passed a tobacco store, Feldman rushed in to get the Buffalo Evening News that was just published, looking eagerly for the review from the previous night. I was thinking, what on earth is so interesting to Feldman that a Buffalo evening paper writes about his music?

In 1975, Feldman invited the S.E.M. Ensemble to perform John Cage’s Song Books at “June in Buffalo,” a festival he just started. The year before, we performed Song Books at Joel Chadabe’s festival in Albany. Cage, David Tudor and many other luminaries were there, and the performance was very successful. Everyone commented especially on the part Julius Eastman performed. When I met Tudor a few months later at some dinner, he brought up the Albany Song Books performance, talking highly about Julius Eastman’s contribution. When Feldman called me about Song Books for his June in Buffalo, I was convinced that everyone expected Julius to be part of it, but he had already stopped performing with us. I called Julius to inquire if he would do Song Books again, and he eagerly agreed.

The performance at June in Buffalo didn’t come out as expected—Julius misinterpreted the score and prepared a single “Song” in a wrong way, with wrong collaborators, resulting in the audience’s uproar, greatly upsetting Cage and, perhaps even more, Feldman. The next day, Lejaren Hiller tried to smooth things out and invited all of us to a dinner at his house. I sat next to Cage, Feldman across the table. The talk turned to the way the mainstream music world comments on new music and someone quoted Donal Henahan from the New York Times who just wrote about Cage “…but is it music at all?”, to which I said, “Does it matter what the New York Times writes about Cage at all?”

I’ll never forget Feldman’s reaction. His face, red with anger, screaming at me from across the table and repeating over and over: “You are full of shit, you are full of shit!” He could not possibly understand how I could say something like that. On the other hand, being a recent arrival from Czechoslovakia, where the press was totally controlled by the government, no one paying attention to it, I still looked at it with reservation. This commotion didn’t harm the atmosphere of the evening, but it was interesting to me, and made me better understand Feldman.

In the summer of 1987, I commissioned Feldman to write another piece for S.E.M. He was very pleased, but could not do it. He passed away soon after. I have continued to perform his music, especially orchestra pieces since forming the S.E.M. Orchestra in the early nineties, and later with large orchestras in Europe, especially in Ostrava, Czech Republic. I have conducted practically all of the orchestra compositions by Feldman, including his gigantic compositions, such as the hour-long Violin and Orchestra, or Coptic Light. Feldman’s music, from his earliest published pieces to his last works, such as For Samuel Beckett, are a bedrock of music of our time.