The Brooklyn Rail

Forty years after Morton Feldman's death, he seems to be as little understood as when he was alive. This is strange because he has his fans, more now than when he was prolifically making new pieces.

At the narrow margins of the recording era, which has been dominated by popular music, he has been possibly the most heavily documented avant-garde composer, and one of the most well-documented composers in living memory. The Mode label alone has recorded most of his important solo instrumental and chamber music. Feldman has an ongoing afterlife as something to be collected.

One does wonder what he would think about this. He was obstreperous, more so with his friends than anyone else, and it seemed the case of the people closest to you being most vexing because they don't always see who you are while being in the position where they should. And Feldman, who was brilliant at seeing the work of others, wanted to be seen.

That's the thing. New work can be difficult to see from close up in time, especially music which, when brand new, is almost always heard only live, and almost always only once. Memory has to share time with listening, listening to understand what's going on, memory to hold on to immediate impressions and find a place to fit those into the knowledge and experience you've gained. New books and paintings can be taken in at leisure, you can go see a new movie again, but a world premiere goes at its own pace, has its own duration, then disappears. 

When Feldman’s music was new, especially his works notated on graph paper, it must have been startling and hard to grasp as what it is. In a 1967 article, Feldman explained the origins of his graph pieces, describing a dinner with John Cage and David Tudor, where he got up, went into the other room, and "wrote on graph paper some indeterminate music for cello—no notes, just indications of high, low, middle, short, long, loud, soft.” He claimed that “was probably the first piece of indeterminate music."

It is necessary to understand what that means. A composer’s score is a set of instructions to musicians, and Feldman’s gave the performer some choices within specific guidelines—which also included general directions to play slowly, softly, and to allow substantial periods of silence. That was his sound. It seemed related to what Cage was doing, which it wasn’t, and outside of classical music, which it also wasn’t.

As to the first, indeterminacy is not chance, which was Cage’s field. Cage wanted to remove intentional choice from his compositions, so designed bespoke procedures to use chance to make all the choices for him. Indeterminacy is first chosen by the composer, then produced through the musician’s choices. But it will sound different each performance.

For the second, it’s fair to call the graphic scores and indeterminate music Feldman’s avant-garde/experimental period. But like a quantum physicist collapsing wave functions, he moved from indeterminacy to complete determinacy. Feldman always saw himself as a classical composer, and in retrospect the early music seems like a long apprenticeship through which he found what he wanted to hear and figured out how to write it down, on manuscript paper, with the type of standard notation that any musician could read. In method, this was as traditional as classical music gets.

The remarkable thing, uncanny really, is that his sound didn't change. This is the deceptive thing about Feldman, the quiet, slow, spacious aesthetic never fundamentally changed, so the experimental music and the traditional music can sound the same. And if the listener’s exposure to Feldman is only through listening to his discography at home, the key details that separate the two eras, details that are subtle but incredibly important and meaningful, are lost.

Feldman’s music is too quiet and subtle for the stereo. If that’s the way to hear it, there’s no problem with that, but at home his music blends into the overall experience of what’s happening in and around the space, it disappears into corners and tasks and other distractions. At home he is an ambient composer. And he was not an ambient composer.

What is also hard to hear at home, but prominent live, is that his sense of time changed and that is the divide between his eras, between his apprenticeship and his mastery. Yes, his later music might explore extremely long duration, but the real difference is that indeterminate music has an indeterminate duration in performance, while the five-hour String Quartet No. 2 has a long duration but a fairly determined length—it can vary, but it has a limit that is set by the last page in the score. It’s inevitable the musicians will reach that, so even before a performance begins everyone knows it’s going to end. “We’ll see it through to the end” is a universe of difference from “Let’s see where this will end.” Indeterminate music explores time, scored music defines time.

Hearing that means seeing Feldman. One doesn’t have to be able to read music notation to hear how he etched specific, precise musical ideas, and repeated them at exact moments, in pieces like Piano and String Quartet and For Philip Guston. His interest in quiet, in varying timbres, and space, has a modernist-with-a-capital-M significance, remaking traditional language with newer knowledge (e.g. Varèse’s use of timbre as a structural device, Gustav Mahler including a five minute pause after the first moment of his Symphony No. 2). 

His haunting, mysterious, floating quality has been immensely appealing to any listener who seeks music that breaks away from not just familiar forms but sensations. There are listeners who seek music experiences subversive vis-a-vis everything standard, from rock to pop to jazz and especially classical, the standard of standard. But the subversive thing about Feldman is that he wasn’t just classical but barely a step past Beethoven's late music, the rising, floating trills of the Op. 111 Piano Sonata, the meandering recollections of memories in Symphony No. 9.

Beethoven may seem as standard and ordinary as classical music gets, but one thing Feldman does is help us see how radical Beethoven's late music is, and also the radical music of Feldman keeps those classical foundations revived in the late 20th century on up to today. In person, the details are sharp and precise as cut diamonds, and the hushed atmosphere that surrounds a Feldman performance has the same exalted quality Beethoven evokes in audiences. That’s the company Feldman keeps.