Rothko Chapel

"Rothko Chapel" is perhaps the best introduction to Feldman. It is not an hour and a half long; it is pleasant in its instrumentation; and has a conventionally beautiful melody at the beginning of the fifth section. I love his use of quiet timpani. This was the first piece I heard by Feldman and for years I didn't know much else of him. It didn't hurt that Rothko is my favorite painter, of course.

Once you get used to Rothko Chapel, then you are ready for "Crippled Symmetries." This piece is quite a bit longer, but it is a better introduction to his great, late long works than, say, "Piano and String Quartet" or "Mental Perturbation." It is more sonically pleasant, more calming and even melodic. It is divided into sections, so you can start with one and listen to 15 or 20 minutes. This work will teach you how to listen to more unitary, unsubdivided long works.

Some really short early works might be easy enough to get through, but they are too short to provide enough information for the listener to get used to Feldman's style. "Rothko Chapel," at 24 minutes, is perfect in length in this regard.

There have been whole years when I just wasn't in the mood for Feldman's music. I only wanted music that would stimulate and arouse my nervous system in the more usual ways.

3rd Batch of Feldman Notes

I gave an exam today, so naturally I came up with a lot of ideas while the students were writing.

Let's look at Feldman's approach to musical elements.

In articulation, he emphasizes decay over attack:

This is perahps why in my music I am so 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 toward us.

In dynamics, soft rather than loud. And very, very soft, ppp.

In tempo, slow rather than fast. He liked the tempo of about 60bpm.

In structure, development, his music is static rather than directional. There is little or no narrative or movement forward.

In rhythm, duration rather than ictus.

In the construction of phrases, isolated notes or clusters rather than linear phrases.

In musical gesture, nuance rather than bombast.

In timbre, a kind of ghostly presence rather than the stencil or stereotype of the sound.

In other words, he has a consistent approach to music evident in all of these dimensions, so that if you put loud, fast, articulated, developmental, etc... in one column you would find he avoids all of those things. His music is the anti-bebop.

What I haven't gotten to yet is his approach to melody and harmony. The exam was only an hour and 15 minutes. I would say he that his sequences of short clusters are anti-melodic. He doesn't compose very many tunes that go up and down the scale. Harmonically, the music does not build tonally in the classic style, nor does it follow a 12-tone, serialist technique. What I don't know yet is what it does do.

These are very crude judgments so far. I'm just trying to figure out what I know so far, and it could be that what I know is partially mistaken.

More Feldman Notes

(6) I like that anti-ideological spirit in Feldman. It is not anti-ideological in the cheap postmodern sense--which is just a reinstatement of another ideology. It is not "anything goes." Neither was Frank O'Hara, despite facile readings of him. In contrast, Cage's seeming openness is very ideological, very didactic.

(7) Duration is a key concept. How long something lasts, whether a note or an entire composition. In a comment on the last post, Vance Maverick has noted the extremes of brevity and length in his early and late compositions, respectively. The early sequence "Durations" might hold a key to this concept.

(8) If you didn't know the early pieces were indeterminate, would you think of them that way when you heard them?

(9) I'd like to do an amateur essay on Feldman. Obviously I could do nothing else, lacking the technical ability to do the non-amateur kind. But it would still be about the music, not just about his connections to literary and painterly comrades from Guston to Beckett. I think he was writing music for me, not just for musicologists. Nor do I think of this as "cerebral" music.

(10) Another approach would be a sort of nationalist, Americanist reading. This strain is evident in Feldman's writing, but is it what most interests me? Only very indirectly.

(11) What does Feldman mean for my other writing projects? Will he be roped in for some project in which I can speak from the point of view of the expert academic? Would this be a good or bad thing?

Feldman Notes

One of my persistent obsessions is the music of Morton Feldman. Here's a few things I know.

(1) He liked to give names of instruments or dedications as the titles of his works. "For Frank O'Hara" or "Piano." The other main category of title refers to the process or structure of a piece: "Projection," "Crippled Symmetries." He tends to avoid the names of musical genres in the title--like "Waltz" or "Sonata."

(2) He is a precursor of miminalism, but I find his music quite different from most minimalism. It is hypnotic, but does not depend as much on rhythm. It is more introspective, less facile, more involved with visual and poetics arts.

(3) I like him better than Cage because the music seems less didactic, less theological.

(4) He uses a lot of percussion, but not for rhythmic or bombastic effects; more for timbre and texture.

(5) He was an interesting writer, and his writing still provides the best entrance into his musical world. His writing is interesting even if you don't know his music. In this, he is like Cage, but once again, I am more interested in Fedlman's writing than in Cage's.

The qualitative defines personal experience, its distinctness. One reason that I know that I am still I is that I can listen to Art Tatum play "Nice Work if You Can Get It" and recognize my previous experience in it. It's almost like opening a door to the self and seeing that the self is still there. (I listened to this maybe 400 times when I was 14.) I cannot get that qualitative experience out of something I listened to for the first time at 30, with the same intensity at least. The qualitative (timbre) is what makes things recognizable as themselves.

I feel especially drawn to things that were happening around the time I was born, or just before or after. Everything I end up being interested in falls into that 1947-1967 window. Which means in practical terms that the writers and musicians I most love were born between 1920 and 1940, or might as well have been born then. (Shapiro the child prodigy is younger but already writing poems when I was born, so he qualifies.) I wrote my first book on a Spanish poet born in '34, and have been mostly interested in that group of poets. It's the generation of yr parents, sd the Freudian.

Just to give 1926 as an example, we have Miles, Coltrane, Ginsberg, O'Hara, and Creeley who are born that year. Not to mention my favorite modern composer Morton Feldman.

I was never as fascinated by the generation born in the 40s or 50s. I came of age when the good stuff was disappearing from the culture in favor of a cruder aesthetic. I'll give some of it my grudging admiration, but really I don't have the same personal investment in it.

Going back to generation born in the 1880s: that's another source of fascination for me, but it is not as immediate. I could be Creeley, in some sense, but not Wallace Stevens.

Timbres are auditory odors.

Morton Feldman's writings on music are very profound.

His distate for "attack." In other words, he doesn't want music dominated by the front end of the note or by loud flashy dynamics. Think how much more interesting the decay of the note is than its onset.

His notion of a note as a "stencil." He didn't want the stereotype of an instrumental sound. He was hearing something more subtle in his mind.

All his interest in oriental rugs and painting, in musical sound as a visual surface.

He even out-Cages Cage.