Listening to Morton Feldman’s early Nature Pieces and Intermissions last Sunday afternoon, it was soon clear that they encoded more than their surfaces implied. They were played during the first of Piano Spheres’ two-day marathon celebrating the composer’s centennial and these comparatively gnomic scores were wedged between the massive Crippled Symmetry and Triadic Memories like a pair of islets walled inside of a massive fjord. Considering that Feldman found his authentic voice only in middle age, and that he composed Nature Pieces and Intermissions while still a young man, these pieces could almost be dismissed as juvenilia. Pianist Thomas Kotcheff’s pliantly yogic playing revealed them, instead, as moments when modernist future faced and, perhaps, bade farewell to its future past. Both works evoked Anton Webern, the spiritus rector of the postwar avant-garde. He was also one of the great inimitables of music, as his posthumous epigones inadvertently demonstrated. Feldman must have soon discovered he was in a stylistic bind that he needed to save himself from, resourceful though his style of post-Webernian serialism.
Few composers have been as unlike their music as Feldman, who on first glance appeared more likely to work the counter at Katz’s Deli than author some of the most ethereal music ever written. His earthiness, however, never tinged his art, as Otto Luening noticed, who once chided the young Feldman for not knowing “how to spiel”. Irony, a defining trait of our modernity, is non-existent in Feldman’s music. Especially in the late works which comprised most of Piano Spheres’ marathon.
There are moments, though, where something like the cosmic laughter of the universe can be heard. In Piano, played by pianist Conor Hanick, and Palais de Mari, played by pianist Nic Gerpe, seemingly familiar devices from mainstream music unexpectedly emerged. True to Feldman’s goal of freeing his music from what he called “fifteen hundred years of goddamned references”, they lead in just as unexpected directions, never employed for their functional purpose, but rather as “found” objects within a vast sound collage.
Reference to the visual arts is more than just a useful metaphor — it was the foundation of Feldman’s mature work. The composer once expressed his admiration for how Philip Guston “was so careful about how much paint he put on the brush and how much pressure he applied when he put it to the canvas”. Sensing that the frontier was closing on Western music, Feldman sought energy from other art forms with reserves of freshness still left to spare. This was especially apparent in the performance of Why Patterns? that opened the second day of the marathon. Pianist Richard An, flautist Rachel Beetz, and percussionist Dustin Donohue realized Feldman’s vision of tones as sound brushes that streaked across an auditory canvas. Or as droplets of tone spackled Jackson Pollack-like. And although each instrumental attack signaled a note’s arrival, its decay did not necessarily signal its end. In Triadic Memories, played by pianist Amy Williams, and especially For Bunita Marcus played by pianist Aron Kallay, notes arrive, but never truly decay; instead they continually enrich a firmament of overtones that betokens an aural eternity in which the listener is only a momentary witness.
One must search deep into the past to find an equivalent to the kind of experience that Feldman’s music creates with the right musicians. Whether it was Crippled Symmetry as played by pianist Gloria Cheng, flautist Michael Matsuno, and percussionist Jonathan Hepfer, or For Bunita Marcus played by Kallay, or Patterns in a Chromatic Field played by pianist Todd Moellenberg and cellist Erika Duke, the sensation that they channeled from Feldman resembled less classical recital than it did kabbalistic ritual.
Feldman’s music, much as it was borne from the wish to be unfettered from “goddamned references”, is expressive, even overwhelmingly so. His Piano and String Quartet, played by pianist Vicki Ray and the Eclipse Quartet, is permeated by a feeling of lateness, the awareness of time’s flight, and its futile wish to linger just a while longer. There is no “progression” or “movement” in the traditional sense. Feldman, instead, seems to circle around the same idea again and again, finding with each turn a new detail to behold, a new reason to stall the inevitable with a “but not yet”.
Feldman once compared Cage’s music to Monet’s later paintings which “look into the sun” and “slips from our ears into a non-delineated sound world”. His words may arguably be an even more accurate description of his own art. More than that. As delicate as it often is, there is no music wherein the composer’s voice booms as forcefully as it does in Feldman’s. His music resists “interpretation” and subjugates performers to his will. All the more remarkable, then, waa the collective achievement of the musicians of Piano Spheres. Their selfless virtuosity, the patient denial of their egos — it was a living tribute such as few composers ever enjoy.
As Thomas Welch, executive director of Piano Spheres, reminded the audience, Monday, the final day of the marathon was Feldman’s 100th birthday. It was appropriate to say “birthday” rather than to say the centennial of his birth. Feldman does live. Now. Piano Spheres spoke the truth of the living Feldman, his music as much as the man himself.