“I really don’t feel that it’s all necessary anymore,” Morton Feldman told an interviewer in 1972. “And so what I try to bring into my music are just a very few essential things that I need—to at least keep it going, for a little while more.” Feldman had been asked whether his corpus of work, with its brooding slowness and trembling softness, had something to do with Jewish mourning in the wake of the Holocaust. He evaded the question, though he admitted that he thought about it privately. Instead, he gestured toward a more abstract vanishing—what he called “the death of art,” or, more acutely, “Schubert leaving me.”
It’s still going. At the time of his death, in 1987, Feldman seemed destined to be remembered as a particularly esoteric associate of John Cage’s. His obituaries were preoccupied with the fact that some of his works were very long. But a cult was growing around him, and in the past few decades his influence on new music has become pervasive. The late Feldman archivist Chris Villars assembled a list of some two hundred and fifty pieces written in Feldman’s memory. Linda Catlin Smith, who wrote two of them, recently told the critic Tim Rutherford-Johnson that hearing Feldman “made me feel that writing music was possible, that I might be able to write music that I want to hear.” The homages continue to arrive: in 2022, Tyshawn Sorey wrote “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife),” which emulates Feldman’s shiver-inducing 1972 score “Rothko Chapel,” a musical response to Mark Rothko’s sepulchral shrine in Houston.
In an age of algorithmic din, Feldman’s appeal lies in his unhurried, monkish devotion to the elementals of sound. His output can be seen as a kind of wilderness preserve, in which stray fragments of musical history are allowed to roam free, without having to worry about adapting themselves to any modish system or sensibility. You encounter ambiguous piano chords that could have survived a charred sonata by Schubert; darkly sighing flute motifs that might have graced a quieter page of one of Schoenberg’s expressionist eruptions; cryptically tolling percussion tones out of late Stravinsky; static repetitions that nod toward minimalism. Each sound inhabits its own space, hardly touching the others. A canyon of silence envelops them all.
At first glance, Feldman might seem to be a prophet of the so-called slow movement, which calls for the savoring of simple pleasures. Yet his empire of quiet is undergirded by unease. As in the writing of Samuel Beckett, who supplied the libretto for Feldman’s only opera, “Neither,” gnomic utterances bear the scars of catastrophe. This is not music you can zone out to, unless the zone in question is the shimmering wasteland of Tarkovsky’s “Stalker.” An atmosphere of tension, even menace, circumscribes the sensuousness of those lost Romantic chords. As another Jewish American sage once said, beauty walks a razor’s edge.
Feldman’s hundredth birthday was on January 12th. Little is being done on his behalf in New York City, where he was born and raised. But the University of Buffalo, where the composer taught for many years, mounted a two-day festival in his honor, and the Piano Spheres series, in Los Angeles, presented a pair of marathon concerts. I attended the latter, which culminated in the unveiling of a cake emblazoned with Philip Guston’s portrait of Feldman—a bulbous figure puffing on a cigarette and gazing into the distance. I happen to share a birthday with the man of the hour. It was as good a way as any to mark the creep of age.
The Piano Spheres events, which were divided between the Wende Museum, in Culver City, and the Brick, in Koreatown, concentrated on the music of Feldman’s final decade, when he largely gave up trying to produce works that could fit onto conventional programs. Thirteen of his scores from this period go on for more than an hour; two of them, “String Quartet II” and “For Philip Guston,” each outlast “Tristan und Isolde.” I sometimes suspect that Feldman seized on Wagnerian scale as a way of exacting revenge on Hitler’s favorite composer. But the vastness was really about fostering conditions in which his spectral harmonies could thrive. Rothko needed to fill a room with his canvases; Feldman needed to fill an evening with his music.
Anchoring the proceedings were two seventy-five-minute-long creations for solo piano. Amy Williams played “Triadic Memories,” from 1981, and Aron Kallay offered “For Bunita Marcus,” from 1985. Both renditions were superb, though small divergences between them showed that Feldman’s seemingly monolithic style leaves room for individual approaches. In his later years, he fashioned his music to suit his favorite interpreters—“like a tailor,” he said. Writing for piano, he often had in mind the lustrous touch of Aki Takahashi, who, thirty years ago, gave a hypnotic, séance-like reading of “Triadic Memories” at the Lincoln Center Festival.
Williams grew up with Feldman in her ears. Her father, the percussionist Jan Williams, taught alongside the composer at Buffalo and participated in the premières of “Guston” and other major works. The younger Williams is giving a number of Feldman performances this year, including one at Columbia’s Miller Theatre, in March. “Triadic Memories” is a stark construction, even by Feldman’s standards. For long stretches, the pianist picks out single notes rather than chords, although the pedal allows ghost harmonies to accumulate. The score is thick with repetition: figures are heard six, eight, ten times in succession. Williams knows how to humanize this bare-bones vocabulary, minutely adjusting the voicing of a chord or caressing the last of a set of recurring motifs with a regretful ritardando. Lightly syncopated patterns dance in place like Messiaen’s birds. Feldman has seldom sounded so companionable.
Kallay, a professor at the Claremont Colleges, had never before essayed Feldman in public, although you wouldn’t have known it from the phenomenal focus and finesse he applied to “For Bunita Marcus.” This score, too, is remarkably threadbare. The first page has thirty-four notes in twenty-four bars. Kallay, like Williams, has a gift for infinitesimal variation: solitary high C’s glitter like crystals being struck by shifting light. When, in a harmonic field that verges on the key of C-sharp minor, an E-sharp brings a major-ish gleam, Kallay underlined the shift just enough to make it feel like an epiphany. Yet his playing had an otherworldly serenity that contrasted with Williams’s gentle purposefulness. His luminous tone filled the Brick, a recently converted gallery space with fine acoustics. Heightening the atmosphere was the presence of Kara Walker’s sculpture “Unmanned Drone,” a creative deconstruction of a statue of Stonewall Jackson that once stood in Charlottesville.
The Piano Spheres marathon also featured various works for chamber groups. Andrew McIntosh and Vicki Ray gave an especially striking rendition of “For John Cage,” from 1982. McIntosh, a brilliant composer who has a sideline as a virtuoso early-music violinist, revelled in the microtonal shadings that Feldman built into his notation. In the modern equal-tempered system, the notes F, E-sharp, and G-double-flat are the same pitch; here, as in music of the Baroque era, they are slightly distinct, bringing out eerie flecks of intermediate color.
At the end of the first day, Ray and the Eclipse Quartet traversed “Piano and String Quartet,” which was first heard at LACMA, in 1985. The piano plays mostly arpeggios; the strings fixate for hundreds of bars on a pair of hazy four-note chords. Somehow, these unadorned devices are transformed into materials of aching emotional weight. Uncanny scenes may flicker through your mind. During the endlessly rocking harmonies of the closing section, I first pictured a baby in a cradle, then an old man taking his final breaths. When the last arpeggio sounded, I wanted it to keep going, for a little while more. ♦
