Listeners unprepared
for the Morton Feldman idiom almost
invariably need to radically adjust
their ideas about music. I was fortunate
to have a somewhat gentle initiation
with the atmospheric lyricism and relative
brevity of ‘Rothko Chapel’, while already
being acquainted with the paintings
of Mark Rothko, who was a friend of
Feldman. The 1979 String Quartet
is a tougher nut to crack, but no
less rewarding to those willing to allow
its sinuous sound-world to insinuate
the brain cells.
The String Quartet
followed a period where the composer
was occupied with works for orchestra,
and as such forms a watershed after
which his attention shifted to chamber
music and ‘the long piece’. The first
performance of this work by the Columbia
Quartet on 4 May 1980 lasted well over
one and a half hours, which led to the
piece receiving the nick-name ‘100 minutes’.
This extended duration is almost impossibly
demanding of the musicians, beginning
and end lose their relevance, the sound
of the moment is the protagonist, the
concept of ‘tempo’ is almost destroyed,
the perception of metre and rhythm becomes
practically impossible. The piece is
almost entirely quiet in dynamic (the
score calls for the use of mutes throughout),
and the music exists almost solely to
service the unfolding of sounds in total
freedom – an instrument to order sound
and silence in a flexible time structure.
John Cage, in his book Silence said,
"(It is useless to debate the question)
is the music of Morton Feldman ‘good’
or ‘bad’, Feldman’s music is ..."
What Feldman’s music
is not in this string quartet
is dull or repetitious. Feldman, feeling
the need to defend the extreme length
of his String Quartet discussed
his reluctance merely to repeat: "What’s
repeatable material? You can’t just
repeat ..." His own attitude was
that it had to do with ‘feeling’: "I’m
just watching how I feel." Just
a few insights into the time into which
the piece was born, and the composer’s
‘watching and letting go’ and there
is no further need for intellectual
nit-picking. You cannot put this music
on as an ambient background. The beauty
is in the detail, the delicacy of sonorities
and nuances which are placed in an unhurried
and elastic, context-less performing
environment.
The performance and
recording on this disc are exemplary.
When I moved to The Netherlands to study
composition in 1987 Feldman had just
died, and was the flavour of the time
– adopted by composers as an intellectual
defence mechanism, a crutch to defend
empty and meaningless music constructed
over mathematical grids and given wordless,
‘graphic’ titles. I’m glad to hear that
the old master’s pioneering spirit still
sounds as challenging and inspirational
as it did then. You couldn’t imitate
him then any more than you should try
to now, but if you let him, he will
keep you on the edge of your seat for
nearly 80 minutes.
Dominy Clements
The Group for Contemporary Music: Benjamin
Hudson (violin); Carol Zeavin (violin); Lois Martin
(viola); Joshua Gordon (cello) 
