New Directions in Music: Morton Feldman

By Frank O’Hara

 

The last ten years have seen American composers, painters and poets assuming leading roles in the world of international art to a degree hitherto unexpected. Led by the painters, our whole cultural milieu has changed and is still changing. The “climate” for receptivity to the new in art has improved correspondingly, and one of the most important aspects of this change has been the inter-involvement of the individual arts with one another. Public interest in the emergence of a major composer, painter or poet has, in recent years, almost invariably been preceded by his recognition among other painters, poets and musicians. The influence of aesthetic ideas has also been mutual: the very extremity of the differences between the arts has thrown their technical analogies into sharp relief. As an example of what I mean by this, we find that making the analogy between certain allover paintings of Jackson Pollock and the serial technique of Webern clarifies the one by means of the other – a seemingly “automatic” painting is seen to be as astutely controlled by the sensibility of Pollock in its assemblage of detail toward a unified experience as are certain of Webern’s serial pieces. And it is interesting to note that initial public response to works by both artists was involved in bewilderment at the seeming” fragmentation” of experience. Although these analogies cease to be helpful if carried too far, it is in the framework of these mutual influences in the arts that Morton Feldman could cite, along with the playing of Fournier, Rachmaninoff and Tudor and he friendship of John Cage, the paintings of Philip Guston as important influences on his work. He adds, “Guston made me aware of the ‘metaphysical place’ which we all have but which so many of us are not sensitive to by previous convection.”

 

I interpret this “metaphysical place,” this land where Feldman’s pieces live, as the area where spiritual growth in the work can occur, where the form of a work may develop its inherent originality and the personal meaning of the composer may become explicit. In a more literal way it is the space which must be cleared if the sensibility is to be free to express its individual preference for sound and to explore the meaning of this preference. That the process of finding this metaphysical place of unpredictability and possibility can be a drastic one is witnessed by the necessity Feldman felt a few years ago to avoid the academic ramifications of serial technique. Like the artists involved in the new American paining, he was pursuing a personal search for expression which could not be limited by any system.

 

This is in sharp contrast to the development of many of Feldman’s European contemporaries, for example Boulez and Stockhausen, whose process has tended toward elaboration and systematization of method. Unlike Feldman’s their works are eminently suited to analysis and what they have lacked in sensuousness they invariably may regain in intellectual profundity and in the metaphysical implications of their methods. But if we speak of a metaphysical place in relation to Feldman, it is the condition under which the work was created and which is left behind the moment a given work has been completed.

 

Feldman’s decision to avoid the serial technique was an instinctive attempt to avoid the clichés of the International School of present-day avant-garde. He was not to become an American composer in the historical-reminiscence line, but to find himself free of the conceptualized and self-conscious modernity of the international movement. Paradoxically, it is precisely this freedom which places Feldman in the front rank of the advanced musical art of our time.

 

A key work in the development away from the serial technique is the Intersection III for piano (1953). A graph piece, it is totally abstract in its every dimension. Feldman here successfully avoids the symbolic aspect of sound which has so plagued the abstract works of his contemporaries by employing unpredictability reinforced by spontaneity – the score indicates “indeterminacy of pitch” as a direction for the performer. Where others have attempted to reverse or nullify this aural symbolism (loud-passion, soft-tenderness, and so on) to free themselves, Feldman has created a work which exists without references outside itself, “as if you’re not listening, but looking at something in nature.” This is something serialism could not accomplish. This freedom is shared by the performer to the extent that what he plays is not dictated beyond the graph “control” – the range of a given passage and its temporal area and division are indicated, but the actual notes heard must come from the performer’s response to the musical situation. To perform Feldman’s graph pieces at all, the musician must reach the metaphysical place where each can occur, allying necessity with unpredictability. Where a virtuoso work places technical demands upon the performer, a Feldman piece seeks to engage his improvisatory collaboration, with its call on musical creativity as well as interpretative understanding. The performance on this record is proof of how beautifully this can all work out; yet, the performer could doubtless find other beauties in Intersection III on another occasion.

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Projection IV for violin and piano (1951) explores an entirely different area of musical experience. A graph piece also (see illustration), its marvelous austerity is achieved mainly through touch, and I will quote the note to the performer as an example of how the individual area of experience in these graph pieces is indicated to the performers:

 

 

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A comparison of these two graph pieces, whose ambiances are so totally dissimilar, gives an idea of the great compositional flexibility possible with graph notation.

 

Unpredictability is used in a different way still in the Piece for Four Pianos (1957). This work, scored in notation rather than graph, begins simultaneously for all four pianos, after which the following notes may be played to the end by each of the pianists at time intervals of their mutual or individual choice. Feldman has said, “The repeated notes are not musical pointillism, as in Webern, but they are where the mind rests on an image – the beginning of this piece is like a recognition, not a motif, and by virtue of the repetitions it conditions one to listen.” As we proceed to experience the individual time-responses of the four pianists we are moving inexorably toward the final image where the mind can rest, which is the end of the piece. In this particular performance it is as if one were traversing an enormous plain at the opposite ends of which were two huge monoliths, guarding its winds and grasses.

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In all of Feldman’s recent work the paramount image is that of touch – “The use of the instrument must be as sensitive as the application of paint on canvas.” (Which brings us back to Rachmaninoff, Fournier and Tudor.) In some pieces the entrance into the rhythmic structure is left entirely to the performer, and it is in this area that unpredictability enters and the performer must create the experience within the limits of the notation.

 

On the other hand, one of the most remarkable pieces recorded here is Structures for string quartet (1951). It is a classical string quartet without sonata development, without serial development, in general without benefit of clergy. Like Emily Dickinson’s best poems, it does not seem to be what it is until all questions of “seeming” have disappeared in its own projection. Its form reveals itself after its meaning is revealed, as Dickinson’s passion ignores her dazzling technique. As with several other Feldman pieces, if you cannot hear Structures, I doubt that studying the score would be a help, though it is a thoroughly notated field of dynamic incident, whose vertical elements are linked by a sort of shy contrapuntal stimulation of great delicacy and tautness.

In an oeuvre which so insistently provides unpredictability with opportunities for expansion and breath, the question of notation at all arises, for the graph would seem to provide an adequate control for the experience and a maximum of differentiation. But differentiation is not Feldman’s point, even in the graph music: the structure of the piece is never the image, nor in eschewing precise notation of touch is Feldman leaving the field open for dramatic incident whereby the structure could become an image (as in Boulez). Notation is, then, not so much a rigid exclusion of chance, but the means of preventing the structure from becoming an image in these works, and an indication of the composer’s personal preference for where unpredictability should operate. As John Cage remarked in this connection, “Feldman’s conventionally notated music is himself playing his graph music.” And of course the degree of precision in the notation is directly related to the nature of the musical experience. Feldman is exposing. This notation can be very precise, as in Extensions I for violin and piano (1951), which indicates an increasing tempo of inexorable development from beginning to end by metronomic markings, as well as the dynamics and expressive development.

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Although the traditionally notated works are in the majority on this record (Extensions I, Structures for spring quartet, Extensions IV, Two Pieces for Two Pianos, Three Pieces for String Quartet), I have gone into the use of unpredictability in this music at such length in order to reach a distinction about its use in much contemporary music. In Feldman’s work unpredictability involves the performer and the audience much in the same way it does the composer, inviting an increase of sensitivity and intensity. But in much of the extreme vanguard music in America and Europe, particularly that utilizing tape and electronic devices along with elements of unpredictability, the statistical unpredictability has occurred in the traditional manner during the making of the piece; it has been employed preconceptually as a logical outgrowth of serial technique, and it is dead by the time you hear it, though the music is alive in the traditional sense of hearing. What Feldman is assuming, and it is a courageous assumption, is that the performer is a sensitive and inspired musician who has the best interests of the work at hear. This attitude leaves him free to concentrate on the main inspiration-area where the individual piece is centered.

 

What he finds in these centers – whether it is the sensuousness of tone and the cantilena-like delicacy of breathing in Three Pieces for String Quartet (1954-56), or the finality of the “dialogues’ in Extensions IV for three pianos (1952-53) – is on each occasion a personal and profound revelation of the inner quality of sound. The works recorded here already are an important contribution to the music of the twentieth century. Whether notated or graphed, his music sets in motion a spiritual life which is rare in any period and especially so in ours.

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