response 1 of 31:

Sep 27 12:33 UTC 2002

My opinion: 

I agree that Feldman's music can sound minimalist when we describe it, 
it just doesn't sound minimalist when we actually listen to it.  
Strange but true.  Feldman's sound-world descends from Webern, not from 
LaMonte Young or Terry Riley.  

If your purpose in placing Feldman in a box labeled "Minimalists" is to 
give potential listeners an idea what to expect, then I just don't 
think the box is useful for that purpose.  Some innocent soul is apt to 
reach into the box expecting the soothing sounds of "In C" and instead 
pull out "Piano and Orchestra."  Thanks a *lot*, Mr. Critic Man.  ;-)

Otoh, if all you're doing is classification for the purpose of 
classification, then why lump a composer of atonal music together with 
a group of composers who are known for bringing tonality *back*?  
You've put an avant-gardist in a box with a bunch of reactionaries!  
That is, why does repetition trump tonality (or decibel-level, rhythm, 
tessitura, or any other quality)?

response 3 of 31:

Sep 27 22:34 UTC 2002

Footnotes (it's hard to double-check an entire long post in the tiny 
box of the pistachio interface):

I wrote "for _this_ classification, [repetition] is the striking 
quality that distinguishes all of thee composers from the expressionist 
orthodoxy of the mid-20C, composers for whom information density was 
all-important ... and for whom repetition of this kind was 
incomprehensible anathema."

Again, it's not just repetition.  But there's a huge dividing line in 
modern music, that by about 1950 had crystallized into two decisively 
clear camps.  At fundamental basis it's a question of which is more 
important, intellectual content or emotional effect.  The orthodox 
view, held by the true-believer Webernian orthodoxy _and_ by their 
supposed polar opposite, John Cage, was the former.  The minimalists, 
Feldman, and some other composers not minimalist at all, including 
Shostakovich, held the other view.

I wrote that "the canonical minimalists all began as Cagean 
anarchists."  Strike the "all"; Young and Reich certainly did, but I'm 
not sure about the others.  But Riley and Glass both went through 
periods as devoted Young disciples, and that too is not exactly 
compatible with a term like "reactionary".  Nor did any of them 
abruptly switch sides, like some musical David Horowitz: their later 
work, especially Reich's, grew directly out of what they did before.

response 5 of 31:

Sep 28 18:16 UTC 2002

[Apropos John Cage, did you hear about the British composer who 
recently included a track called "One Minute of Silence" on a CD, and 
was sued by Cage's publisher on the grounds that his silence infringed 
on the copyright of John Cage's silence in Cage's 4'33"?  The British 
composer promptly registered copyrights for several silent works, 
including one 4'32" long and one 4'34" long.  He promised to monitor 
future performances of Cage's 4'33".  "If one of them is shorter or 
longer than four minutes and thirty-three seconds," he says, "it's 
mine."  I think Cage, who died in 1992, would've laughed himself silly.]

response 7 of 31:

Sep 30 21:01 UTC 2002

Re that Cage matter: the Brit in question is named Mike Batt (best 
known to me as the producer of two Steeleye Span albums).  I agree: 
Cage would have laughed himself silly, because his aim was to mess with 
people's heads, and boy have people's heads been messed with here.

Including Batt's.  He's missed the point of the copyright complaint.  
He didn't just put a track of silence on the album, he deliberately 
took Cage's concept, and acknowledged that by crediting the track 
to "Batt/Cage".  (He says _now_ that the "Cage" was "Clint Cage", a 
pseudonym he created for the purpose.  But he didn't say that at first, 
and in any case it's an obvious figleaf.)

response 9 of 31:

Oct 1 17:17 UTC 2002

Here's where our differences in taste really run up against each other, 
because my first exposure to minimalism was an excerpt from none other 
than Glass's "The Photographer" and I was captivated.  Not only did the 
music instantly appeal to me, but it opened up an entirely new _kind_ 
of music that I had never realized existed before.  This experience was 
of an awesomeness not matched since my first exposure to a symphony, 
the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth.

This mind-opening experience with Glass eventually led me, via Riley 
and Young, to Feldman, so don't knock it.

I'd known of the minimalists before I ever heard any, and here's where 
I'm reminded of your opinion that Feldman's music seems minimalist in 
description but doesn't sound that way.  For I never would have 
guessed, from descriptions of minimalism, that I would like it so 
much.  From the descriptions, I would have thought it would drive me 
crazy.  Why this difference?  I have some ideas, but that's another 
topic.

The two works you say you can't stand are both by Glass, and from a 
certain period, the 1975-90 period.  They're not at all typical of 
other minimalists' work, except in the broadest sense, and even Glass's 
music from other periods varies from that a lot.

Historically, minimalism began with extremely austere "strict" 
or "doctrinaire" works, but by the mid-1970s most of the composers 
writing it had evolved to writing music in which the strict minimalist 
elements were mixed with more conventional elements.  In Glass's case, 
he put in identifiable melodic lines, richer (tonal) harmony, and 
harmonic progressions and cadences, which had been absent from his 
earlier music.  Glass's own opinion is that the term "minimalism" is 
really only appropriate for the earlier, "strict" works, and that's why 
he resists definition of himself as a minimalist.

What's happened since is that more and more composers, including the 
(ex-)minimalists themselves, have turned to writing music in which the 
strict minimalist elements are just one part, if a prominent one, of 
the language, in the same way that the language of "Le Sacre" became a 
part of almost all composers' vocabulary in the mid-20C.  As you 
observe, the minimalist influences in Adams are well-mixed with those 
of Barber and Sibelius.

Adams was one of the first composers to be successful at this: there 
are many others, and I named some in earlier posts.  This kind of music 
is sometimes called post-minimalism, but the critical point is this: 
the music that most of the canonical minimalists have been writing for 
the last 15-25 years is just as post-minimalist as anything Adams 
does.  If Glass, Reich and Riley are minimalists and Adams is not, it's 
only for the _historical_ reason that the three were writing strict 
minimalism in the 1960s.  Not for what they've been doing since 1980 or 
so.

So if you don't like mid-period Glass's mixture of heavy quantities of 
tonal harmony and strict minimalism, try a hearken to his pure strict 
minimalist works: "Music in Twelve Parts" would be good.  And his more 
recent works are quite post-minimalist.  Unfortunately many are not all 
that good, unless you're already attuned to Glass.  For a sampler, I'd 
recommend the Naxos recording of his Violin Concerto (far superior to 
the Kremer/Dohnanyi recording).

And for Ghu's sake, don't judge the other minimalists by Glass.  Reich 
is the most similar, but even he is very different: far less lush 
harmony, and far more complex rhythmic patterns.  More of an 
intellectual's composer than Glass.

response 11 of 31:

Oct 3 03:21 UTC 2002

You don't have to listen to the minimalists if you don't want to, of 
course.  There is not world enough and time to listen to everything.  
(Though it so happens that I'm listening to WGUC on the web as I write 
this, and they just finished playing Glass's Second Symphony a few 
minutes ago.  Had you been doing the same, that would have been a 
painless way to sample some post-1990 Glass.)

But I keep mentioning various minimalists that I think you, as a 
Feldman loyalist, might also like.  It's not at all clear to me if 
you've heard anything by Young or Andriessen.  When you say you don't 
like the way "it" sounds, I don't know what "it" may be besides a 
nodding acquaintance with "In C" and a small selection of Glass.

If that is all, or close to all, it would perhaps be wise to be careful 
of what criticisms you make of this music you're not that familiar 
with, and especially of the fallacy of using this small selection of 
Glass serve for description of a whole school of widely varying 
composers.

Which brings me to the comparison with Vaughan Williams's Sixth.  Very 
interesting that you should bring that up, because I've had a long 
discussion of that very point with the same friend who introduced me to 
Feldman.  I see the similarity you mention, but I doubt the influence.  
The approach to tonal ambiguity seems to me to be entirely different.  
VW seems to me to be deliberately hurling a challenge in the teeth of 
conventional notions of cadence.  Meanwhile, Glass seems to me not to 
be in opposition to anything conventional about tonality at all, but to 
be writing his harmony in a deliberately naive style, as if tonality 
had not existed before he (re-)invented it.  I think here we have two 
composers who came to a similar area of the musical landscape by 
entirely different routes.

response 13 of 31:

Oct 19 15:06 UTC 2002

The November 2002 issue of Vanity Fair magazine has an article 
supposedly by Elvis Costello called "Rocking around the Clock," in 
which various musical selections are recommended for each hour of the 
day.  The 4 AM selection is Morton Feldman's Piano and String Quartet, 
which the author describes as "hypnotic and transporting."

response 15 of 31:

Oct 23 15:54 UTC 2002

You'll love this.  The url is too long, so you have to copy and paste 
it:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000000R2Z/qid=1035387506/sr=2-
2/ref=sr_2_2/102-8451282-6055367

It's an Amazon.com member's review of a CD with Feldman's "Rothko 
Chapel" and "Why Patterns?" in which the reviewer calls Feldman "the 
prototypical minimalist." (!) 
 
(He or she also calls Feldman's music "ambient music."  Can minimalist 
also be ambient?  You know how bad I am at categories. ;-))

response 17 of 31:

Oct 24 14:49 UTC 2002

"Ambient" has to be one of the most-abused adjectives in music.  It's been
used so many different ways that I don't think it means anything at all
anymore.  

response 19 of 31:

Oct 24 22:33 UTC 2002

There's an "ambient" genre of electronic music, inspired by Brian Eno.  The
Orb and Future Sound of London are two of the big names.  The music is what
you might expect from the name -- sort of spacey and easy to get lost in.

response 21 of 31:

Oct 25 10:41 UTC 2002

The "Gran Partita" wind serenade is one of my favorites.  Wouldn't've 
called it ambient, but I guess if the shoe fits...

response 23 of 31:

Nov 29 20:52 UTC 2002

There are some funny reviews of Feldman's 2nd String Quartet out 
there.  Here's one from the topica.com "Why Patterns" list"

This article from NYTimes.com 
has been sent to you by lunb-@uwm.edu.



Minimal and Maximal Meet a Five-Hour Long Work

February 17, 2002 

By KYLE GANN




MORTON FELDMAN once described his Second String Quartet as
a nightmare. That has certainly seemed to be true from the
standpoint of the groups that have played it. In a splendid
new recording by the Ives Ensemble on Hat Art, the piece is
five hours long: 293 minutes, to be exact. If you lift your
right arm into the position to hold a violin bow and
imagine keeping it there for five hours, you will see the
problem. 

The piece is a medieval torture device for string players.
The otherwise adventurous Kronos Quartet used to rush
through it in four hours and, after a few such trials,
refused to play it, even infamously canceling a planned
1996 performance at the Lincoln Center Festival. Since
then, the younger Flux Quartet has played the work in New
York, and now members of the Ives Ensemble of the
Netherlands have made a long-awaited first recording. 

But Feldman was not thinking merely of length when he
called the piece a nightmare. Born and raised in New York,
Feldman was a musical revolutionary, known for his long
association with John Cage, for writing superlong works
with dynamics marked "as soft as possible" and, more
recently, for being perhaps the most influential composer
of the late 20th century. 

"It's like a jigsaw puzzle that every piece you put in
fits," Feldman said of the quartet, "and then when you
finish it, you see that it's not the picture. That was the
idea. The jigsaw puzzle, everything finishes, and it's not
the picture. Then you do another version, and it's not the
picture. Finally you realize that you are not going to get
a picture." 

The Second String Quartet, from 1983, is indeed made up of
hundreds of shards, juxtaposed as in a puzzle or, perhaps
more relevantly, as with the patches of color in one of the
Persian rugs Feldman loved to collect. Along with
Stravinsky, Messiaen and Ralph Shapey (who has never
received credit for it), Feldman was one of the 20th
century's great musical imagists. 

There is no syntax in his music; there are no transitions,
no connective tissue and certainly none of the contrapuntal
rhetoric one associates with string quartet writing.
Instead there are pairs of chords that recur over and over;
four-note repeating melodies in pizzicato; breathy tone
clusters; D sharp leading to C sharp again and again; and
about every 15 minutes, an arch-shaped theme that keeps
coming back like the eternal unanswered question. 

It is generally easy to characterize Feldman's mature music
as sustained notes gliding by at different rates in
different instruments. But his music for strings tends to
depart from the pattern: drier, spikier, written more in
unison ensemble rhythms. Although the Second Quartet
sometimes lapses into a kind of slow atonal waltz for a few
minutes, it is otherwise obsessed with four-ness. Groups of
four chords echo in the silence, and four-note ostinatos
follow one another, sometimes lurching into the motoric
repetitions of Minimalism. If anyone wants to make the case
that Feldman was, after all, a Minimalist, this piece is
Exhibit A. 

The case has often been made. (In a 1987 obituary of
Feldman, The New York Times referred to him as both a
Minimalist and an expressionist, an awkward but arguable
pairing.) In an era that rejected repetition of any kind,
Feldman used repetitive figures as early as his
"Structures" for string quartet, of 1951, long before Terry
Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass created a splash with
tape loops and repeated phrases in the mid-60's. 

Yet Feldman's repetitions were always hesitant, irregular,
creeping back as ambiguously as dim memories, never
propulsive and metronomic like those of Mr. Reich and Mr.
Glass. When Feldman started making his music more
repetitious again in the 1970's, he showed anxiety about
possibly being seen as a Minimalist epigone. At one point,
he pulled his composition student Peter Gena into his
office, showed him a new score and asked, "Tell me, do you
think it sounds too much like Steve Reich?" 

Repetition notwithstanding, Feldman's music never sounds
like Mr. Reich's. Momentum is no part of the Feldman
vocabulary. Quite the contrary, his music sounds as if it
could die away at any moment, as if it were inching through
unmarked terrain and pondering whether it should turn aside
or even continue at all. Like others in avant-garde musical
circles of the 1950's, Feldman was intrigued by the mobiles
of Alexander Calder, and he sought ways in which music
could replicate the mobile's gradually metamorphosing
shapes. Credit for having achieved that effect usually goes
to Feldman's close colleague Earle Brown, whose "open form"
pieces like "Available Forms I" allow the conductor to
improvise with set passages of music. 

But Feldman came up with his own brilliant solution:
repeated figures in different instruments floating at
different rates and recurring irregularly so that the
relationship between figures keeps changing. This mobile
technique appears most clearly in the long chamber works
Feldman began writing in the 1970's, especially in the
cycle for flute, keyboard and percussion: "Why Patterns?,"
"Crippled Symmetry" and "For Philip Guston" (the last,
another work of five hours or so). 

So while there are repeated images in a Feldman work, there
is rarely literal repetition. The Second Quartet is
possibly the major exception. Some passages rock with a
slow pulse, others bounce in clocklike pizzicato, and a few
even achieve a kind of quiet Terry Riley-ish ebullience
likely to be described with that ubiquitous euphemism of
Minimalist critical dialogue "hypnotic." 

Rather than let that word cover the usual ground, let's
examine it. Hypnosis, as the Random House Dictionary of the
English language defines it, is "an artificially induced
trance state resembling sleep, characterized by heightened
susceptibility to suggestion." Trance is not what Feldman's
music induces, at least not for me. His repetition of
chromatic, dissonant motifs of two to four notes doesn't
draw the mind into the music but instead pushes it away. 

Once you realize that two chords are going to alternate
unchanged for a while, it becomes hard to keep focusing.
Then the pattern changes, and your attention revives. You
gradually realize that the music has changed, or you
suddenly recognize something you heard earlier, you think,
but the pieces of that puzzle never make a picture. It's a
pleasantly loose mode of listening, better attuned than the
linear narrative of the 19th-century symphony to the late
20th century, an era of aural overstimulation and
conflicting sound bites. 

Feldman called his compositional method one of "negation."
This operates on many levels. On the most minute level,
each pitch tends to be canceled out by another. Over and
over in this quartet, the upper strings wave back and forth
between C sharp and D sharp, this minimal melody ever
contradicted by a dissenting, low pizzicato D natural in
the cello. 

On a larger scale, Feldman quietly fakes out the listener
with the discontinuity of his repetitions. A motif will
repeat in different registers for three or four minutes,
pause for a couple of chords, then start right back up
again. "That was just to see if you were still listening,"
the music seems to be saying. Mr. Reich once wrote of his
own music that "obviously everyone within hearing distance
should be put into ecstasy." Feldman could have written
that everyone within hearing distance of his music should
be compelled to stop and think twice. 

The continual negation in Feldman links him to Samuel
Beckett, the playwright he most resembles, just as Calder
is the sculptor he most resembles; Mark Rothko, the
painter; and Kafka, the novelist. Feldman once hounded
Beckett for an opera libretto, and the playwright finally
handed him a few lines that Feldman turned into his opera
"Neither," of 1977. What he shares with Beckett is a
situation in which drama is still possible yet absent, or
at least very subdued. (In true Minimalist music, one might
say, drama is precluded.) 

"In my new string quartet," Feldman said in 1984, "in the
third hour I start to take away material rather than bring
in, [rather than] make it more interesting, and for about
an hour I have a very placid world. I don't use the drama,
essentially." 

That's what is most obvious about the Second Quartet and
what will most put off lovers of classical music: climax,
progression and crescendo are nonexistent. The one
observable concession to the concert frame is that in the
final measures, the rests between phrases get longer and
longer. But as a result, the changes of atmosphere become
all the more powerful. 

There are no extreme gestures of the kind to be found in
"For Philip Guston," where the players obsess for 25
minutes on a tiny chromatic segment, then burst across the
entire range of the keyboard in pianissimo C major. Yet
there are still changes from chromaticism to tonality and
back as subtly compelling as a series of ominous clouds
passing on a sunny winter day. 

For all this to unfold, the piece must be enormously long.
Feldman's early works were brief. Around 1970 he quit
working in his uncle's dry- cleaning plant and took his
first university position, and in 1973 he moved to the
State University of New York at Buffalo, where he would
spend the last 15 years of his life. It was also around
that time that he began vastly expanding his canvas to
works of one, three, five hours. He felt that the 20-minute
piece had become a modernist clich , and scorning any kind
of clich , he expanded from what he called the level of
"form" to the level of "scale." 

There had always been, in classical music, an assumption
that the longer a piece was, the more carefully its
structure needed to be worked out and the more it required
certain kinds of drama and variety. With works like the
Second Quartet, Feldman exploded these assumptions. The
music world is still trying to figure out how to react. 

In a recording, of course, the length issue is not so
daunting. There are enough rests in the Second Quartet to
make planning the breaks between CD's pretty easy. 

The Ives Ensemble members - Josje Ter Haar and Janneke van
Prooijen, violinists; Ruben Sanderse, violist; and Job Ter
Haar, cellist - offer an elegantly atmospheric and
perfectly paced performance (Hat Art 4-144; four CD's).
They have played the piece in concert several times and are
scheduled to do so again next month in Geneva. One imagines
that the last hour of the work sounds fresher on disc than
it could at the end of a five-hour performance, but that
depends on stamina. 

The Flux Quartet is to release its own recording of the
Second Quartet on Mode in coming months, and one
controversy not likely to die soon is the final word on the
work's length. The Ives Ensemble claims that it arrived at
a five-hour length by following Feldman's metronome
markings meticulously. Mode argues that Feldman specified
the length as six hours, which the Flux recording will
apparently approximate. Both statements may be correct, as
far as they go. If you want to compare the recordings, set
aside 11 hours. 

It is not for sheer length that Feldman became the most
influential composer of the last 20 years, although
90-minute pieces by young composers have, sadly, become
more common as a result. It is also because his music
retains the chromatic pitch language of modernism yet
offers a broad road out of modernism's macho
one-upsmanship, making him a pivotal figure between two
eras. 

His radical reliance on intuition after a period in which
intuition had been misguidedly despised has caught the
imagination of young composers all over the world. Less
than five vinyl records' worth of his music appeared during
his lifetime; since his death there have been more than 50
CD's, including 24 so far in Hat Art's monumental attempt
at his complete output. The Ives Ensemble's superb
recording of the Second Quartet is an essential piece of
the Feldman puzzle. No music had ever before sounded like
Feldman's, and even within his output, no other piece ever
sounded like this.   

Kyle Gann, a composer, teaches at Bard College and writes
about new music for The Village Voice.