Here are some comments that inspred this item:

#126 of 130 by Michael Delizia (md) on Wed Sep 25 14:17:43 2002: 

...Feldman didn’t think his music was “minimal,” and he didn’t regard 
himself as a minimalist.  And in fact, his music doesn’t remotely 
resemble that of any of the minimalists when you hear it played, only 
when you read descriptions of it like this one.  So don’t listen to it 
if you’re a Glass or Reich or Adams or Riley fan looking for more of 
same...
 
#127 of 130 by Jeffrey Carey (coyote) on Thu Sep 26 01:01:34 2002: 

...I didn't know what to expect, never having heard Feldman before, 
only having heard about him, but I was still very surprised by the 
music. It's really not like anything else I've heard.  Very hypnotic.  
I don't know that I initially liked it, but once I withdrew and 
listened to the music on a different time scale I really began to enjoy 
it.  I guess in that sense the composer it most reminds me of is Gavin 
Bryers, though with a certain added complexity and sophistication.

 
#129 of 130 by David Bratman (dbratman) on Thu Sep 26 17:58:24 2002: 

"Piano and String Quartet" is the Feldman work I know best, and the 
work that originally sold me on this composer. I picked it up in the 
first place because I like the quintet for piano & strings as a 
combination of instruments.

For what it's worth, it strikes me, while listening to it, as very much 
resembling, and in the same spirit as, the music of LaMonte Young, the 
original minimalist, and a good bit of Terry Riley's too.  It's far 
closer to their work in style and spirit than any of them are like 
Glass and Reich.  Broadly speaking, these three composers are out to 
contemplate the universe, slowly; while Glass and Reich are urban 
jitterbugs.  (Riley's "In C" may at first sound like an urban jitterbug 
work, but not taken as a whole.)

None of this is to deny Feldman's distinctive individuality, that all 
great composers have, or to claim that anybody necessarily influenced 
anybody else.

Of course Feldman denied being a minimalist.  So have Riley, Reich, 
Glass, John Adams ... all with equally good reason.  It's a broad brush 
that would call Beethoven, Weber, Brahms, and Wagner all "Romantics". 
Nevertheless it's a useful box and it will continue to be used.

Whether you like the term or not, Feldman and the canonical minimalists 
were all equally part of a startling revolution towards simplicity, of 
making minimal means serve for maximum effect, in complete opposition 
to, and against the vehement objections of, the highly complex 
expressionist orthodoxy of their day.  In that, all these composers are 
alike, as much as any group of individual geniuses can be alike, and 
really no two more alike or unalike than any other two.

31 responses total.

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)?

Good questions.  Some replies:

Critical "boxes" are good or bad according to the purposes to which 
they're put.  It is _always_ incorrect to assume that two composers in 
the same "box", however accurately they go there, are interchangable.  
No two artists of any worth are like that.  Only trash is 
interchangable with other trash.  But human beings, being good at 
perception of broad patterns, can create boxes containing things of 
broad similarity which are not identical or interchangable.  This 
certainly applies to the "canonical minimalists": Young, Riley, Glass, 
Reich, and for that matter Adams, Nyman, Torke, and other "post-
minimalists".  Each has a distinct sound-world, each can easily be 
distinguished from any of the others.  If you go to any of them 
expecting music just like that of another, you'll be disappointed.  
The "Mr. Critic Man" who claims that any two great composers are alike 
is a straw man, and as foolish regarding the minimalists themselves as 
regarding them vs. Feldman.

That there is a box with all these composers in it that is 
labeled "minimalist" shows that it's already a very big box.  These 
composers are very different in many ways.  Other things they have in 
common.  My claim is that the things they have in common, Feldman also 
has.  That's a box useful for this purpose.  Other boxes are useful for 
other purposes.  In fact, Feldman is closer to some of the minimalists 
than they are to other minimalist.  I've already written that I can 
construct a box that contains Feldman, Young, and Riley, but not Reich 
or Glass.

You write, "Feldman's music ... just doesn't sound minimalist when we 
actually listen to it."  What you mean "we", white man?  I was first 
pointed at Feldman's "Piano and String Quartet" by a fellow lover of 
minimalism.  I found I liked it in the same way, and for the same 
reasons, that I like LaMonte Young, and some of the works of Terry 
Riley (not "In C", a work not at all typical of the rest of the Riley I 
know).

That should explain why "repetition" trumps other qualities (which are 
not as much in opposition as you think; see below): for _this_ 
classification, it's 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 (leading often 
to a state of Augenmusik), and for whom repetition of this kind was 
incomprehensible anathema.

Of course it's not just "repetition" as a simple quality.  I wrote in 
my previous post of "simplicity, of making minimal means serve for 
maximum effect," which is much more than "repetition".  Nor are Feldman 
and the minimalists necessarily opposed in other qualities.  Repetition 
doesn't trump tonality, because not all the minimalists are tonal.  It 
doesn't trump decibel-level or rhythm, which far more than repetition 
are the qualities Feldman shares with Young.  Young, in fact, is not 
strictly repetitious at all (but he is very, very quiet and very, very 
long - just like Feldman).  Yet he is the founder of minimalism and 
belongs by definition in that box.  (I can't speak to tessitura, 
because I don't know Feldman's vocal music.)

I mentioned the "expressionist orthodoxy," many of whom were Webernian 
loyalists.  You write that Feldman descends from Webern.  I didn't know 
that, though I can instantly see what they have in common.  But he's 
not at all like the orthodoxy, which demonstrates another point: 
ancestry doesn't necessarily matter: what matters is the music.  To 
insist on a separation on those grounds would require separating 
Stravinsky's 12-tone period from his other work.  And for some purposes 
that's useful, but as Michael Tilson Thomas and others have observed, 
it's more important that it all sounds like Stravinsky.

You write of "In C" as "soothing".  I really have to wonder what 
performance you've heard.  I've heard several, and "In C" is an unholy 
racket!  Only viewed as a whole, by taking a mental step backwards, 
does it get that quality I described of a slow, contemplative view of 
the universe.  And that's exactly the same quality I'd describe in the 
Feldman I've heard.

And you write of the minimalists as "a bunch of reactionaries," which 
makes me wonder what wildly inaccurate, mouth-foaming anti-minimalist 
propaganda you've been reading.  If you want a reactionary, point at 
Stefania de Kennessey, not the minimalists.  The canonical minimalists 
all began as Cagean anarchists, of all things, which should really give 
one pause before using words like "reactionary"; they are not all 
tonal, though they almost all use a more consonant palette than 
expressionist orthodoxy does (so does Feldman, for that matter); and 
reutilizing tonality doesn't make one a reactionary, even less than 
repetition alone makes one a minimalist.

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.

Here's where our opinions might converge: in his book The History of 
American Classical Music (1995), John Warthen Strubel writes that with 
his "interest in working with sound structures that minimized overt 
musical motion and isolated events from each other," Feldman "created a 
link, in the textural if not the tonal dimension, between the late 
music of Webern and the early works of the minimalist composers."  
Sounds good to me.  Maybe you could have a "Minimalist" box and 
a "Webern" box, with a little bridge connecting them 
labeled "Feldman."  ;-)

Another link that occurs to me: Feldman was a member of the Cage 
circle.  (His early music shows the influence of Cage.)  The very un-
European idea of the composer eliminating his own personality from his 
music was strong in Cage, Young and Riley, who all seem to have been 
influenced by oriental religion and philosophy in this matter.  Feldman 
shared this idea with them, but in Feldman's case I don't sense 
anything especially Taoist or Buddhist about it.  I think that it's a 
position he arrived at independently of the others -- or at least as 
independently as was possible in the hothouse environment of that 
group -- and that for Feldman it was more a matter of a highly refined 
esthetic sensibility.  He instinctively withdrew from any showiness or 
display -- and as a result created these fantastic, unmistakable, 
glittering objects that people stand in total awe of.  One of the 
weirder paradoxes of 20th century music.

A possible cause for the divergence in our opinions: I was a Feldman 
fan before the minimalists existed.  I followed Feldman's progress as 
it developed from his early whimsical miniatures in the mid-1950s to 
the later thorough-composed works.  Somewhere in the middle of all 
this, the minimalists came and went.  I didn't perceive any meaningful 
connection between Feldman and the new movement, and still don't.  You, 
on the other hand, seem to have been a fan of the minimalists, as I 
never was, and consequently your later discovery of Feldman enabled you 
to see a connection that whether it was causal or coincidental was 
nevertheless definitely there.

[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.]

What Strubel is saying is that Feldman's music has sufficient in common 
with the canonical minimalists that from certain perspectives they are 
usefully considered together.  This is what I have been saying.  If it 
takes a respected source to confirm my point, then that's what it takes.

I tend not to think in terms of boxes, but in terms of a virtual 
landscape.  Composers pitch their tents in a congenial part of the 
landscape; critics come along afterwards and draw lines around clusters 
of them, as seems appropriate.  But those lines are also influenced by 
historical and personal connections among composers, which are 
orthogonal to the musical landscape I'm describing.

There was a group of American composers who worked together in the 
early 1960s, around whom a line was drawn and labeled "minimalist".  
But that line, in the musical landscape, had to have a major dent in it 
to exclude Feldman, who (as you noted) had pitched his tent in the same 
area before the minimalists arrived.  And Feldman's tent was closer to 
Young's and Riley's than theirs were to Glass's and Reich's, yet the 
line included all of them but excluded Feldman.

One could call the minimalists a historical group, like the Russian 
Five, who are defined historically regardless of what their music, or 
other's music, sounds like.  But that's not the way the term minimalism 
has been used.  Other composers, with no historic connection to the 
group, came to be called minimalist: John Adams, and Europeans like 
Gorecki and Andriessen.  The term became a descriptive of a type of 
sound-world, and Feldman has that type, at least to an extent.

You write that "the minimalists came and went."  Again I wonder what 
rabid anti-minimalist propaganda you've been reading, because they've 
never gone.  Pick on Glass if you want (an inaccurate caricature of 
Glass is the punching bag of anti-minimalists), but minimalism is here 
to stay: Glass and Reich are securely important composers; John Adams, 
a second-wave minimalist, is widely becoming considered the greatest 
living American composer, and many others are in his wake; Riley's "In 
C" is becoming considered a seminal work, whose influence is on the 
order of "Tristan und Isolde" or "Le Sacre du Printemps".

As I noted, I came to Feldman via LaMonte Young, and I found good music 
which I responded to the same way.  Might I suggest that you might find 
it rewarding to travel the road the other way?  No pure Glassian 
diatonic repetition here.  Try some Young (I have "The Second Dream of 
the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer," if I've remembered the 
title correctly), or Riley's 1980s collaborations with the Kronos 
Quartet (which sound less like "minimalism" than Feldman does), and 
decide what you think.  And, if part of Feldman's appeal to you is his 
(supposedly non-minimalist) harmonic astringency, then try some of the 
European minimalists: Louis Andriessen definitely, and music by Gorecki 
other than the Third Symphony: Lerchenmusik or Symphonies 1-2.  Both 
these composers are hyper jitterbugs more like Glass and Reich in 
rhythm and tempo, but they're as far from reactionary tonalists as can 
be imagined.

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.)

For the record, I don't *think* I've read anything that could be 
construed as anti-minimalist propaganda, apart from maybe a stray 
remark or two by hard-liners like Pierre Boulez, but I could be wrong.  
My boredom with the canonical minimalists is based on my own listening 
and is absolutely sincere and unaffected.  ;-)

Otoh, my experience of minimalist music is limited to the occasional 
radio performance, which I usually switch off with an annoyed little 
frown after ten minutes tops.  Why I can enjoy an 80-minute Feldman 
piece but can't stand more that a brief snatch of Koyanisquaatsi or The 
Photographer, I don't know.  

The only minimalist composer I've ever heard in concert is John Adams, 
and I'm an off-and-on fan of his music, so maybe I need that kind of 
enforced listening experience with the others as well.  My impression 
of Adams, though, is that he's a romantic at heart -- temperamentally 
about a hemisemidemiquaver away from Samuel Barber, in fact -- who 
manages to sneak all kinds of crowd-pleasing "European" effects into 
his music, such as cinematically lush melodies, real cadences, and 
sonata-like logic.  My favorite composition of his is the one he 
describes as "my most minimal of minimalist works," the 20-minute-
long "Common Tones in Simple Time," in which he noodles along for 15 
minutes in doctrinaire (but, typically for Adams, very pretty) 
minimalist fashion; then, when you've forgotten that the music's 
tessitura the whole time has been entirely midrange to treble, he 
suddenly adds a deep resonant bass line that is clearly calculated to 
knock the audience right out of their seats.  Shameless pandering, but 
quite effective.  (It was at that point in my first listening that I 
realized who'd been lurking in the background of this music all along: 
Sibelius!  Adams has since admitted as much.)

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.

I dunno.  I keep putting off giving the minimalists a serious listen, 
and I imagine I'll keep on doing so.  You hit the nail on the head: 
it's a difference in taste.  I simply don't like the way it *sounds*.  
No amount of rhythmic complexity or Zen philosophy can help that.

Btw, speaking as a total non-expert on the subject, I've often thought 
that the minimalists' tonal ambiguity -- that feeling that it's mostly 
consonant but without a home key -- derives from the last movement of 
Vaughan Williams' 6th symphony.  Listen to the way it ends, with those 
two chords rocking back and forth, and tell me Glass wasn't thinking of 
it when he wrote some of his stuff.

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.

You're right, of course, although I should add for the benefit of 
anyone reading this who hasn't heard Vaughan Williams' 6th symphony 
that the hurled challenge is actually whispered almost inaudibly at the 
end of a completely pianissimo movement.  (Maybe Feldman was influenced 
by RVW, too?)  (Just kidding.)  On my ancient Boult/London recording, 
RVW himself gives a little speech at the end of this movement thanking 
Sir Adrian and the gentlemen of the orchestra for a beautiful 
performance.  "All my thoughts came to the surface.  I hope a few 
virtues came out as well."  Then he added, "And when I say 'gentlemen,' 
I include the lady harpist."  He wore his celebrity well.

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."

What's more, it'll take you all the way to 5 AM.

"Hypnotic and transporting" - a description that could apply to 
(forgive me) a lot of canonical minimalist works just as well.  And 
some non-minimalist works too.  Bruckner is more transporting than 
hypnotic; Hovhaness is more hypnotic than transporting; mix them 
together ...

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. ;-))

Yes, minimalism can be ambient.  But so can Mozart.  You know those 
compilation CDs of "Classical Music to Relax By" and such like that?  
Ambient music.

"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.  

Probably a lot of middle movememts of concertos qualify.  The so-
called "Elvira Madigan" movement from Mozart's 21st (is it?) piano 
concerto, for example, or the middle movement of Beethoven's 5th piano 
concerto, the middle movement of the Brahms Violin Concerto, etc.  I 
guess anything can be ambient depending on what mood you're in.  But 
are there composers who write ambient music as such?  That is, 
is "ambient" a school or movement with dedicated practitioners of its 
own?  

Some of Feldman's music might make good ambient music for a Halloween 
party according to one of the Amazon.com reviewers, who remarked 
how "eerie" Violin and String Quartet sounds.  When it just went on and 
on, he found himself asking, "Why is he *doing* this?"  I got a chuckle 
out of that.

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.

Defining "ambient" music as music intended to be heard but not to be 
paid close attention to, we have:

1) A lot of early minimalist music (this is stuff from the late 50s I'm 
talking about here) is specifically written with attention focussed on 
the intended mental state of the listener, and not on the music itself.

2) Mozart really did write was intended as background music for dinners 
and parties, not intended for concert listening.  This would not be 
those beautiful middle movements of concertos, but things like 
Serenades.

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

I'm not sure if the Gran Partita was actually written as ambient 
music.  But some of the earlier serenades, like K.203, to name one I 
have a recording of, certainly were.  And they sound like it, too.

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.

Here's another, same source:

Here's a review of Flux String Quartet II, not sure its the 
performance you are curious about, and this *used* to be 
online - but no more (got it in a cache)
:Patrick

Published Sunday, March 4, 2001, in the Herald-Leader 

And the quartet played on and on, and on ...
Six-hour marathon tests musicians, audience
DANVILLE I knew how long the concert was going to be: six hours.

That begged all sorts of other ``how long'' questions.

How long before nature calls?

How long before the sandman calls?

How long before I start panting from thirst, like a dog in the 
desert?

How long before my growling stomach drowns out the musicians?

And how long would I go before I'd feel like a complete loser 
if I stepped out?

Yes, the Flux Quartet's performance of Morton Feldman's String 
Quartet No. 2 at Centre College's Norton Center for the Arts 
was a concert. But walking in, it felt more like a long race, 
an exam or a day of fasting.

Unlike most other extra-long arts events, Feldman's quartet 
takes six hours, with no intermission. 

What's more, it isn't like this is six hours of gripping drama.

This quartet is a quiet, minimalist composition with the 
performers slowly drawing their bows over their instruments' 
strings.

Fortunately, Flux threw all of the traditional expectations of 
classical music audiences out the window, so the audience 
(mostly students) was free to come and go, take naps, read 
books, even catch up on some paperwork while the quartet played.

I decided this week I'd try to stay for the whole thing, with 
no breaks. After all, this is only the third time this piece 
has been performed in the world. Why not be one of the few to 
hear it all?

2:12 p.m.: The performance started with no fanfare and 132 
people in the audience.

The four musicians strolled onstage in black slacks and earth-
tone, open-collar shirts and took the seats they'd occupy for 
the next six hours.

2:23 p.m.: Must fight sleep.

2:33 p.m.: A handful of patrons leaves.

3 p.m.: I might have taken a nap. Somehow, 20 minutes passed 
just like that.

3:12 p.m.: Several art students are sitting in the front row 
and sketching the musicians as they play.

Two students sit on a couch at the right side of the stage.

Ian Jones, a chemistry major from Monument, Colo., said he 
spotted the sofa in the Norton Center on Thursday and decided 
to haul it in. 

3:48 p.m.: Violinist Tom Chiu has kicked off his shoes. The 125-
page scores overwhelm the players' music stands. Many measures 
are repeated five to 13 times, Norton Center director George C. 
Foreman says.

5:12 p.m.: At the halfway point, about 70 people are still 
hanging on.

While there isn't a lot going on in this piece, three hours 
tells you it's really beautiful and haunting. It sounds like a 
quiet, cold winter afternoon in the country. That sounds like a 
nap, and that's my main problem.

5:25 p.m.: Whoa! Standing! What a difference that makes.

7:53 p.m.: A random thought: Why not yell ``encore'' when 
they're done?

8:03 p.m.: Cellist Cornelius Dufallo sits back in his chair 
with his eyes closed, chiming a note like a grandfather clock.

8:45 p.m.: Feldman's Quartet No. 2 ends after six hours and 33 
minutes. Forty-two students stayed the whole time. The crowd 
for the final ovation is around 100. Dufallo leads the quartet 
in applause for the audience.

``This is definitely the greatest audience we've had for 
this,'' he says. ``They were very respectful. They were right 
there with us.''

You have to hand it to the Flux guys, too.

While we wiggled in our seats, read books and slept, they kept 
their eyes on the music and didn't look the worse for wear.

That they were so sharp for six hours with so many distractions 
is a testament to their concentration.

This concert might have been a novelty for its length, but it 
was still good music by top-flight musicians.

Rich Copley 

herald-Leader Arts Columnist

I'm hardly going to argue with Kyle Gann about what minimalism is, and 
I note he makes the case for Feldman as a kind of minimalist.  Yet in 
distinguishing Feldman's music from Reich's by noting that momentum, so 
key to Reich's music, plays no part in Feldman's, he fails to add that 
Reichian momentum is in no way essential to minimalism.  The minimalist 
composer Feldman most resembles is LaMonte Young, who started writing 
music of this kind at about the same time that Feldman did (Gann 
implies that Feldman predates the minimalists, but his notated works 
don't).  And they were both inspired by John Cage.

If you'd said "the minimalist composer who most resembles Feldman is 
LaMonte Young" it would sound better because Feldman was writing music 
consisting entirely of repeated figures nearly a decade before the 
minimalists started doing it.  I'm sure some of them do sound a little 
like Feldman when you describe their music (though not, as I've said, 
when you actually hear it).  

The only reason I entered the above reviews was that the idea of a six-
hour-long work for live performers that the Kronos Quartet refuses to 
perform, during one performance of which a reviewer actually kept a 
diary, and which the composer himself described as "a nightmare," 
struck me as quite remarkable.  I get a lot of pleasure out of 
listening to Feldman's music, but he does spoil my kids' fun in playing 
the latest soi-disant "shocking" alternative or rap music for me (lots 
of screaming about suicide and murder and blowjobs, every other 
word "nigger" or "fuck").  I have to grant that some of it is pretty 
extreme, but then I counter with Feldman's "Violin and String Quartet," 
and after five minutes of a two-note violin phrase against a haze of 
dissonant quartet chords they ask, "How long does this go on?" and I 
get to say, "Two hours."  With new listeners, Feldman wins the 
outrageousness competition every time, although I don't think that was 
ever his intent.

[Btw, I'd've thought Gann's "If anyone wants to make the case that 
Feldman was, after all, a Minimalist, this piece is Exhibit A" would've 
pleased you.]

It did, and I said "I note he makes the case for Feldman as a kind of 
minimalist."

To my ears, Young sounds quite a lot like Feldman.  Certainly I'd have 
no trouble telling them apart, but the closeness is striking, 
especially when you consider how many very different ways there are out 
there of writing music.  It's Reich who is like Feldman only in written 
description.

Music with repeated figures predates both Feldman and Young by quite a 
bit, but this only leads to unproductive discussions of whether 
Bruckner, Ravel (Bolero), or, gods help us, Sorabji are minimalists.

Looks like John Cage's ghost is having the last laugh.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/music/2728595.stm

I like the article's line "Cage composed the original piece before his 
death in 1992."  If he'd composed it after his death, it would need to 
have been played by Rosemary Brown.  At least that would keep her busy 
for the next 639 years.

I was listening to the Ronnie Lynn Patterson CD of Palais de Mari on 
headphones, which I hadn't tried before, and noticed that the piece is 
*so* quiet that the piano mechanism is clearly audible all the way 
through.  Every single time Patterson releases the key, you hear the 
little thud of the hammer returning to its pad.  I don't think it's the 
pedal, because the pedal sounds depressed all the way through.  I.e., I 
don't think he ever takes his foot off it.  

I checked out the "Why Patterns?" Feldman list to see if anyone else 
had noticed it, but apparently not.  One person claimed not to like 
Patterson's interpretation as being too slow.  It's a good ten minutes 
longer than the other available recordings.  He complained about the 
tendency of performers to reduce Feldman's "difficult" music 
to "isolated plinks and plunks in the vast silence of eternity."

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