Morton Feldman’s Music of Stillness

“I truly don’t consciousness that it’s each indispensable anymore,” Morton Feldman told an interviewer successful 1972. “And truthful what I effort to bring into my euphony are conscionable a precise fewer indispensable things that I need—to astatine slightest support it going, for a small portion more.” Feldman had been asked whether his corpus of work, with its brooding slowness and trembling softness, had thing to bash with Jewish mourning successful the aftermath of the Holocaust. He evaded the question, though helium admitted that helium thought astir it privately. Instead, helium gestured toward a much abstract vanishing—what helium called “the decease of art,” or, much acutely, “Schubert leaving me.”

It’s inactive going. At the clip of his death, successful 1987, Feldman seemed destined to beryllium remembered arsenic a peculiarly esoteric subordinate of John Cage’s. His obituaries were preoccupied with the information that immoderate of his works were precise long. But a cult was increasing astir him, and successful the past fewer decades his power connected caller euphony has go pervasive. The precocious Feldman archivist Chris Villars assembled a database of immoderate 2 100 and 50 pieces written successful Feldman’s memory. Linda Catlin Smith, who wrote 2 of them, precocious told the professional Tim Rutherford-Johnson that proceeding Feldman “made maine consciousness that penning euphony was possible, that I mightiness beryllium capable to constitute euphony that I privation to hear.” The homages proceed to arrive: successful 2022, Tyshawn Sorey wrote “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife),” which emulates Feldman’s shiver-inducing 1972 people “Rothko Chapel,” a philharmonic effect to Mark Rothko’s sepulchral shrine successful Houston.

In an property of algorithmic din, Feldman’s entreaty lies successful his unhurried, monkish devotion to the elementals of sound. His output tin beryllium seen arsenic a benignant of wilderness preserve, successful which stray fragments of philharmonic past are allowed to roam free, without having to interest astir adapting themselves to immoderate modish strategy oregon sensibility. You brushwood ambiguous soft chords that could person survived a charred sonata by Schubert; darkly sighing flute motifs that mightiness person graced a quieter leafage of 1 of Schoenberg’s expressionist eruptions; cryptically tolling percussion tones retired of precocious Stravinsky; static repetitions that motion toward minimalism. Each dependable inhabits its ain space, hardly touching the others. A canyon of soundlessness envelops them all.

At archetypal glance, Feldman mightiness look to beryllium a prophet of the alleged dilatory movement, which calls for the savoring of elemental pleasures. Yet his empire of quiescent is undergirded by unease. As successful the penning of Samuel Beckett, who supplied the libretto for Feldman’s lone opera, “Neither,” gnomic utterances carnivore the scars of catastrophe. This is not euphony you tin portion retired to, unless the portion successful question is the shimmering wasteland of Tarkovsky’s “Stalker.” An ambiance of tension, adjacent menace, circumscribes the sensuousness of those mislaid Romantic chords. As different Jewish American sage erstwhile said, quality walks a razor’s edge.

Feldman’s hundredth day was connected January 12th. Little is being done connected his behalf successful New York City, wherever helium was calved and raised. But the University of Buffalo, wherever the composer taught for galore years, mounted a two-day festival successful his honor, and the Piano Spheres series, successful Los Angeles, presented a brace of marathon concerts. I attended the latter, which culminated successful the unveiling of a barroom emblazoned with Philip Guston’s representation of Feldman—a bulbous fig puffing connected a cigaret and gazing into the distance. I hap to stock a day with the antheral of the hour. It was arsenic bully a mode arsenic immoderate to people the creep of age.

The Piano Spheres events, which were divided betwixt the Wende Museum, successful Culver City, and the Brick, successful Koreatown, concentrated connected the euphony of Feldman’s last decade, erstwhile helium mostly gave up trying to nutrient works that could acceptable onto accepted programs. Thirteen of his scores from this play spell connected for much than an hour; 2 of them, “String Quartet II” and “For Philip Guston,” each outlast “Tristan und Isolde.” I sometimes fishy that Feldman seized connected Wagnerian standard arsenic a mode of exacting revenge connected Hitler’s favourite composer. But the vastness was truly astir fostering conditions successful which his spectral harmonies could thrive. Rothko needed to capable a country with his canvases; Feldman needed to capable an evening with his music.