I
have just
discovered a
composer whose music I can de-stress to. It isn’t Bach, Mozart or
Satie, but the American composer Morton Feldman (1926-1987). Okay,
so Feldman (right) isn’t totally new to my ears but for some years, I have
been treating insomnia (mine, not my patients’) with his 80-minute
long Piano and String Quartet. That Nonesuch disc by the
Kronos Quartet and pianist Aki Takahashi is worth much, much more
than a bottle of Valium.
It’s not that it's
boring. Feldman’s music just puts one’s brain into a state of
mind for complete relaxation. Spas should try it. More
seriously, his music totally defies what is considered classical
music, or concert music, or music as we know it. Avant-garde?
Post-avant-garde? Atonal? Polytonal? Experimentalist?
Minimalist? Installation art-music? Nothing quite seems to fit.
This music can’t be pigeon holed; it just exists.
Like his more famous
compatriot John Cage (1912-1992), Feldman thrived in the age of
experimentation that defined the avant-garde movement of the 1950s
through 70s. Together with Cage, Earle Brown and Christian Wolff,
they were known as the “New York School”, a movement that allied
itself with artists such as Mark Rothko and Philip Guston. Labels
aside, Feldman is and sounds different from Cage. Both however had
a penchant for lengthy works. The Kronos Quartet attempted
Feldman’s Second String Quartet but even they could not
stay the course of its five and a half hours.
These two well-filled
discs provide an illuminating window into Feldman’s world – a
timeless journey into sound textures quite unlike any other. The
works come from the last 12 years of Feldman’s life, a period when
he returned to conventional scoring as opposed to graphic scores.
The generic titles of the works also provide a clue to the
spareness of his musical textures. Violin and Orchestra and
Piano and Orchestra simply state the medium of performance,
yet these aren’t a violin or piano concerto in the conventional
sense. And one can’t get more minimalist in naming a 30-minute
long essay for piano simply Piano.
So what do these pieces
sound like? In Violin and Orchestra (1979) and Piano and
Orchestra (1975), the solo instruments become one with the
orchestra, as part of a unified musical fabric. One can hear the
solo violin or piano distinctly, yet they do not stand out like in
a conventional concerto. That is not to say that the solo parts
aren’t virtuosic. The virtuosity is in keeping concentration
through an extraordinarily long period of time, maintaining an
individual voice yet being part of the ensemble. Violin and
Orchestra lasts nearly 50 minutes (longer than most
performances of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D) while
Piano and Orchestra is but a “brief” 20 minutes. Both are
played in one single movement – each a seemingly amorphous morass
of sound that varies little in dynamics and seldom rising beyond
pianissimo. There are hardly any themes or motifs to speak
of, just series of chords and arpeggiated notes of various timbres
played over a quietly humming and throbbing background. Deep
within each work is a never-ceasing pulse, one that varies with
each heartbeat and intake of breath. This “pulse of life” is what
makes each work come alive.
A
suitable visual analogy would be a typical painting by the
American artist Mark Rothko. His minimalist canvasses have been
much copied, parodied, celebrated and vilified – vast expanses of
grey, brown, black or what have you, with the occasional swathe of
colour. Everything is understated, seemingly static and with as
little variation in shade or texture as possible, but there it is
staring at you and awaiting a response. My preferred analogy would
be sitting for an hour or two in the Zen rock garden of Kyoto’s
Ryoanji Temple watching sunlight fall and shift over its fifteen
stones, casting their short shadows on the sand beneath. Time
stands still and you have the serene and tranquil feeling of not
wanting to be anywhere else at that point of time.
(left:
Mark Rothko Red, Orange, Tan, and Purple,
1949)
There cannot be enough
praise for German fiddler Isabelle Faust who bravely takes up the
challenge of Violin and Orchestra and shines through this
test of endurance. Her well-timed solos cut through the wads of
sound like a surgical laser, illuminating and searing an indelible
impression onto the proceedings. Pianist Markus Hinterhäuser seems
to have an “easier” time given that Piano and Orchestra is
a much shorter work, and his part consists largely of widely
spaced chords and arpeggios, but I seriously doubt it.
Piano and Orchestra
then gives way to two of Feldman’s major piano works – Palais
de Mari (1986) and the afore-mentioned Piano (1977).
This is nearly an hour of solo piano music consisting of
repetitive patterns formed by pulses of chords, appearing and
dissipating like raindrops falling gently on a reflecting pool.
Somehow, one can sense the moment when Palais de Mari ends
and Piano begins; there is a perceptible change in “colour”
that the ear immediately picks up. Do try it for yourself! There
is however a wider range of dynamics employed in Piano,
where chords played triple forte literally break the
silence midway through the work. One could easily get impatient
listening to this, hoping against hope for the appearance of a new
theme, or some form of development, or for the work to end, but
that would be missing the point altogether. It is perhaps an
indictment of our listening habits and hectic times that we
continually seek Tchaikovskian thrills and spills in concerts and
recordings.
One of Feldman’s best
known and more-often recorded works is Coptic Light (1985).
Its relatively compact 25 minutes also make it a potentially
programmable concert piece (a likely hit for the BBC Proms!).
Feldman was an admirer of Eastern tapestries and carpets; their
patterns of light and shade – repetitive and otherwise – were to
vividly capture his imagination. This work, inspired by Coptic
textiles that Feldman viewed at the Louvre in Paris, is a musical
representation of those “patterns”. Taking a further few degrees
of separation, it is also meant to be a musical summation of an
entire civilisation as viewed a couple of millennia later.
Profound stuff, one might surmise, but it works as pure music by
virtue of orchestral colour in its multifarious guises and its
perpetual – and life-giving – pulse.
There are at least four
recordings of Coptic Light in the catalogue. I have not
heard them all but the Bavarian Radio Symphony, one of Germany’s
finest orchestras, is as good as it comes. However, my ideal
introduction to Morton Feldman – if you can still find it – is the
recording by Michael Tilson Thomas and the New World Symphony
(combining Coptic Light, Piano and Orchestra, and
Cello and Orchestra) on the sadly defunct Argo label.
One writer described
Feldman’s compositions as “unanalysable”; I am not going to
challenge that assertion. As I do not foresee any of these works
appearing on the concert stage in Singapore anytime soon (although
I won’t discount the ever-adventurous Singapore Dance Theatre
choreographing Coptic Light sometime), I won’t hold my
breath waiting for the impossible to happen. I can only hazard a
guess that such works might not work so well visually (even with
the handsomely beautiful Isabelle Faust gracing the stage) as
compared with hearing it through one’s speakers, so these discs
would do rather nicely.
Morton Feldman represents
the benign face of 20th century avant-garde music. Can
his work – gradually gaining acceptance if the number of
recordings is to go by - be called music? Yes. Can it be
appreciated and enjoyed? Yes. Can it be ignored? Yes, but life
would be much poorer for it.
Tou Liang hopes to
visit Ryoanji again. The next time, he will be armed with an i-Pod
filled with Morton Feldman’s music.
Col Legno's website:
http://www.col-legno.de/
