The Perfect Composer
I’ve loved music all my life. All of it. Rock, folk, pop, jazz, classical — these and all the seemingly infinite number of subgroups. Each taking on a different flavor with the succeeding generations.
So, given that such a width of styles and genres appeal to me, how could possibly single out one person as “The Perfect Composer”?
Perhaps the best way to answer that is to say how much I love a single work, the String Quartet №2 by this composer. For I do. I listen to it over and over.
So what’s new about that? I’ve listened to many pieces over and over. Sometimes I would play nothing else but a single song for days.
Maybe if I tell you a little bit about the piece you might get a sense of what’s different.
Morton Feldman’s second string quartet is six hours long.
It’s also very quiet and derived from very little musical material. There are no ‘big tunes’ here. What there are, taken a very languid pace, are a massively lengthy series of variations that on the surface sound very similar to each other, but are all in fact quite unique. Six hours worth of almost imperceptible changes.
On the surface, this sounds ridiculously boring. It goes against everything that most of us used to Western music have become accustomed to. A good beat. A snappy melody. Sumptuous harmony. Attractive key changes. The list goes on.
However, if you are familiar with Eastern music, Indian, Chinese, Indonesian, then it doesn’t sound so strange. Feldman was close friends with John Cage and Cage embraced an aesthetic drawn from Eastern music and philosophy more than any other, so much so that he used the Chinese ‘I Ching’ as a constant compositional tool for much of his music. Feldman, too, embraced chance in some of his earlier works, but not in this late string quartet. Nonetheless, a meditative, trance-like but never trance-inducing, aura emanates from the very first notes and sustains right through to the end.
Six hours later.
In fact, what is so remarkable about the quartet is that what, on the surface, seems like music that should drift past you — much as so much music under the ‘Ambient’ label does- instead it reaches out and grabs you. You feel yourself reaching towards it, all the more so because it is so quiet.
Six hours.
Maybe too long? In that case, settle for “For Philip Guston” at a mere four hours. Similarly structured, but this time for flute. percussion, piano and celeste and with a different feel thanks to the more percussive instrumentation. Equally beguiling though.
These pieces are only a small sample of Feldman’s output. Most of Feldman’s lengthier works clock in at about an hour or two, but if you’re looking for shorter pieces, you’ll find those too. Sometimes very short, for example the “Two Intermissions (1951)” for piano, clock in about a minute and half each. The funny thing is — Feldman says exactly all that is needed here, just as he says exactly all that is needed in the six hour string quarter.
How can this be? The earlier shorter pieces are quite understandable. Feldman was deeply appreciative of the work of the Austrian composer, Anton Webern, whose entire life-time published output runs to about four hours in duration and who immersed himself in exquisitely brief miniatures. Webern’s language, atonal and later serial, has stylistic affinities with Feldman, although Feldman was not a twelve-tone composer — unlike many of his peers in the 1950s and 1960s. Again, we can thank the extraordinary influence of John Cage in allowing Feldman to bypass many of the orthodoxies of his time.
Feldman’s singular vision, a vision that led to music to seems to exist completely free of any label or fashion, was undoubtedly helped by Feldman’s strong faith in his own artistry throughout his career. And the artistry of others too. He was friends with and part of the circle of abstract impressionist painters of the New York School and many of his works — such as ‘For Philip Guston’ are dedicated to those artists. Not just painters, the poet Frank O’Hara received a dedicated piece as well.
One of Feldman’s most approachable and beautiful pieces, “Rothko Chapel” was written for performance in the Rothko Chapel outside of Houston. It impeccably compliments the austerely beautiful paintings that hang on the walls but also stands alone. As do all of Feldman’s works whether you are aware of dedicatee or not.
The Perfect Composer? Of course not. Feldman’s art is just one small part of a vast continuum and that continuum allows for no definitive answer as to the relative worth of any contributor. Listening, though, all that becomes moot.
Even for six whole hours.
