Do you notice a mistake?
Morton Feldman wrote,
One of my favorite stories is the young man that goes to the Zen master, and I think he has to go for seven years. And the Zen master gives him a broom. And for seven years he is told that he has to sweep the house. So he is sweeping the house and he is over there and the Zen master is here with a sword. This guy is sweeping with a broom and the Zen master screams, yells, and comes behind here, and the young man lifts the broom. After a while the young man listens and he hears him over there, and so he turns the other way and he waits, or he gets out of the way, he stands over there. And the game of listening, the perception of listening comes in, you see. So all the nuances of listening, getting ready and naturally going in the right direction in terms of the body… At the time when seven years are over, he graduates and they give him a sword and take away the broom.1
In the European musical tradition, what we listen to is inscribed within a structure, a narrative, or a drama that defines it, often in terms of what it is not. This reduces the musical discourse on listening to a metaphor, limiting the very possibilities of perception. All in all, we tend to translate musical facts into literary content. “That was my idea about sound. It still is, that they should breathe… not to be used for the vested interest of an idea,” Feldman said, suggesting that listening — something seemingly inherent to musical language — requires rediscovery.2
That type of listening, following the teachings of Edgar Varèse, whom Feldman regarded as a mentor and whose “way of life” and attitude he emulated, though not his music or style, is a listening to sound:
a. From Charles Ives to John Cage, the American tradition is empirical. The concept, the logic, the rules of creation and of construction, the authoritarian and intimidating need to do and the justification of the gesture to the detriment of the listening, are insufficient to prove the validity of a musical assertion. What matters more are sensation, with its power to discriminate, and memory, characterized by persistence. In “a conscious attempt to formalize a disorientation of memory,”3 Feldman referred to Turkish rugs: while Persian rugs may be viewed starting from any one of their pattern components, one sees the design of a Turkish rug only when it has transferred into one’s memory, excluding any overall view of its weaving. In music, early forms were based on a magnificent convention of inattention, as seen in classical models such as ABA, scherzo, and sonata form. To simplify a work into labeled sections (a, b, c, etc.), the succession of which gives birth to a form, is to pass over the forgetful nature of our perceptions — a tidy explanation for the inadequacy of such analysis, to which Feldman’s gestures and figures are sometimes reduced. Against the “Thomist” belief in the truth of the material, as expressed by Webern’s followers and imitators (but not Webern himself), where this material is an object external to the musician, Varèse called for the traversing of experience. He shattered the diktat of structures, the omniscience of systems or methods that select sounds with machine-like precision. Instead, the spirit of Webern’s music — of which Feldman called himself and Cage “illegitimate sons” — took precedence over its serialist logic. This spirit brings silence; synthesis of horizontal and vertical elements; mirror imaging and variation in rhythm and the placement of chords within measures, anticipating asymmetrical symmetries; and, finally, the motif or pattern, which Feldman would return to later in his career.
b.
I had one lesson on the street with Varèse, one lesson on the street, it lasted half a minute, it made me an orchestrator. He said, ‘What are you writing now, Morton?’ I told him. He says, ‘Make sure you think about the time it takes from the stage to go out there into the audience.’4
This awareness of sound in space was also what Feldman devoted his teaching to: a movement toward composition via the acoustic reality of instrumentation. “Know thy instrument! Know thy instrument better than you know yourselves,” commanded Feldman.5 The sound does not showcase the instrument and the subtleties of its making, which, always available, produce this sound in its beauty, but at the risk of stealing away its immediacy, of exaggerating it, of scrambling it, of giving it over to a meaning, to an insistence, that are foreign to it. For there is the possibility of a pure sound, beyond or despite the instrument, which the color, given a posteriori or to underline connections, transforms into a stencil, or even a false resemblance to sound.
c. Listening should entail hardly any protestation against the past, as to rebel against this past is to still belong to it, but an indifference to the historical process and an interest in the sound itself, for the sound has no history. Through acoustics and physics, Varèse dismantled harmonic causality and opened the door to a new way of listening. Varèse was to Feldman inside the sound, just as Mondrian was inside his canvas — despite whatever his theoretical writings might suggest. The sonic object is not situated in time, does not theorize on the nature of time, but is time itself, which it “projects,” to use Feldman’s verb.6 This model resonates with Jackson Pollock’s drip painting, where paint is allowed to fall or drip from perforated cans, tools, or brushes onto a canvas laid flat on the ground.
d. Focusing on sound modifies the way we perceive form. “His musical shapes respond to each other, rather than ‘relating’ in any sense that the word is used today,” Feldman wrote of Varèse, whom he credited with creating an “almost stationary grandeur, like a sun standing still at the command of a latter-day Joshua.”7 In his essay “Crippled Symmetries,” he wrote that the same was true of the exceptionally long “opening” of Varèse’s Intégrales, composed with just three notes. Varèse used additive processes and the “continual transformation of rhythmic shapes and time proportions.”8 This kind of stasis preserves a tension, as in Rothko’s paintings, where “it’s frozen, and at the same time, it’s vibrating,” and illustrates the major influence of painting on music for Feldman.9 It establishes the inseparability of sound and time, giving rise to Feldman’s idea of a composition as a temporal canvas. “All we composers really have to work with is time and sound — and sometimes I’m not even sure about sound,” Feldman remarked.10 The sound matters less than its season, or its duration — preceding intelligence, rhetoric, or imagination, as every musician aspires to demonstrate.
The demand for a return to listening requires a kind of epoché (suspension of judgment), where the listener achieves, if not ecstasy, at least a contemplation of the phenomenon of listening based in the perception of sound, in the singularity of graphic notation as in everyday writing. There arises the need to slowly enter into the sound, to penetrate it so slowly that the form dissipates into the fatigue of memory and transforms into a scale where you simply “let it go” and “see what happens.”11 The stitches of time come undone in a desire for eternity.
“Would you say that The Odyssey is too long?” Feldman retorted to those who dismissed his work as tedious.12 This thinking suffuses the listener, more and more deeply, in an almost Proustian way — indeed, Feldman linked Proust and Samuel Beckett, having encountered the famous study of the one by the other, in which time is a source of lyricism, and, having been abolished in the same way that space has, it gives the work its shape. Not the past as a heavy and threatening stone in the hackneyed pathway of hours and days, but as Proust’s involuntary memory, where the explosion of a recollection ties the present and past in a contiguousness more vital than either of the two in isolation.
Feldman radically questioned the theme of a sovereign subject that would arrive from the outside to inject life into the inertia of codes and signs, leaving the indelible mark of its freedom on the discourse. For him, if art is to emerge, the creator must fail:
You know a termite. The one that eats wood. So it’s very, very interesting. Who chews the wood? The termite has no apparatus himself to chew the wood. But inside it there are millions of these microbes. And they’re chewing the wood. There’s some analogy about composition, about something else doing the work.13
He is not describing the completely free, self-determined consciousness defined by thinkers from Descartes to Sartre. The subject here is not hewn from the bedrock of psychological identity but emerges through practice, listening, touch.
Feldman’s work was born from an intense concentration on the resonances of the piano — a piano that obliged him to slow down, and with which time, as an acoustic reality, became more audible. He even developed a technique in which the pianist presses the keys silently up to a point of resistance, releasing a soft, muted sound. Any note played in this fashion acquires a particularly long resonance and a musical presence capable of suspending the structural demands of composition.
The dynamics, spanning the outer reaches of audibility become a source of tension for player and listener alike, inviting both to sharpen their attention. This approach binds instrumental timbres at the threshold of decay, risking instability. The composition is concentrated around the birth of sound — its attack, often softened or blurred, the gentleness of sound, and its mode of decay. Still, Feldman more reservedly declared that “I don’t really think my music is quiet… What’s quiet are the connections. Volume-wise, my music is at the same level as a Schubert quartet. If things seem calmer, it’s because the linking takes longer.”14
Far from the variations in the styles of Beethoven, Brahms, or Schoenberg — “a marvelous technical device to achieve the maximum unity of the moment,” — the principles of change and repetition, or, more precisely, of reiteration with slight or discreet shifts, offer differentiation.15 They suggest repetition: a surface that “sounds like repetition,” such as chromatic harmonies of three notes or patterns with constantly modified phrasings. The same element may be illuminated from different angles, without our ever knowing which is the shadow of the other. In a world of nuances and graduated chromaticism, where a slow unveiling occurs, each line expresses the same thought, but in a different way. The variant is a distant cousin of translation — a practice Beckett pursued throughout his life, both for himself and others.
Consider, for example, the eighteenth-century moral philosopher Sébastien Nicolas de Chamfort, who wrote, “Que le cœur de l’homme est creux et plein d’ordure.”16 Beckett translated this into English as, “How hollow heart and full of filth thou art.” Here, we can see that translation and musical transcription are closely linked: Beckett translated, rhymed, and distilled Chamfort’s elliptical phrasing. Phrasing demands listening to these translations/transcriptions.
Feldman also articulated this, but differently: Beckett’s writing, he suggested, determines micro-displacements of sound. In Feldman’s view, the poet writes a sentence in French, follows it with an identical sentence in English, and then re-translates it; this double translation distances the first sentence from the second: “Finally I see that every line is really the same thought said in another way. And yet the continuity acts as if something else is happening. Nothing else is happening.”17 The difference is so slight that the same pattern might return, with just one note, or word, added, or two removed. The same can be true of the chord, but in another register, with another instrumentation, meter, or nuance.
“I seem content to be continually rearranging the same furniture in the same room,” Feldman once said.18
Only a significant trait remains, sufficient to make the lineage perceptible. Composition consists of choosing a pattern to be repeated, deciding how long to repeat it, and determining the nature of its variation. The genius of the musician, which Feldman sought notably in Beethoven, lies in a sense of timing: the exact moment to introduce an element, neither too early nor too late, and its duration. Music, an art of time, gives time its essence, imprinting it with tempo.
Feldman would not allow his students the use of the repeat sign. In his rejection of the nightmare vision of return, of the identical, or of the same, he played the attentive and patient interpreter of difference.
Just as discourse is not constructed from variation or from development, but rather from this variant established in alliance, form essentially relies on the and. This kind of thinking is fundamentally that of parataxis, the mode of ordering (taxis) according to which the elements of a phrase are not logically connected (sun), but juxtaposed (para), placed alongside one another. This principle of apposition is different from logic, with no more specific linking word indicating the nature of the relationship among the propositions.
Working within the poetics of and, Feldman pushed away any temptation toward causality, leading him to define himself as a “master of non-functional harmony.” He found the same idea in Hebrew sentence construction, which uses short propositions coordinated by the conjunction “ve,” whose value varies according to context. Furthermore, this structure is part of the Jewish exegetical tradition, which turns to the incomplete, the partial, the undecided, profusion, clustering, and opening as hermeneutical principals and sources of endless creativity. Is this not what resonates in Rabbi Akiba (1963), Feldman’s work for soprano, flute, English horn, horn, trumpet, trombone, tuba, percussion, and piano? The subject of the piece, Akiba ben Joseph, a Mishnaic sage (tanna) and halachic scholar, systematized and developed new methods of scholarly interpretation, massively expanding the Oral Law. He was martyred under Roman torture in Caesarea, his flesh torn with “iron combs,” and his final word was the concluding ʾeḥād (“One”) of the Shema. While Rabbi Hillel developed seven methods of interpretation, Rabbi Akiba, using spelling variations and the particularities of the Torah to extract unexpected meaning, established other rules using prefixes and suffixes. Does Feldman’s work borrow from this kind of hermeneutics, which seeks to unveil the hidden meaning of the Bible?
Might this approach also be a deliberate step away from the moral foundation of variation found in nineteenth-century German music, from Beethoven to Brahms, a foundation whose values had been shattered by Nazism? Like Adorno and Steiner, Feldman questioned the possibility of making art after Auschwitz: “I want to be the first great composer that is Jewish,” he often said.
1. Morton Feldman, “The Future of Local Music” (1984), in Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman, ed. B. H. Friedman, Cambridge, Exact Change, 2000, p. 189. ↩
2. “Conversation between Morton Feldman and Walter Zimmermann. November 1975,” in Morton Feldman Says: Selected Interviews and Lectures 1964-1987, ed. Chris Villars, London, Hyphen Press, 2006, p. 56. ↩
3. Morton Feldman, “Crippled Symmetry” (1981), in Give my Regards to Eighth Street, op. cit. (note 1), p. 137. ↩
4. Feldman, “The Future of Local Music,” op. cit. (note 1), p. 170; “Conférence de Francfort,” p. 291. ↩
5. “Morton Feldman Remembered,” New Music Concerts Fall Series ’88, selected and arranged from Morton Feldman Essays, Kerpen: Beginner Press, 1985.
https://www.newmusicconcerts.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/November-6-1988-Concert-Program.pdf ↩
6. Morton Feldman, “Autobiography” (1962), in Essays, ed. Walter Zimmermann, Kerpen, Beginner Press, 1985, p. 38: “My desire here was not to ‘compose,’ but to project sounds into time.” ↩
7. Feldman, “Some Elementary Questions” (1967), in Give My Regards to Eighth Street, op. cit. (note 1), p. 66. ↩
8. Feldman, “Crippled Symmetry,” op. cit. (note 3), p. 135. ↩
9. Quoted in Paul Beaudoin, “Morton Feldman’s On Time and the Instrumental Factor,” written for the concert “American Modernism Seen & Heard: The Abstract and Geometric Tradition in Music and Painting, 1930-1975,” performed 20 December, 1992 at Carnegie Hall (https://americansymphony.org/concert-notes/morton-feldmans-on-time-and-the-instrumental-factor/). ↩
10. Morton Feldman, “Remembrance. Tom Johnson. 1967-1969,” in Morton Feldman Says, op. cit. (note 2), p. 36. ↩
11. Morton Feldman, “I’m reassembling all the time” (2 July 1985), Morton Feldman in Middelburg: Words on Music. Lectures and Conversations, ed. Raoul Mörchen, Cologne, MusikTexte, 2008, p. 152. ↩
12. Quoted in Jean-Yves Bosseur, “Monographie,” in Morton Feldman, Écrits et Paroles (Presses du réel), p. 71. ↩
13. Morton Feldman, “Darmstadt Lecture” (1984), in Morton Feldman Says: Selected Interviews and Lectures 1964-1987, London, Hyphen Press, 2006, p. 208. ↩
14. Quoted and cited in French by Jean-Yves Bosseur, “Monographie,” in Morton Feldman, Écrits et Paroles, p. 71. Retranslated into English. ↩
15. Morton Feldman, “Beckett as Librettist. Howard Skempton. January 1977,” in Morton Feldman Says, op. cit. (note 2), p. 76. ↩
16. Literally, “Oh, how man’s heart is hollow and full of filth.” ↩
17. Morton Feldman, “Darmstadt-Lecture” (1984), in Essays, op. cit. (note 6), p. 185. ↩
18. Morton Feldman, “The Anxiety of Art” (1965), in Give My Regards to Eighth Street, op. cit. (note 1), p. 30. ↩
Do you notice a mistake?