"Pensive Music Yearning To Be Alone"
by Alex Ross
The New York Times, Aug. 6, 1996
The music of Morton Feldman works best in isolation. It follows
parameters so peculiar to itself that it often sounds uncomfortable
when heard alongside the music of others. Last weekend, Lincoln Center
Festival 96 delivered a magnificent tribute to this lonely giant of
American music; for a weekend, the resonant but intimate hall of the
Ethical Culture Society on West 64th Street became an almost perfect
Feldman world. Even those already convinced of Feldman’s stature may
have come away staggered by the intensity of vision communicated in
this three-concert retrospective.
Feldman’s reputation has soared steeply since his death in 1987.
Feldman festivals have become common in Europe; half of his 150 works
appear on recordings. His total achievement is coming into view. What
immediately becomes apparent is the distinctness of the sound:
all-pervasive quietness, slow and irregular pulses, mercurial shifts of
ambiguous harmony, wanly beautiful instrumental colors, slivers of
truncated melody. Feldman aimed intently at greatness, and he
recognized the need to say one thing many times over.
But the great value of this survey was also to point up the internal
contrasts in Feldman’s work. It made a canny selection from various
periods of his career, and it gathered a roster of committed performers
who do not necessarily search out the same sound. The field of
comparison for this composer is now with the dead as well as the
living; his voice is powerful enough to find new and deeper resonances.
Despite a deceptively even surface, Feldman’s style underwent
significant evolutions. Joan La Barbara began the retrospective by
singing the early, gauntly lyrical "Only," for solo voice, at a concert
by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center on Friday. At a piano
concert the next day, Aki Takahashi played "Illusions" (1950), which
resembled Serialism in its sometimes frantic gesturing, but also
forecast the composer’s mature style in stretches of static meditation.
In the 50’s and sporadically thereafter, Feldman used notation that
gave increased freedom to performers. Even in conventional scores, he
specified complex juxtapositions of meters that made precise unisons
impossible. In "Why Patterns?" (1978), each instrument moves at its
own tempo; remarkably, Feldman’s peculiar harmonic profile remains in
force. The piece is a long feast of glistening combinations of tones
from alto flute, glockenspiel and piano. John Palumbo, Gordon Gottlieb
and Takahashi played beautifully, although Mr. Palumbo perplexingly
repeated portions of his part after racing ahead of the others.
"The Viola in My Life I" and "I Met Heine on the Rue Fürstenberg"
filled out Friday’s program. These works are from the 1970’s,
Feldman’s most accessible period: the emphasis is on clearly
demarcated, sweetly tinted groupings of chords, with an occasional
trace of wistful modal melody. The second title refers to Heine’s
encounter with Chopin; Feldman adored the early Romantic piano
literature and made coded references to their more daring suspended
harmonies. Ransom Wilson led slightly cautious performances; Paul
Neubauer was the viola soloist.
Later, Feldman worked in increasingly vast forms. (A cancellation by
the Kronos Quartet regrettably removed the six-hour "Quartet II" from
consideration.) He wanted listeners to stop thinking about form
altogether and lose themselves in the harmonic material. On Saturday,
Takahashi played the hour-long "Triadic Memories" with phenomenal
purity of tone. Her misty atmospherics are not the only possible
approach, but they bring out an Impressionistic influence, particularly
from Debussy’s "Cathédrale engloutie" and "Pas sur la neige." (This
concert was marred by outside noises. But the good-sized audiences
were amazingly quiet throughout the festival.)
The final concert on Sunday afternoon presented two starkly contrasted
works from Feldman’s last few years. "Three Voices," for solo voice
singing alongside two taped vocal tracks, is sensuous and pristine; it
begins with unearthly, chromatically shifting vocalise, but lines from
a Frank O’Hara poem eventually emerge in a melodic line that sways like
a lullaby. Joan La Barbara, for whom the piece was written, combined
great beauty of tone with total rhythmic concentration. She performed
the full 90-minute version, which makes better sense than the sped-up
version she has recorded for the New Albion label.
"For Samuel Beckett," for 23 instruments, is a long voyage into
darkness. Piercing woodwind clusters, glowering brass chords and eerie
string harmonics collide in slow motion over clocklike chiming tones of
harp, vibraphone and piano. The Essential Music ensemble brought out
the roughness of the score, its undercurrent of terror. Except for a
too-soft piano, the balance was admirable. The connection to Beckett’s
austere, depopulated landscapes was easily grasped; just as clear was a
debt to the sculptured dissonances of Varèse.
In a brief epilogue to the retrospective, Feldman’s "Structures"
appears on a New York Philharmonic program tonight, alongside the final
scene of Strauss’ "Salome." The juxtaposition may seem absurd, but
it’s worth mentioning in advance that those deep clusters in "Samuel
Beckett" sound like nothing so much as the moaning brass chords at the
beginning of Salome’s final monologue. Feldman’s music may sound best
apart, but it muses on history in ways that listeners have just begun
to perceive.