Tag: Morton Feldman

Contemporary Classical

FOR PHILIP GUSTON: A MEDITATION AND PRACTICE

Would you spend four and a half hours listening to this long piece?

Would you enter the concert hall and embark on this unknown auditory journey?

BY Di Fang

On April 12th at 2 p.m., in the Conrad Prebys Concert Hall at the University of California, San Diego, renowned percussionist Steven Schick, flutist Alexander Ishov, and pianist Liam Wooding performed together to interpret the work of 20th-century American composer Morton Feldman—”For Philip Guston” (1984). The initial experience of a four-and-a-half-hour concert with a slow, continuous pace, led by one of the world’s leading percussion masters, Steven Schick, left the audience with anticipation.

Steven Schick

Feldman’s music is slow and quiet, with an exquisite delicacy. When the first note of the piece is played, the floating melody immediately creates a sense of emptiness and mystery, leading the audience into an unknown world.

What are the performers doing? What elusive emotions are they evoking? What does Feldman want to say to his deceased closest friend Phillip Guston, the Abstract Expressionist? Where does the music lead the listener? What kind of chemical reaction will occur between the listener and the music? For the lead player Steven Schick, what does it mean to play this controversial work again after so many years? What is the difference between artists of very different ages performing together? What does this mean for the audience? What is the significance of Feldman to present and future?

Unexpectedly, as the music progresses, the audience’s curiosity is not constantly either amplified or resolved, but rather follows it the nice clean emptiness, to the depths of a calm and slightly melancholic abyss. With the passage of time, I began to discard all trivial matters, let go of unnecessary emotional burdens, and gradually set aside pointless thoughts. As the performance crossed the halfway mark, I felt constrained by my seat and walked to the steps on the side of the audience, where I sat down and continued the ritual-like listening. Looking at the other listeners, some stood with their eyes closed, while others lay directly on the carpet, seemingly immersed in a dream.

Liam Wooding

Feldman infused his notes into my present and future life, and my associations became a form of insight. Hidden metaphors, buried within myself, were like a reflection in a dusting mirror, gradually revealing their pure and natural essence through listening to Feldman’s composition. The act of listening enters the realm of aesthetic contemplation and communion with the universe.

The music is extremely minimalistic period, employing minimal motives for parallelism and repetition, resembling the primitive state of life. Its structure, however, is asymmetrical and unbalanced, unadorned, and bears a longing for ephemeral existence. The composer possesses a deep understanding of instrument usage, with the orchestration more akin to the blending of similar timbres rather than mere accompaniment. Compared with the weak sense of rhythm, the patterns of the melodies are more prominent and leave a lasting impression that lingers in one’s mind. This disrupts the audience’s previous auditory expectations of percussion.

This work not only challenges the physical limits of the performers in terms of its duration but also requires a sense of mutual understanding, breath, and collaboration among them due to its rhythmic, tempo, and dynamic characteristics. The vibraphone, the glockenspiel, and the celesta intertwine with indistinguishable timbres, while the contrasting tones of the piccolo and marimba disrupt the melody, creating a “Zen” stillness in the midst of the environment, halting the music and evoking a sense of enlightenment.

Alexander Ishov

The collaboration between the two young artists Alexander Ishov, Liam Wooding, and the percussion master Steven Schick is so harmonious and reflects each other. The bodily movements of the three artists are consistent, evoking the swaying of irregular tree shadows, while the overall composition progresses rhythmically, akin to a pendulum, showcasing a cohesive structure with internal coherence. I have no intention of seeking out specific vocabulary to describe the performance style of them, emphasizing their skills, coordination, and precise control over body expression. It’s because they best embody the concepts of “performer as absent” and “performer not present.” The performers’ act of erasing personal traces allows the audience to directly confront the work itself.

This aesthetic of sound is not commonly found in contemporary compositions. In an era of sound material exploding, Feldman returns to precise notation to paint the new structure. He places importance on the presentation of material and even more on the integration of material, requiring melting and mix like pigments. The process of viewing a painting is temporal, each moment seen is always partial. Feldman maps indeterminate sounds into the stretch of time, dissolving the complete symbolic image, which allows each instrument enough time to adjust its breathing and refine its sound system in the process. At the same time, silence gained its positive status.

In fact, no other composers of his time were influenced so much by paintings and painters. Whether designing, sketching, or copying, a painter’s first consideration is the size of the painting. Feldman thinks the same thing, “up to one hour you think about form, but after an hour and a half its scale. Form is easy—just the division of things into parts. But scale is another matter.” The emergence of the best crypto casino UK parallels this focus on scale, as these platforms expand rapidly, leveraging cryptocurrency to enhance user experiences and operational efficiency. However, we can’t ignore the connection between Feldman and Guston’s abstractions, early Anatolian rugs, Robert Rauschenberg, and the textiles in Egypt’s Coptic Period. The material itself is raised to the same status as the structure. The boundaries between tool and object, form and content are blurred. The intuition is the point.

Feldman’s dissonant sounds are organized within a naturalistic rhythm and a concise arrangement of pitches, creating an abstract space with multiple dimensions. Concrete sounds such as church bells, temple wooden block, and the rhythm of bouncing after free-fall are abstracted one by one, encompassing the natural cacophony, worldly clamor, and inner whispers. In the world of sound, one experiences and engages in a “serene contemplation” (Zong Baihua, “Aesthetic Stroll”). The repetition of similar or identical sonic elements allows the listener to gain a profound sense of time, leading to a clear understanding of life and the essence of time.

Today, do we still need Morton Feldman and Philips Gaston? Perhaps what we should think about is the spatial field of this sound. What the human condition represented or mapped by the presence of this sound.

“For Philip Guston” (1984) is not merely a concert but a meditation and practice for both performers and audience members. It gives me a new understanding of the concert event itself. As the audience enters the concert hall, they entrust their time to the performers, while the performers contribute their passion and past experiences to the composer’s work. The music work becomes a medium of communication between the audience, composer, and performers, constructing a unique path for each individual to find personal significance. The performers lead the audience into an unknown world of sound. This world is not solely created by the composer or performers; it belongs to the collective human experience.

Morton Feldman

As Morton Feldman said, “This piece doesn’t give you the feeling that it’s four hours.”

The beauty of Feldman’s music is characterized by an elusive contradiction and the embodiment of “less is more” functionality, aligning with the aesthetics and analytical thinking of modernism. The journey of this concert seeks enlightenment in stillness, serving as a “spiritual practice” for the performers and a “choice” for each audience to cultivate their inner selves, which will accompany them throughout their lives.

(All photos by Robbie Bui)

Author: Di Fang

Visiting scholar at the University of California, San Diego, Music Department.

Ph.D. candidate in Aesthetics of Music, Shanghai Conservatory of Music.

by Di Fang
CD Review, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, File Under?, Piano

Feldman Late Piano Pieces (CD Review)

Morton Feldman

Late Works for Piano

For Bunita Marcus, Palais de Mari, Triadic Memories

Alfonso Gómez

Kairos 3xCD

 

Morton Feldman’s late piano works are totemic structures, influential on a generation of composers from the Wandelweiser collective to American experimentalists. Slow-moving, prevailingly soft, and quite long, apart from the Palais de Mari, which still clocks in at nearly a half hour in duration. This Kairos recording presents compelling renditions of Feldman in clear, focused sound that captures the pedaling and decay of notes with admirable detail. Alfonso Gómez’s recent recording of Messiaen’s Vingt Regards, also on Kairos, was an impressive outing and he is more than equal to the challenges and subtleties of Feldman’s music.  

 

Feldman often mentioned that the usual late twentieth century pieces, which often were bounded by a somewhat arbitrary 20-minute time frame, were easier for programming. Feldman preferred to think of his predilection for longer pieces as exploring “scale” rather than “form.” Thus the somewhat diffuse direction found in For Bunita Marcus. Written for a composer whom Feldman mentored, it distinctively uses short, thread-like gestures in the middle register in distinctive fashion. These melodic cells are then expanded into dissonant arpeggiations. As is so often the case, the introduction of a new pitch seems like an important event. The pauses and, for lack of a more accurate term, cadential points, are even more so, and beguilingly asymmetrical. 

 

Palai de Mari plays with a widely spaced chordal domain, with two to four sonorities frequently connected in post-tonal voice-leading. A number of the verticals sound like the added note triads found in Poulenc or Milhaud, but they are of course deployed without the sense of harmonic rhythm that propels music by Les Six. These are interspersed with melodic fragments that emphasize the usual seventh and, less usual, fifth. All told, the effect of the piece is that of Feldman exploring different sonorities within his preferred framework of “scale” rather than “form.”

 

Triadic Memories, clocking in here at nearly an hour and a half, is a journey of thirds set against Feldman’s characteristic use of dissonances. Shifts of pacing are pointed up by Gómez’s rendition, where the tempo ranges from very slow to andante. In general, changes in texture, tempo, and pitch selection are faster than the previous two pieces, yet in the uncoordinated and unexpected nature of these shifts Feldman manages to create music that floats rather than inexorably moving towards a goal. His late fascination with Asian rugs, with their uneven threading, is a worthy analogue to this piece in particular. 

Gómez thrives in the epic environments of Messiaen and Feldman. His focus and sense of large-scale pacing are without peer. Recommended. 

 

by Christian Carey
CD Review, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Orchestras, Twentieth Century Composer

Michael Gielen Edition Vol. 10 (CD Review)

Michael Gielen Edition Volume 10: Music After 1945

SWR Sinfonieorchester, Michael Gielen conductor

SWR 6xCD boxed set

 

The tenth and final boxed set in SWR’s Michael Gielen Edition spotlights his considerable contributions to post-1945 concert music. Seven hours of live recordings of music by European avant-garde figures Pierre Boulez, Luigi Nono, György Ligeti, György Kurtág, Jorge E. López, Maurizio Kagel, and Bernd Alois Zimmerman and Americans Morton Feldman, John Cage, and George Crumb. Gielen’s own compositions are featured as well. Gielen (1927-2019) may not have been prolific, but proves to be a fine composer, one whose works should be considered for programming more regularly. Vier Gedichte von Stefan George (2010) (“Four Poems of Stefan George”) finds the SWR Vokalensemble joining a chamber segment of the SWR Sinfonieorchester in a performance that displays the virtuosity of both groups to excellent advantage. Pflicht und Neigung (1988) (“Duty and Inclination”) is imaginatively scored for a sinfonietta sans strings, with muscular percussion writing, crystalline wind chords, and eruptive brass lines. 

 

As the previous nine boxed sets of the Gielen Edition attest, he was a conductor who excelled in many different eras and styles of music-making. Still, Gielen’s championing of contemporary music is legendary, as are some of the performances included here. Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Requiem für einen junge Dichter (1969) (“Requiem for a Young Poet”) has a particularly dark history that lends to the already harrowing nature of the work. Both the narrator, a pivotal performer in the piece, and Zimmermann himself committed suicide shortly after the Requiem’s premiere by SWR and Gielen. It has been widely debunked that Mozart was “writing his own Requiem,” but can one say that of Zimmermann’s riveting piece? Gielen reportedly wasn’t so sure. Ligeti’s Requiem (1965) is another selection that is a standout, with radiant singing of its tight clusters and affecting emotive delivery. Instead of the dizzying polyglot assemblage of myriad texts in the decidedly secular and even nihilistic Zimmermann piece, Ligeti uses portions of the Catholic Requiem liturgy as part of his postmodern setting. George Crumb’s Star Child (1977) is another textual amalgam, with references to Gnostic concepts of Advent and Apocalypse. As so frequently in Crumb’s work, his attention to declamation is only matched by imaginative and exquisitely detailed scoring. 

 

Having recently finished Nono’s collected writings, it was particularly wonderful to hear these fine recordings of his music. In the book, Nono mentions working out complex canons with Bruno Maderna as a focal point of his training, which he deploys here in Variazioni canoniche. His signature orchestral work, No hay caminos hay que caminar (1987) (“Walker, there is no path yet you must Walk”), and A Carlo Scarpa (1984), dedicated to the famous twentieth century architect, also represent Gielen’s staunch support of and insights into Nono’s work. 

 

Kurtág’s Stele (1994) is the piece that elevated his compositional career, and it remains one of his most durable works; SWR provides a rendition that could be the benchmark for a long time to come. Ein Brief (1986) (“A Letter”) by Mauricio Kagel is a piece for mezzo-soprano and orchestra that features angular vocalise and Schoenbergian harmony; it reads like an enigmatic sequel to Erwartung. 

 

The artistic breadth and consistently superior musicality of this set are extraordinary. Given their archival nature, listeners may be surprised at the fidelity of the recordings. Details are clear, and dynamic range is tremendous; the disc containing the pieces by Lopez even includes a warning to be careful of the dynamic extremes of the piece when choosing a volume level. The selections by this composer are all premiere recordings. Born in Cuba and an emigree to the United States, Lopez has for some years been a citizen of Austria, flying under the radar of much of the American musical establishment. His formidable scoring and the aforementioned extremes navigated by his music may also play a role. These prove to be right in Gielen and SWR’s wheelhouse; they make a case for Dome Peak (1993) and Breath-Hammer-Lightning (1991) as  compelling works that deal with a gargantuan spatial aesthetic.

 

Two of Pierre Boulez’s most important orchestra pieces are included here, Rituel in Memoriam Bruno Maderna (1975) and movements from the seemingly ever enlarging Notations (recorded in 1990, with an additional portion added in 2003). Rituel incorporates expressive gestures and formal bearing; it was truly a turning point piece for Boulez. Notations was a touchstone work emblematic of the composer’s willingness to build up and revise fragments of material throughout his lifetime. It is masterfully scored and tailor made for a detail-oriented Gielen. Once again, SWR displays extraordinary fluency in densely complex music.  

 

The late Feldman piece Coptic Light (1985) clocks in at nearly a half hour, which is short by the composer’s standards. It is still one of his most impressive essays, requiring 106 musicians to create a kaleidoscope of colors, staggered entrances, and off-kilter near repetitions. The Gielen set closes with another New York School piece, the totemic Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (1958), an audacious open form piece in which the conductor is literally a time-keeper, using his hands to indicate positions on the clock to move through the piece’s sections. The soloist’s part, written on single sheets, can be assembled in any order. Despite all of the chance procedures at work here, the SWR and Gielen understand the performance practice surrounding Cage’s output well, making clear that they are as equally at home in American experimental music as they are the European avant-garde. Highly recommended. 

-Christian Carey

 

by Christian Carey
Contemporary Classical

Artist of the Year – Igor Levit

2020 Artist of the Year – Igor Levit

I was fortunate last year to hear pianist Igor Levit’s US debut, where he played a Beethoven concerto with an ebullient demeanor that was truly stirring. He has remained a touchstone artist for me throughout the pandemic. Levit has been generous in sharing mini-recitals via his Twitter account, with a range of repertoire that is astounding, from ragtime to Rzewski with all points in between. But especially Beethoven.

Released in 2019, Levit’s recording of the complete Beethoven sonatas (Sony Music)  has remained in heavy rotation at our home. It is the most eloquent release of these thirty-two masterworks in a generation.

2020 has seen the release of Encounter, Levit’s second Sony Music CD recording, a double album with an eclectic program: Bach and Brahms chorale prelude arrangements,  Max Reger’s Nachtlied, and Morton Feldman’s Palais de Mari. The chorales are played with fleet-fingered delicacy, the Reger with poignant romanticism, and the Feldman’s fragmentary phrases are rendered with jewel-like precision. Encounter, as well as the Twitter recitals, reveal depth and versatility in Levit’s playing that is, in its own way, as impressive as his watershed renditions of Beethoven. Both the sonatas and Encounter, as well as regular visits to his Twitter site, are highly recommended. Levit is Sequenza 21’s Artist of the Year for 2020. 

by Christian Carey
Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, File Under?

CageConcert: An Interview with Philip Thomas

Interview: Philip Thomas Launches Cageconcert

By Christian Carey

Pianist Philip Thomas is a prolific artist. A member of Apartment House, he recently participated in their recording of Ryoko Akama’s compositions for Another Timbre. Also on Another Timbre is Thomas’s gargantuan CD set of piano music by Morton Feldman, which includes several previously unreleased pieces.

Two of the pianist’s other recent projects focus on other members of the New York School. His deep dive into Cage’s Concert for Piano (again with Apartment House) has resulted in a book, recording, and an interactive online project, Cageconcert (cageconcert.org) that also includes apps to work with segments of the piece and make one’s own versions. He has also released a recording of Christian Wolff’s piano music. Finally, Thomas has recorded a CD of composer-pianist Chris Burn’s work, including transcriptions of improvisations by the late guitarist (and author of one of the key books on improvisation) Derek Bailey. As the interview below demonstrates, Thomas’s performance and recording schedule shows no signs of let-up. (Note: Philip and I talked before the pandemic, so some of his future projects are now TBA).

How did you and Martin Iddon come to collaborate on a book about Cage’s Concert for Piano (1957-’58)? Were the book and recording in process before the website and apps were conceived or was the idea of multiple presentations part of the initial concept?

This goes back a long way! I had it in my thoughts that, having performed the piece a number of times, with Apartment House but also with others, including the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for the dance ‘Antic Meet’, it was a far richer piece than had perhaps history had credited it. It’s such a well-known piece, not least from its visual appearance, and its historic performance value has influenced what we think of as a Cage-ian performance practice. Plus the premiere performance and recording is notorious from its depiction on the Twenty-Fifth Retrospective Concert album. But I felt strongly that there was much that is not more widely known when digging a little deeper, both about the way it can be performed, about the graphic notations of the ‘Solo for Piano’, and about the instrumental and conductor parts. And I was aware that performance as both historical and contemporary practice has a lot to say about the music, not least because of the unusually long time one has to spend with the piano part in order to arrive at something which is playable. So I set to thinking about this as a major research project and immediately thought of Martin as being an ideal collaborator, particularly due to his brilliant book about Cage and Tudor, as well as his Darmstadt book. So over lunch in London one day we dreamt up the project, which over the following year developed and formed to include the book, the website and apps, as well as the involvement of Apartment House. Then there was the inevitable long wait until we found out our grant application was successful. The grant was for a 3-year project but inevitably aspects of that spill over into the months since – and I’ve just now finished the index for the book! The apps grew from a simple idea that we thought might be nice to a far more complex concept than any of us could have imagined, forming a vital part of the project. The team expanded to include two research assistants, Emily Payne and Chris Melen – Chris being the developer of the Solo for Piano app – with additional help from others, including Stuart Mellor who designed the Concert Player app.

As a pianist who specializes in experimental music, Concert for Piano seems like a natural work to explore from multiple vantage points. When did you first become acquainted with the piece, and what does it mean to you as an interpreter?

I’ve mostly played it with Apartment House. I think possibly the earliest occasion was in 2008 when I organised a 50th anniversary concert of the 25-year retrospective concert. My experience then was as it continues to be, that this is an exceptionally rich and lively piece, full of surprises, and one which is a total joy to perform – each moment is alive and fresh, and my experience as a performer is of being part of music being made, rather than something which is ‘re-played’. We don’t rehearse, everyone works on their own materials, and then it’s put together, so for everyone playing the experience is as new as it is for the audience. This is true of many pieces by Cage of course, but this piece seems to heighten those senses and the material is so exaggerated in its range here – noises, pitches, highs and lows, louds and softs, etc.

The website and apps provided detailed and varied material from Concert. Will you share with us some of the features you consider to be highlights?

There’s so much there, a few of my favourite things include:

Interviews with Apartment House – I love to hear the musicians of Apartment House talk about what they do. These interviews are brimming with insight. I especially like the films which combine their different insights, such as the ‘Performing the Concert’ film and the last 10 minutes of the conductor film.

Watching the films of our performances of the ‘Concert’ and also Christian Wolff’s ‘Resistance’ is a particular thrill, because, as I suggested above, there’s so much unknown in the performance itself that it’s great to get a stronger sense of the kinds of things the other musicians are doing.

This one is not yet on the website but will be appearing very soon – I have made a studio recording of the complete ‘Solo for Piano’, which has never been done. It’s completely different from the version I play with Apartment House – for this I recorded each notation individually, according to a space time measurement of 3 minutes per page, and then Alex Bonney has mapped them together like a patchwork quilt, to get a complete 3 hours and 9 minutes performance of the Solo. You can hear it now actually on the Concert Player app as it’s this recording which we use for the app.

For the uninitiated person finding this on the web, what do you think they apps will demonstrate to them?

I hope firstly that it’ll just be a great entry into the music – that this is music people play and love to play, and is really great to play, instead of perhaps either that it is too ‘far-out’ or obfuscatory, or, the flip-side, that it is entirely open and ‘free’! For users trying out the Solo for Piano app, I hope it’ll both be a great way of playing with the notations and their conditions for performance, to see what might be possible and conversely what is not possible with each, and to play with the multiple possibilities the notation offers; and that it will also be an aid to performance. Of course each pianist will want to try it out in their own way, but at the least I hope that for some notations this will be a time-saver, offering possibilities to randomly generate multiple outcomes and to print them off in usable formats. An obvious criticism of the app is that it removes the fun of working these things out yourself – I think it manages to keep the fun of playing with each notation, whilst cutting down on the work needed to write these things out. And we’ve been careful to always show where and how we’ve made interpretative decision when others might make other choices, so it’s clear that this is both a facility AND an interpretation.

And then the Concert player app is simply a delight to hear – there are 16,383 possible instrumental combinations of this piece, and we have a handful of recordings available. Clearly, a recording of a work such as this can only hint at the slightest possibility of how this piece may sound. But the app allows users to randomly generate or select combinations, plus select pages, their durations, their sequence, and then hear how that might sound. We’ve taken great care to ensure the space-time properties of the music are upheld (measuring by the pixel!) and so really this is a pretty accurate – no matter how inappropriate that word is to this piece!! – realisation. I still listen to it regularly and am surprised all the time by the combinations. It’s a thrill, so I hope people will just dive in.

You have been performing Morton Feldman’s music for over a quarter century. Still, the recording you did for Another Timbre last year was a mammoth undertaking. How long did it take to record? How do you keep so much detailed, long repertoire, with irregular repetitions, in your brain and fingers? 

Somehow it didn’t feel like a mammoth task, more like a real pleasure to play these pieces again. Perhaps surprisingly, I didn’t feel any kind of pressure to give a ‘definitive’ statement on the music – my performances on disc just happen to be a representation of how I play this music today, after many years of thinking about and playing it. If I were to record it all again in 10 years it may be quite different, who knows? It was though a particular pleasure to discover a few pieces that I hadn’t played before, namely the unpublished works I explored at the Sacher Foundation in Basel, and the transcription I made of the Lipton film music.

I recorded the music over a period of about 2 years, in different sessions. It’s funny how the music at times just sticks in terms of fingering, rhythmic detail, whilst at other times what should be very familiar to me still seems strange. Certainly, whereas I thought this project might draw a line in the sand for me – no more Feldman! – I feel it’s done the opposite, opened up more possibilities, more ways of thinking about the music. In particular, Triadic Memories, which I’ve probably played more often than any other single piece of music, changed a great deal for me in preparation for the recording and what I thought I knew now feels more experimental, more curious, than ever. There’s a part of me that sometimes tries to avoid Feldman’s music – it’s almost too gorgeous at times, and I need to find something else, something of rougher hue, but those chords keep pulling me back! Thankfully, there’s so much more to the music than just beautiful sonorities, and in particular the music’s form and narrative feels to me to be so strikingly original.

Are there surprises among the previously unrecorded pieces?

Certainly, the addition of struck drum and glass to the Feldman sound is pretty surprising, bringing to mind much more the 1940s music by Cage, and here included as part of a set of three pieces composed for the dance. In fact there’s a surprising number of pieces composed for dance collaborations, not just for Cunningham, but also for Merle Mersicano, as Ryan Dohoney has written about in considerable detail recently. One of these is Figure of Memory which sounds nothing like Feldman and more like some kind of sketch of a Satie piece, consisting simply of repetitions of three short phrases.

Another recent release is of music by Chris Burn, including a transcription of an improvisation by Derek Bailey. How does that translate to the piano?

Well Chris is a wonderful wonderful composer, and a brilliant pianist and improviser. And so he is fully aware of the slightly perverse nature of what he was doing in writing these pieces, not least as someone who used to play with Bailey. But these pieces are not just really lovely pieces of music, but they also reveal something about Chris and how he hears and thinks of music, as well as being revealing of Bailey’s own work, and in particular of his love of Webern and his close attention to pitch. So when the guitar-ness of the pieces is removed a different side to Bailey’s music is revealed which is simply different but to my ears no less remarkable.

As if 2019 weren’t busy enough for you, a compendium of Christian Wolff’s piano music was released on Sub Rosa. In the notes you say that “In all my performances of Wolff’s music, I aim for interpretations that both interest and surprise me, allowing the notations to lead me to new ways of playing and thinking about music, whilst at

the same time trying to lead the notations toward the unexpected.” When discussing the piano music with Wolff, what were some insights he offered? What piece will most likely surprise listeners? 

The recent double disc follows on from an earlier three-disc set, and hopefully precedes another three-disc set to follow. Christian’s music is, when it comes down to it, the music I feel closest to. I love the potential for change, for surprise, for play. On the whole I tend not to ‘collaborate’ with composers (I trust them to do what they do well and then it’s over to me) and so I love the moment when I begin a new piece, I put it up on the piano and I start to think ‘ok so what am I going to do with this’. This is where I am at my most creative, and Christian’s music works especially well to that effect. I’ve never asked him for his approval of what I do and most often he doesn’t hear my interpretations until after I’ve performed or recorded it. Though the very first time we met, in 2002, I played ‘Bread and Roses’ to him, waited for his response, and learnt fairly quickly that his typical response was ‘Sure!’. He tends not to validate not to denigrate peoples’ performances of his music and I appreciate that. He doesn’t want to say ‘yes, this is how it should be played’ preferring instead for the individuality of the player to find new solutions, new ways of playing. And so I do hope with each performance I give of his music that I might offer something that would surprise him, that might suggest possibilities in his music which he’d not considered.

In this recent set I’ve included a few pieces which are not published, so that surprised him too! So three variations on Satie, pieces he composed for John Tilbury, which he never quite convinced himself as worth publishing but hopefully he’s convinced now they’re out on disc – they’re wonderfully eccentric pieces. Also his Incidental Music, which he has played and recorded (wonderfully, on Mode) but which he’d not heard anyone else perform. He was delighted, so that’s great. And for anyone familiar with Wolff’s music I hope that my playing brings both recognition and surprise too.

What will be your next recording/recital? What will Apartment House be up to in 2020?

Next concert, in Cambridge in April, features a brand-new piece that Toronto-based composer Allison Cameron is writing for me, which I’m delighted about. And Simon Reynell’s always dreaming up new ideas and introducing me to younger composers and I’m always happy to play a small part in that project. And as a result of the Feldman release we’ve been able to commission one of my very favourite composers, Martin Arnold, to write a large-scale new piece for me. But that won’t be for a while. Lots of ideas, lots of pieces I want to play, but actually I’m hoping for a bit of a quieter year this year!

(For more, consult Philip Thomas’s website.)

Christian Carey is a composer, performer, musicologist, and writer. His work has been published in Perspectives of New Music, Intégral, Open Space, Tempo, Musical America, Time Out New York, Signal to Noise, Early Music America, Sequenza 21, Pop Matters, All About Jazz, and NewMusicBox. Carey’s research on narrativity in late music by Elliott Carter, presented at IRCAM in Paris on the composer’s 100th birthday, appears in Hommage à Elliott Carter (Editions Delatour). He is Associate Professor of Composition, History, and Theory at Westminster Choir College in Princeton, New Jersey.

by Christian Carey
Concert review

The Ambiguous Chords of Affirmation

РОССИЯ.МОСКВА. КОМПОЗИТОР АНТОН БАТАГОВ. It was an evocatively strange and ambiguous experience to hear Anton Batagov play Morton Feldman’s Triadic Memories last Sunday evening in the newly restored Board of Officers Room at the Park Avenue Armory. The room is stunning, beautiful and elegant in a way that speaks not just of easy riches but of plutocracy and power. It’s the size of a studio apartment, and sitting in it is like being in the intimate quarters of the people whose riches ensure their legacy in and on buildings across the city.

And there we heard Feldman, the last of three concerts to inaugurate the Armory’s chamber music series. Fitting and strange — a born and raised New Yorker from a middle-class that won’t exist for many more generations, and one of the great and most uncompromisingly avant-garde composers in the Western classical tradition. A Jew in what is essentially a castle for old-money WASPS, making music that utterly ignores conventions of form, structure, development, harmony, melody and rhythm.

By the time in his career of Triadic Memories (1981) Feldman was not avant-garde anymore, that’s what my composer’s sensibilities tell me. He was, as the piece tells me both on paper and in my ears, a great composer in both history and craft; making music that developed and spread ideas important to the continuing development of knowledge about how to compose music, and notating those ideas with imagination, concision and profound skill. It’s a great piece of musical aesthetics and a great piece in the piano literature, pianistic in a way that makes it an absolute peer to Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Shostakovich, Ravel, Nancarrow, Carter and Ligeti.

Batagov dedicated the concert to Lou Reed — we had heard news of his death that morning — another ambiguous element. Reed is important and rightfully beloved, but his status in rock music and pop culture was, just before his death, cemented by his licensing of his song “Perfect Day” to sell PlayStations. Rock is part of mass culture and has never been able to escape commodification, selling is part of the point of its existence. Feldman is never going to sell any product, the three evenings of performances probably sold about 400 tickets. That many people heard Batagov’s transparent, affecting performance.

His concentration, his thinking, were exceptional. The music is terrifically challenging in a way that the likes of Lang Lang would never dare approach. The pianist must be on the knife’s edge of awareness, keeping a strict tempo for ninety minutes and placing notes in rhythms that are both exact and exceedingly finely varied. The technical point is to keep many pulses going at once through a specific period of time. Harmonically the music is tonal and dissonant, but there’s no predictable harmonic rhythm and there are few phrases, a handful of tightly confined one-handed patterns in the middle and towards the end. The physical demands are rudimentary, save for stamina, the intellectual demands are daunting. His measured tempo, slower than most of the recordings I know, shaded the experience with an initial and enticing feeling of tension: could he make it work at this pace?

Unerringly. I praise Batagov when I write that his playing never made the demands of tempo, thought and action noticeable. These are the things I did notice: uncanny and rich timbres of difference tones and especially overtones morphing out of the piano (the pedal is halfway down throughout the piece) — the first octave and fifth were almost as strong as the fundamental pitches — and demonstrating the great acoustic of the room, which gives even the softest notes fullness and presence; the audience so quiet that the sound of a second-hand ticking on a watch somewhere in my row was noticeable (although several people left during the performance, highly disruptive and puzzling — why did they come?); the sense of time not passing but accumulating. There are intellectual and mystical depths to Feldman, paths through those can be explored by each listener. What is objectively true about the piece is that it defines time not as notches on a line but a container to hold a set of events, it beings, proceeds through action and ends, and the arbitrary points that mark the first measure and the last could just be windows into something that is eternal. That’s as great as it gets.

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by George Grella
Contemporary Classical

For Philip Guston @ The Wulf, June 26

If you’re in the LA area this Sunday, and can spare 4 hours and then some (4 hours for the concert, then some for the commute and parking), 3 young musicians attending the Music Department at University of California, San Diego will perform Morton Feldman’s For Philip Guston.

While Feldman performances at UCSD are common enough, the sheer scale of For Philip Guston makes any production a rare event: 4 hours of late Feldman. Rachel Beetz will play flute (can you imagine playing a wind instrument for 4 hours with no breaks outside of the rests the composer gave you?), Dustin Donahue will play percussion (he has to stand for 4 hours), and Martin Hiendl will be the pianist (doubling on celesta). You can read an essay by Petr Kotik on the difficulties in performing this composition here.

I don’t know much about The Wulf, but readers will perceive it to be on the right track as a venue, presenting some of the far-out works on Michael Pisaro’s Dogstar Orchestra series this year.

Feldman always credited visual artists as having the biggest influence on his music: Rothko, Rauschenberg, Johns, and Guston.   Guston’s daughter remembered Feldman thus:

Morty Feldman was a tall, heavyset man with a thick shock of almost black hair over an absent forehead, and eyes that were obscured by glasses with lenses like the bottom of a bottle… His morose, sardonic demeanor concealed a quick and biting critical intelligence. He was a man whose appetites more than rivaled my father’s They both loved to eat and drink and smoke, and they loved doing it together. The two men prowled the city for movies and good cheap restaurants. My memories of Morty have him stretched out and snoring on our wicker chaise, following some feast the two friends had shared.

Read more by Guston’s daughter, Musa Mayer, about Feldman and her father, here.

Philip Guston’s portrait of Morton Feldman may be viewed here.

by Christian Hertzog
Chamber Music, Choral Music, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Houston, Percussion, Performers, Piano, viola

Music for Rothko

(Houston, TX) On February 25th and 26th at 8pm and February 27th at 2:30 pm (the third date added due to popular demand), the Houston Chamber Choir and Da Camera present Music for Rothko, a concert program of contemporary music in one of Houston’s most unique performance spaces. All three performances are sold out.

Presented in the interior of Rothko Chapel, the Music for Rothko program includes piano works by John Cage and Erik Satie, Tagh for the Funeral of the Lord for viola and percussion by Tigran Mansurian, and choral compositions by John Cage including Four. Feldman’s Rothko Chapel for soprano, alto, choir, celesta, and percussion, is the centerpiece of the program. The performers include the Houston Chamber Choir conducted by Robert Simpson, pianist Sarah Rothenberg, percussionist Brian Del Signore, and violist Kim Kashkashian in her first Houston appearance in more than 20 years.

New Yorker Magazine music critic Alex Ross recently tweeted: “It’s Rothko Chapel week” in reference to several performances taking place this week across the country of Feldman’s elegy for his friend painter Mark Rothko. It is exciting to find out via Twitter that this piece is receiving so much well deserved attention. Last Fall on Sequenza 21, I wrote about the Houston Chamber Choir and this upcoming concert. But I didn’t know at the time that several other performances of the piece would take place within a short span of time. And now I’m interested in contemplating what will set the Houston performance of Rothko Chapel apart from those taking place in other cities?

In his wonderful collection of writings Give My Regards to Eighth Street, Feldman describes Rothko’s paintings as “…an experience in depth…not a surface to be seen on a wall.” Music for Rothko will be complimented by the fourteen paintings Rothko painted for Rothko Chapel; and this setting is one that venues in other cities will not be able to approximate. Rothko’s paintings seem to move beyond the edges of the canvases, their surface appearances changing constantly thanks to the light coming through the chapel’s skylight and Houston’s unpredictable weather patterns. A fusion between the paintings, the architecture of the octagonal room, AND the live music is in store for the chapel’s capacity audiences.

Rothko Chapel

Music for Rothko takes place February 25th and 26th at 8pm and February 27th at 2:30pm at Rothko Chapel. All three Music for Rothko concerts are sold out.

A standby list will be created beginning one hour before the performances, and if there are unoccupied seats, ticket will be sold for $35 at the door beginning about 10 minutes before the concert begins.

by Chris Becker