Fantastic Reminiscence

(A set of digressions on listening to Morton Feldman)

Morton Feldman’s String Quartet No. 2 goes on for somewhere between five and six hours, making it the longest string quartet in history. I heard a story that, about an hour and a half through an early performance of the piece, the audience was disturbed by someone loudly snoring. When they looked to see who had caused the interruption, they turned to the front row to see that Morton Feldman himself had fallen asleep.

Not only is Feldman’s music often very long, it is also unapologetically abstract. Sometimes I catch myself, when listening to a piece of music that I find difficult, trying subconsciously to make each sound into a kind of ‘picture’ standing for something visual or narrative, so that I might better understand the music. Sound, when compared to thought or sight, is uncomfortably indistinct. Sometimes this picturing work is cut out for us, as when a choir imitates birdsong, or when in an opera you hear the sound of a swordfight. Even in more experimental pieces, a sound can serve as a picture, albeit of something less literal. Leonard Bernstein interpreted Charles Ives’s ‘The Unanswered Question’ in the following way:

Against this slow sustained purely diatonic background, the trumpet intermittently poses his question: a vague, nontonal phrase. And each time, it is answered by the wind group in an equally vague, amorphous way. The repeated question remains more or less the same, but the answers grow more and more ambiguous and hectic until the final answer emerges as utterly gibberish. But throughout it all, those strings have maintained their diatonic serenity, imperturbable. And when the trumpet asks his question for the last time—‘Whither music?’—there’s no further answer except for those strings, quietly prolonging their pure G major triad into eternity. Is that luminous final triad the answer? Is tonality eternal? Immortal? Many have thought so, and still do; and yet that trumpet’s question hangs in the air, unresolved, troubling our calm.¹

Under this interpretation, five notes played on the trumpet come to signify a question. Not only that, but a particular question about the fate of music in the new century. And what about Bernstein’s suggestion that what the woodwinds finally offer is mere ‘gibberish’? (In Ives’s score, he describes the winds as ‘mocking’ the question.) It takes an attentive kind of listening to discern how one atonal phrase signifies a posable question, while another brushes up against what is not signifiable at all.

Obviously, Leonard Bernstein was very good at this, and other people might be very bad. It wouldn’t be enough to hammer out three or four notes on a piano and then, shutting the lid, looking all satisfied, turn to your friend and say ‘See? That was the Iliad.’ The mark of a great interpretation is that when we relisten to the piece that has been interpreted, we hear it all confirmed for ourselves. Ives’s piece really is a dialogue between vagueness and resolution, hanging on the edge of gibberish.

What interests me in Morton Feldman’s music is just how hard it is to find such pictures in it at all. This seems to be something that Feldman himself was invested in. ‘I mean what the hell is it all about,’ he asked in a rambling 1982 lecture. ‘All the set poses, the set emotions? Do we have anything in music for example that really wipes everything out? That just cleans everything away, from some aspect of illusion and reality?’ Throughout his career he was haunted by these questions, returning again and again to the issue of whether music is an ‘art form’—and, if it is, of what kind of art it is supposed to be.

A moment ago I referred to the uncomfortable indistinctness of sound. Perhaps what gives sound this quality, in part, is that (unless you are totally deaf) it is always there. The same goes for touch (which I wrote about already). You can shut your eyes and see nothing, but you can’t shut your ears. (Lacan says somewhere that this is what makes us so distinctly responsive to the voice.) And so—as John Cage, Morton Feldman’s close friend and one-time flatmate, was always pointing out—we are constantly surrounded by the stuff that music is made of. How, then, is music supposed to exist on its own terms, to say something for itself? I take Feldman to be expressing this worry when he says, in the lecture I quoted above:

A remark of Whitehead’s clarified something for me last week. He said that the reason that something couldn’t be defined is because it was too general. Not that it was so complicated or so esoteric; it was just like—too general to get a handle on. And that’s the way I feel about music. Just too generalized. Everything is too generalised. Everything to me is like a found object. A major third is a found object, what the hell, you have no right to write a major third—with or without a context. … This was when I woke up, that was part of a hallucination, if music could be an art form. Everything sounded like a found object. Everything didn’t seem to be personal. Everything had a fantastic reminiscence about it. Even my own music.

What kind of music is written out of this feeling? We can find an answer if we compare pieces of music from before and after this realisation that Feldman describes.

In 1970, Feldman returned to America from Europe and phoned his mother, who told him ‘Madame Press died last week at ninety.’ Vera Maurina Press had been his childhood piano teacher; she had such a graceful way of playing, he said, that she would place a gentle finger down to play a B-flat ‘and you wanted to faint.’ He composed an elegy to Madame Press, using his mother’s words as the title. It is a short piece, only about four minutes long, and throughout the whole thing a pair of flutes play major thirds—the kind of ‘found object’ he described above—imitating the sound of a cuckoo clock. There is the sound of a clock’s chime, too.

In this regard, ‘Madame Press Died Last Week at Ninety’ exists at the simplest level of picturing that I described above: the music literally imitates sounds from real life—perhaps from the house where a young Morton Feldman would have had piano lessons. Still, there is more to the music than this simplicity. A quartet of horns harmonises with the cuckoo-flutes in beautiful chords that, to me, sound poignant and tender. There is the mix of aching and sweetness that you find in nostalgia, particularly in the succession of four chords from bars 5 to 6 (roughly 0:24 to 0:35 in the video below.) This must be the sort of reminiscence that Feldman would go on to describe.

Fifteen years later, and less than two years before his death, Feldman wrote his ‘Piano and String Quartet’. Even the name of this piece gives us less to work with. Many of Feldman’s compositions had bare, ingredient-list titles like this—‘Voice, Violin and Piano’, ‘Bass Clarinet and Percussion’, even just ‘Piano’—which he once compared to the titles of still-life paintings. If the elegy to Madame Press sounds obscure, then the Piano and String Quartet, which is just under an hour and a half, is impenetrable. It begins as if out of nothingness: a piano plays broken chords and the strings accompany it trepidatiously. The piece is slow enough to feel emptied of rhythm, and it has no tonal centre. Even the repetitions are undermined: if the piano repeats a chord, it plays it in an inversion. Nothing in the piece sounds like anything else.

When listening to ‘Madame Press’, it is hard not to discern the cuckoo clock; when listening to ‘Piano and String Quartet’, it is hard to discern anything except, maybe, for some pure mood. (Imagine the sound you might hear in a sixties spy movie when the main character stumbles upon an intriguing clue, then extend that sound to over an hour: then you will be close to a Feldman-esque atmosphere.) What Bernstein found in Ives was a set of ideas so distinct that they could have been paraphrased into an essay. What I hear in a piece like ‘Piano and String Quartet’ is so indistinct, but nonetheless so resonant, that words at all seem to betray it. It reminds me of what Wittgenstein said about ‘the impression of good architecture’: ‘It makes one want to respond with a gesture.’

As it happens, Feldman’s music has been associated with architecture. In 1964, Dominique and John de Menil funded the construction of a chapel in Houston, and commissioned Mark Rothko (who I wrote about in 2023) to help in its design and create paintings for its walls. The building is octagonal, austere, with no windows except for a small skylight. Its interior is decorated with fourteen artworks by Rothko; painted shortly before his suicide—he did not live to see the chapel’s completion—they are part of his darkest period, so consistently black that they are indeterminate even by Rothko’s standards. Feldman was a friend of Rothko’s, and he too was commissioned for the chapel, composing original music for it in 1971.

Feldman’s music is often compared to Rothko’s painting. I can see the similarities: where the paintings are large, intimidating, and unitary, the music is unwelcoming, often long, and—in its atonality, its avoidance of narrative and progression—imposing and still. Just as the fields of colour in Rothko’s most famous paintings bleed indefinitely into each other, the quietness of Feldman’s music makes each note or chord seem reluctant to stand out on its own, uncertain of its place in relation to everything around it.

But I don’t think that Rothko is the only, nor even the most convincing, point of artistic comparison for Feldman’s music. In his concerns about musical ‘found objects’, and his attention to the thin line between music and mere sound, Feldman might be compared to Duchamp, who after 1913 made the found object the cornerstone of his artwork. But Duchamp wanted to create an art that would satisfy the mind more than the senses, and this seems contrary to Feldman’s music which speaks so directly to the ears and so consistently resists thought. When I listen to his music—particularly the later works like the Piano and String Quartet, or the four-hour ‘For Philip Guston’ (1984)—I think most often of the ‘mobiles’ by Joan Miró or, especially, Alexander Calder.

Look at Calder’s artwork (untitled, c. 1939) above. Its elements, discrete but alike in kind, are suspended beside each other in space. There is no obvious order or structure to their positioning, and yet I have the impression of them as being very deliberately, carefully, placed. Each element, therefore, is somehow both indeterminate and precise. Suspended in this way, the whole work seems to have come out of a void: I couldn’t easily place its ‘edges’, or its beginning and end, and each time I look at it, it is as if I have to start from scratch in orienting myself about it, discerning the right way to look. Lastly, although I can rationally understand the decisions behind each element—it took a human to ‘place’ them like this, to give them this colour, this tone—there is still something unfamiliar about them, such that the work as a whole takes on an uncanny, almost inhuman quality.

Now listen to some of Feldman’s ‘For Philip Guston’:

While listening to it, if you reread my description in the previous paragraph—only swapping out the word ‘space’ for ‘time’, and ‘look’ for ‘listen’—you might find that it fits the music as much as it fits the mobile. This works for me, at least.

Morton Feldman wrote this piece some years after the painter Philip Guston had died, and around a decade after the two of them had fallen out over Guston’s move away from abstract and towards figurative art. To me, it represents Feldman’s greatest attempt at achieving what he had dreamed for: something in music that just wipes everything out, cleans everything away. Just as Alexander Calder, in my view, managed an ultimate kind of abstraction with his mobiles, creating artworks that encounter us as objects without history, without picturing anything, even without ‘objecthood’ per se, Feldman did something similar, but in time rather than space. His music gives us something close to gestures of pure time, unnamed feeling.

But as I suggested in my description of Calder’s mobile, there is always some human quality that remains. In Feldman’s piece for the Rothko Chapel, a vibraphone, viola, and choir (without words) weave an atonal line over deep rumbling from a timpani. If you listen inattentively, or just skip through the piece, you might not be able to tell the first four movements apart from each other at all. It is beautiful, but it is also the usual Feldman fare: ambiguous sound that (in Maggie Nelson’s words) isn’t entirely sure it wants to be heard. One moment stands out, however. In the piece’s final movement, out of the vague, amorphous atmosphere, the viola plays a simple melody. It is musical in a way nothing else in Feldman’s work is, with the sound of an old Hebraic folk song, something half-remembered. In fact, Feldman wrote the melody when he was fifteen and still at high school; it found its way into his composition only now, thirty years later. In the score it is accompanied by a single instruction: ‘very, very simply.’

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPGstQUbpHQ&t=1215s