A New Recording of a Major Feldman Composition

from the Amazon.com Web page for the recording being discussed

Back in my student days, one of my music professors used to delight, every now and then, in citing his list of the major “non-composers” of our day. The list might change from time to time, but Morton Feldman was always on it. I do not know whether he really meant to dismiss Feldman so abruptly or if this was a “cunning plan” on his part to get his students to listen to recordings of Feldman’s music (which were pretty sparse back in the Sixties when I was in that professor’s classroom).

The other way I learned about Feldman was through John Cage, with whom I went on mushroom hunts in the summer of 1968 and then would encounter as often as circumstances would allow. Feldman had been Cage’s colleague in what is now known as “The New York School;” and Cage continued to champion him after they had gone their separate ways. Unless I am mistaken, my first listening experience came from a vinyl Columbia album that divided its tracks between Cage and Feldman.

It did not take long for me to warm up to Feldman’s music. However, I quickly realized that he was very much an experimentalist, exploring different compositional techniques. His earlier efforts involved approaches to indeterminacy that were inspired by Cage’s interest in chance-based approaches to decision making but were far from following in Cage’s footsteps. However, Feldman gradually departed from scores consisting of rectangles on graph paper that allowed extensive opportunities for choice by the performer to a far more meticulous technique in which every individual note would be specified with respect to not only pitch but also dynamics and often articulation.

As Feldman’s scores became more precise, they also became much longer in duration. Unless I am mistaken, his demands on listener attention were pushed to the max with the completion of his second string quartet in 1983. The total duration of the recording of this quartet made by the FLUX Quartet is (as it says on the album cover) “6 hours 7 minutes and 7 seconds.” That recording requires five CDs.

To be honest I have never been interested in approaching an opportunity to listen to Feldman’s music as if it were an endurance test. As a result, I have tended to settle into those compositions whose performances fill a single CD without any interruptions. One such composition is “Patterns in a Chromatic Field,” a duo for cello and piano.

This past October Wergo released a new recording of this piece performed by cellist Mathis Mayr and pianist Antonis Anissegos. Note the use of the article “a.” An Amazon.com search for “Morton Feldman patterns” turns up an impressive number of different performances. It almost seems as if any cello-piano duo that is interested in an ambitious challenge has turned to “Patterns in a Chromatic Field” and released a recording of their efforts. (Personally, I have only one other copy, the recorded performance made by cellist Christian Giger and pianist Steffen Schleiermacher. I was drawn to it because I knew of Schleiermacher’s project to record the complete piano music of John Cage.)

These days I am more interested in attending concert performances of Feldman’s music than in listening to recordings. Indeed, I can confess that, when I started listening to this recent Wergo recording, I no longer had any recollection of the Giger-Schleiermacher recording. Nevertheless, my past experiences in being able to identify motifs and then track the gradual transformations of those motifs kicked in with little difficulty. The fact is that it is not difficult to become aware of those transformations and to accept the principle that the “destination” of a transformation is secondary to the transformational process itself. That precept and a willingness to be patient are about all one needs to bring to a “CD scale” Feldman composition; and, on this new recording, that patience is definitely well rewarded.