Other Minds to Release New Feldman Album

Cover of the album being discussed (courtesy of Other Minds)

This coming Friday Other Minds Records will release its latest album entitled The Possibility of a New Work for Electric Guitar. This is the title of a composition for solo electric guitar that Morton Feldman composed for his colleague Christian Wolff. The album is currently available for pre-order through a Bandcamp Web page, both for digital download and for a twelve-inch 45 RPM vinyl disc (which will also include the digital download). As is usually the case, that Web page also provides program notes for the album.

Feldman composed this piece in 1966, and Wolff performed it here in San Francisco that same year. That performance was recorded and was archived by KPFA. Sadly, when Wolff was traveling to Yale to play the piece, both his guitar and the only copy of Feldman’s score were stolen from his car. Presumably, the music has “survived” thanks to Wolff’s memory, possibly the KPFA recording, and a reconstruction of that score. According to Amazon.com, a score was published by Edition Peters in France in 2015. However, the Web page for that score is listed as “Currently unavailable;” and it is not listed at all on the French site. On the other hand, the work is included on an electric guitar anthology album of performances by Lars Ove Stene Fossheim, for which Amazon does have an MP3 Web page.

The Other Minds album has three tracks. The first of these is the 1966 recording. This is followed by a second recording of the same piece, recorded by Wendy Eisenberg in 2022. The final track is another Eisenberg recording, this one of Wolff’s “Another Possibility.” It was composed in 2004 as an homage to the Feldman composition based on a scrap of notation from Feldman’’s composition, which was found in the Feldman archives at the Sacher Foundation in Basel.

My interest in Feldman dates all the way back to my graduate student days, when I first came to know him through my acquaintance with John Cage. I also recall first meeting Wolff when he was still at Harvard University, prior to his move to Dartmouth. Sadly, I do not encounter performances of Feldman’s music very often, although I was more than a little surprised to see “The Viola in My Life” on the program of a LIEDER ALIVE! program in February of 2022. As a result, I am most delighted that this new release provides me with another opportunity to introduce Feldman (once again) to my readers!