popcorn youth

Well, ‘review’ may not be the appropriate word. ‘Notes on an event of startling simplicity and beauty’ might, however, be more fitting, if a bit bombastic . . . . In any case, the event was very much an aural treat and, after all, a person must ask themselves this: How often does one get the opportunity to experience one of Morton Feldman’s late piano pieces in a spacious hall, on a arctic winter evening (seems somehow fitting), with a performance by someone who has been thinking hard about the piece for a long time, thinking not only about the music’s aesthetic logic and peculiar temporal syntax, but also about its relation to the visual arts, which were of course central to Feldman’s entire outlook and method?

The answer, as if it even needs to be stated, is of course: “not often.”

Morton Feldman’s “For Bunita Marcus” is a long piece. It was composed for one of Feldman’s favorite pupils, and it was one of his last works for solo piano. Most recordings, say, by Markus Hinterhäuser or John Tilbury, clock in at 72 minutes or more. Presumably most (all?) of those who attended the concert knew that the event would comprise one long piece. The Ithaca Times article discussed the fact. The question of time is an interesting one, and bears not only on the audience but on the performer as well. Syau-Cheng Lai talked about the consequences of length and organization in the interview that she gave to us. I personally had been wondering all week what the duration would feel like, and had been looking forward to being so close, so to speak, to the music of Feldman, in such a concentrated, and focused setting.

Regarding the piece itself, I had listened to a recording of it the week before, and had been taken somewhat aback by the assertiveness of the rhythmic writing, and by its immediacy. Short rhythmic cells, which for large stretches amounted to ingenious explorations of three chromatic notes (E, E flat, and D), were spread across four octaves at extraordinarily quiet levels. During our interview, Syau-Cheng Lai had shown us the score and talked at some length about the way in which she approached the question of rhythmic cells. Not surprisingly, the intervalic phrases were composed across a shifting set of time signatures, the patterns of which seemed not to be precisely fixed but related in something approximating a shifting syntax, the effect of which meant a freeing of the arrangement of notes to become both repetitive in their rhythmic clustering yet elusive from the point of view of a steady pulse. In other words, temporal pulses and expectations would rise and fall throughout, while small pockets of dyads would crystallize before pausing for breath or for a single chord wrought from the preceding melodic material. Syau-Cheng explained to us that when she first began to prepare the piece, she counted out the shifting time signatures mechanically and deliberately, as if in a machine-like mode so as to master Feldman’s rhythmic conception for the smaller and larger nodes, cells, and arcs. Only after a longer period of preparation, she told us, did she begin to internalize the phrases and the ways in which they slow and speed and morph, the result of which was the internalization of the piece from the point of view of musical phrases, scenes, episodes, and sliced-and-edited cell rewrites. For a flash of a moment when she was speaking, the thought occurred to me that Feldman had anticipated the cut-and-paste approach used by those who work in digital workstation environments, e.g., with Logic or Cubase or Ableton Live, where one often constructs 8-bar loops and then builds the piece from there, by extending, cutting-and-pasting, re-mapping, and expanding.

During the performance, however, the analogy that came repeatedly to mind was that of painting, both because Feldman himself had drawn inspiration from painters, but also because Lai’s own project included a gallery presentation of her visual work, entitled “Visualizing for Bunita Marcus.” After settling down into Feldman’s soundworld and the harmonic contours of the piece, I found myself asking, ‘What is this music of Feldman’s? What is it actually wanting, or attempting, to do? How large or how small are its ambitions? And more importantly, what kind of listening does it solicit, need, and repay?’ These are, of course, typical questions for any listener in search of more than mere momentary entertainment, but in this case they gave rise to still more questions: ‘Does the piece succeed? Does it open a space within the fabric of concert hall-styled classical music for itself and its listeners, or is it doing something else? Where in the tradition of classical music does this piece even fit, or want, or deserve, to be?’

With these questions in mind, I also found myself returning to the question of the relation between this kind of piano writing and the modernist painting Feldman so loved, between the auditory space and the visual, vertical, hanging-on-the-gallery-wall spatiality familiar to us all. I knew that Feldman had written a famous piece for Rothko (“Rothko’s Chapel”), as that had been the first Feldman piece that I’d ever heard, some ten or fifteen years ago (on a cassette tape, no less). I also knew that Philip Guston had been one of Feldman’s best friends, and that Feldman had taken considerable inspiration from visual artists throughout his lifetime. I’d also been reading Feldman’s collected writings, Give My Regards to Eighth Street, a delightful and rambling economy of words, to which Lai drew our attention during our visit to her studio, in which he writes at some length about painting and music. Though the question may seem naïve to some, still for me it is useful to ask questions of the following: Is that simple interval like a brush stroke, or more like a line? Is there a geometry to this passage, and if so, is it a figure, or an abstraction? How far may we push, after all, this analogy of painting and music?

In response, I couldn’t help but think of Malevich, Rothko, and (Ad) Reinhardt, but especially of Helen Frankenthaler. ‘No, Frankenthaler is too painterly,’ I first thought, before then remembering that Feldman’s music, especially his approach to tonality, was in some ways melodic in the same way that Frankenthaler’s canvasses were sensuous in color field and tonal construction. Cy Twombly? Maybe, yet Feldman seems too quiet, too spacious, too cavernous in its emptiness to justify that comparison. Agnes Martin? No, because Feldman still has color, this music is not pencil grid on dusk-hewn grey. Eventually I remembered a quote attributed to Feldman, namely, that his musical notes were to be played in a manner that sounded “as if they had no source,” and again I returned to thoughts of abstraction. Lai definitely achieved the sound of sourcelessness in her performance. More so than other recordings that I’ve heard, her notes seemed merely to hover there at a steady, reliable, quiet volume throughout. Rarely could one hear or sense a variation in attack, and often the music was so quiet that one’s focus returned repeatedly to the question of horizontal and vertical density, rather than the identity or origin of individual notes.

It was at some point that I also found myself wishing that the piano had been amplified. Not that her playing had been louder, because that would have been wrong, but that the instrument itself had been amplified so that we could be surrounded by the sensuous geometry of the individual notes. This of course was little more than a prejudice on my part, a fact that I quickly recognized; and it was a prejudice that derived no doubt from the ability to live with headphones on one’s ears these days for many hours without a single person batting a disapproving eye. I quickly dismissed my wish as a whim, and turned my attention toward the instrument in the center of the room.

The question of Lai’s approach to the piece recalled for me one of the key points that she made in the interview. She said something to the effect that sentimentality would ruin the piece, that the piece was not to be emotive, or even outwardly expressive, and of course she was right. I am aware that to point out an antipathy to sentiment is to state the painfully obvious, since emotion—not to mention something as gaudy as sentimentality or nostalgia—was anathema to many of the minimalists, and many other late modern artists as well (and no, I am not lumping Feldman together with the minimalists) (and let us not forget that less disciplined minimalists certainly have no problem with sentiment and emotion). It was Lai’s fidelity to the quiet nature of the music, and her refusal to make it easier for the audience by sentimentalizing or emphasizing the more tonal passages, that provided further proof that we as listeners were in good hands, thanks to Lai’s wise and knowing rendering.

Though it may violate custom to point to extra-musical aspects of the performance, somehow the concert seemed to recommend it. First of all, there were no more than forty people in Barnes Hall. Is this a surprise? Not really, as it did feel like a sizeable crowd at the time and certainly seemed to suit the intimacy of the music. But what are we to take away from the fact? Ithaca is, after all, a highly literate arts community, with a university and college to boot, each of which have their fair share of artists, musicians, and thinkers. So why would not more people turn up to hear a long and demanding piece written by Morton Feldman? Of the contemporary composers often mentioned as relevant and ‘important’ in some way to the cultural landscape today, Feldman is considered one of the easier ones to absorb. Quiet, slow, largely tonal, and not without passages of startling beauty and grace, his music furnishes a fine place to begin for someone interested in looking under the rug of contemporary classical. What is more, Feldman’s music is not all that frequently performed, and even less frequently performed in the form of a 75 minute recital. So why not attend? I definitely do not mean to scoff or cavil, and to be honest, the question is dishonest, since the Eastman Wind Ensemble was playing across campus at the same time, and debuting a new piece by Cornell’s own Pulitzer Prize winning composer Steven Stucky no less. (To be perfectly frank, Natasha and I considered trying to find a way to hear the Stuckey piece too, as we are admirers of his work and wanted to hear it, but in the end decided that to pass on an opportunity to hear Feldman would be an error, especially after having discussed the piece with Lai and seen the artwork that she made in relation to it.)

My point in mentioning the forty member audience at the concert is really only to draw attention to the fact that Feldman’s music is still somewhat controversial, and somewhat of an enigma for many contemporary listeners (one of the few students whom I did see at the concert was an acquaintance who just two days prior had lent me three Erstwhile discs, one of which featured a contribution by John Tilbury, a pianist who has recorded Feldman’s piano corpus in its entirety).

To return to the question of time. To be honest, during the concert, I had lost track of it. I drifted from periods of listening very carefully both to the contours of phrases and the stylized rhythmic writing, to thoughts concerning the ‘musicality of space’ and the ‘spatiality of music,’ to moments of childlike glee at the fact that so much concentration, ceremony, and seriousness were being devoted by audience and performer alike to this very quiet, and in some ways, very specific, form of musical writing.

But then I heard the watches. At 9:00pm, two or three audience members’ watches beeped and I knew that approximately 45 minutes had passed. The concert was scheduled to begin at 8:00pm, the wind and snow outside were fierce, audience members were still arriving and unbundling for minutes thereafter, so the concert did not get started until approximately 8:15pm. With the watches, I knew that we were past halfway, and I marveled at the fact that forty five minutes had passed. The beeping could have been the half hour marker, I first thought, but soon I concluded that more time must have elapsed, and that we were therefore at the forty-five minute mark in the piece.

It was also at this point that the piece entered into a strikingly beautiful, and surprisingly tonal, passage. No more than four notes, spread across three octaves, “For Bunita Marcus” enters at the 46 minute mark into a brief expanse which, once dissolved, would return in bits and shards throughout the remainder of the performance.

One of the appealing aspects of “For Bunita Marcus” is the fact that a listener can actually hear, follow, and trace certain much discussed compositional ideas over the course of the piece. Syau-Cheng talked to us about Feldman’s use of rhythmic cells in this particular piece. This was nothing new, certainly, for the tradition of classical composition. Cells of melodic and rhythmic material, by the time that they fell in to the hands of Feldman, were old hat, though not necessarily exhaustively explored. Stravinsky famously pioneered the ‘composition by rhythmic cell’ approach in early works, including the Rite of Spring. Numerous other composers also pursued the idea, as it was a powerful compositional tool, not to mention, solution, to the question, prominent on the minds of those opposed to dodecaphony, of how to delimit and organize harmonic material for the purposes of an individual composition (noting, of course, that Stravinksy also explored dodecaphony). The piano writing, and temporal duration, that mark this piece certainly allow for that sort of horizontal exploration of harmonic and rhythmic material in a contained, manipulable, cell-like manner.

But let us not forget the vertical nature of this music, for this is where a good deal of Feldman’s writing excels. With about sixteen minutes left in the piece, Feldman blesses listeners with a sumptuous sequence of dyads and triads that continue at irregular temporal intervals for many minutes. During this passage, individual notes disappear, cells seemingly disappear, and we are left with a series of gorgeous chords which in some ways feel as if they are the canvas itself, or better yet the paint, the clotted thickness, messed together and stirred, from which the individual notes were earlier and later taken, plucked, dipped, and applied. The effect is heightened by the succeeding passage, now nearly 58 minutes into the piece, when Feldman strips the piece bare, giving us a series of hollow, but still somehow essential, notes: D, B flat (one octave lower), D (an octave higher), then A. This section continues, and gently evolves for minutes more, before settling into the last many minutes of the piece piece, a section which in some ways reprises earlier geometries and in other ways occupies its own static unfolding until an end is reached well into the seventy fifth minute.

When all was said and done, Syau-Cheng Lai’s performance of Morton Feldman’s “For Bunita Marcus” was an enormous success. Disciplined, focussed, intent, almost ritual-like in its attention to sourceless, almost volume-less, piano playing, the conclusion of the piece left one feeling as if they had indeed experienced a musical event. The sense of ‘event-ness’ was further heightened upon seeing her gallery show, “Visualizing for Bunita Marcus,” at Tjaden Hall on the last day of its run (Natasha’s photos of it are here). Syau-Cheng was there, and a recording of the concert was playing from a disc player taped to the floor of the white-walled gallery. Her paintings, which you can see here, here, here, and here thanks to Arthur Whitman’s photographs, presented yet another mode of thought, yet another way of responding to the music of Morton Feldman. She told us that the artwork was not to be considered a mimetic representation of the music, nor was it to be considered as a kind of linear unfolding in some way matching Feldman’s piece. Rather it was her own response, in color and pigment and pencil, to the aesthetic space opened by “For Bunita Marcus,” as well as to her own journey as an artist during the preparation of the music and the making of the artworks themselves. For those who were able to attend the concert and to visit the gallery, Syau-Cheng Lai’s performance and artwork presented a rewarding confrontation with a work by a composer whose relevance and meaning still stand ahead of us.