M o r ton Feldman: Triadic Memories - DRAM · PDF fileMorton Feldman's music has been steadily creeping back into my life these days. This has come after a relaxed kind of hiatus from

a golden light. Feldman felt strongly about the materials of his music, and the Great Halloffered the ideal situation for a very liverecording, in which the goal would be to cap-ture the magic of the sounds in the space. Mostcrucial was the sense of decay, the dying of thesonority that is integral to the world of TriadicM e m o r i e s. “[I]n my own music,” wrote Fel d m anin The Anxiety of Art, “I am so involved withthe decay of each sound, and try to make itsattack sourceless. The attack of a sound is notits character… Decay, however, this departinglandscape, this expresses where the sound exists in our hearing — leaving us rather thancoming towards us.” When Triadic Memoriesis taken at the tempo I have chosen, one hearsto a heightened degree the exquisite decompo-sition (la mort exquise) of the sounds after theyhave been released. They meet fates of theirown, and the pianist must resist the temptationto try to control these processes. The challengefor the performer, and for the listener as well, is not to impose an interpretation on whatFeldman has given us but rather, keeping thewords of the composer in mind, to love thesounds and leave them alone.

— © 2003 Marilyn Nonken

Marilyn Nonken, named “Best of the Year”five times by the Boston Globe, has been

described by the New York Times as “a pianist

from music’s leading edge” and a “determinedprotector of important music.” Her repertoire,featuring composers associated with theSecond Viennese School, American experi-mentalism and ultramodernism, Darmstadt, theNew York School, Spectralism, and the NewComplexity, includes historic works of Ives,Barraqué, Stockhausen, and Ligeti as well asthe complete solo piano music of Schoenberg,Boulez, and Tristan Murail. Composers whohave written for her include Murail, MiltonBabbitt, Mario Davidovsky, Chris Dench,Michael Finnissy, and young Americans suchas Jason Eckardt, Paul Nauert, Jeff Nichols, andDavid Rakowski; she has worked closely withJames Dillon, Jonathan Harvey, Alvin Lucier,Salvatore Martirano, and Charles Wuorinen,among others. She has been presented as asoloist throughout the United States, Canada,Italy, the Czech Republic, France, Belgium, theNetherlands, and the United Kingdom. Also anacclaimed chamber musician, Ms. Nonkenplays in New York with Ensemble 21 (of whichshe is a cofounder and Artistic Director) andhas appeared as a guest artist with the Groupfor Contemporary Music, the Chamber MusicSociety of Lincoln Center, and Elision. For twoconsecutive seasons, she was featured onCarnegie Hall’s “When Morty Met John,” a series devoted to the music of Feldman andCage curated by Joan La Barbara. Ms. Nonken

Triadic Memories (1981) takes us to that“other place that’s not a metaphor forsomething else.” In his essay Between

Categories, Feldman (1926-87) described hisexperience of Mark Rothko’s paintings with thisphrase. Yet it can be applied equally well toFeldman’s own compositions, to their stunning-ly real quality and lack of affectation. InFeldman’s music, the sounds are allowed tospeak for themselves. The chords and pitchesin Triadic Memories are no more or less thanthat: materials that live and die in the course of the work.

Of Triadic Memories, Feldman wrote,“Chords are heard without any discernible pat-tern. In this regularity (though there are slightgradations of tempo) there is a suggestion thatwhat we hear is functional and directional, butwe soon realize that this is an illusion; a bit likewalking the streets of Berlin — where all thebuildings look alike, even if they’re not.” Theplace Triadic Memories takes us is full of illu-sions, not only of function and direction butalso of timelessness and stasis. Can there be amusical experience without temporal refer-ence? Can there be a place without metaphor?We must ask if the apprehension of an illusionis any less real than the apprehension of reality;whether the desert-wanderer sees an oasis or

mirage, the very act of beholding it may be justas intense. Feldman’s music offers the opportu-nity to explore these issues of perception andimagination, which are inherent in the way he talked about his music and which TriadicMemories brings into play.

Unlike some of Feldman’s other works,Triadic Memories is strictly notated in terms of rhythms, dynamics, and repeats. The pedal,depressed halfway at the beginning of thework, is never released. The primary chance element, for which there is no indication, istempo. I have chosen to maintain a steadyeighth-note pulse throughout that approxi-mates the heartrate at rest. At this tempo,rhythmic nuances speak clearly and distinc-tively, and the sounds have a certain body andprojection. Unfolding in time at this rate, thework’s geography — its rapturous peaks andlong, low valleys — is brought into relief.

As Rothko’s painting is a study in color,Triadic Memories is a study in sound. For this recording, I chose the Great Hall at the Krannert Center for its instrument andacoustics. The piano, a Hamburg Steinway, hasan unusual depth and sustain, and a rich, soul-ful timbre. The hall itself, paneled in wood, isresonant in a way that warms the sounds in theair — never clouding them but casting them in

M o r ton Feldman: Triadic Memories

has recorded for New World Records, Albany,Lovely Music, CRI, and Metier Sound andVision; American Spiritual, a CD of works written for her, was a CRI release. A student of David Burge at the Eastman School, she received a Ph.D. degree in musicology fromColumbia University. Her writings have been

published in many international journals, and she is the guest editor of “Performers onPerformance,” an issue of Contemporary MusicReview. Ms. Nonken is a Steinway artist.

www.ensemble21.com/nonken

Conjuring the atmosphere of the New York art scene is an enticing angle in enabling a broader appealto Feldman's music, but often the music specialist wants a bit more. Regardless of the popular stancethat Feldman's music is so intuitive and self-aware that it evades analysis (which for the most part istrue when comparing it to the analytical techniques associated with conventionally contrapuntal,harmonic or serial music), how might Feldman view what his material is? How might his nearlyinstinctual urge to question what these materials become the process of manipulation?

Morton Feldman's music has been steadily creeping back into my life these days. This has come after arelaxed kind of hiatus from listening to, reading the prose of, and analyzing the scores of the latetwentieth-century icon. Why a hiatus? After a long obsession and thorough inquiry into the composer'sworks and thoughts during the blossoming of his posthumous career, I thought I had no ability togarner new thoughts about the unique musical sensibility of Feldman.

I recently attended New York City Opera's presentation of Feldman's opera to a Samuel Beckett text,Neither, and, sitting on the front row, I was enthralled by the performance. In the later portions ofNeither, the dancers delivered a chorus-like unison of full body movement ambiguously rooted inpopular dance. After a long duration of muted or smaller gestures such as rhythmic hand gesturesresembling a faux-sign language, and stage crossings, this seemed a very bold move, but it workedwell.

My thoughts were: How did they pull off dancing like that to Feldman??? And that question ultimatelybrought me closer to the topic at hand: the degree to which Feldman's late music makes incrediblyoriginal statements on the subject of rhythm and the notation that catalyzes it. This is a point oftenovershadowed by the sociological contextualization of Feldman's aesthetic.

The band of Abstract Expressionist cronies that influenced the attitudes and metaphors behindFeldman's compositional choices is extremely important, as is the encouragement from John Cage andthe conceptual similarities of the New York School of composition. There has been plenty said alreadyabout these relationships. What I would like to focus on is Feldman's notational procedures and howthese provide clues to his ways of selecting and manipulating musical materials, and furthermore, towhat extent the notation itself becomes the laboratory in which performative aggregates are born, asopposed to treating notation as a representation of the performed sound-object.

Notation in the late works

Feldman's compositional output from the late 70s until his death is typically regarded as his late period,and is characterized by pieces of long duration. Feldman's sense of material is just as concentrated as inhis early work. However, in his late work a fascination with musical patterns (what Feldman may call amusical "image") emerged. Growing beyond his early predominant emphasis on merely the selection ofmaterials (instrumentation, notational format and general stasis of gestural forms), how Feldmanintuitively balances the amount of change and stasis in his patterned materials through literalrepetitions, sequences of slightly altered versions of an initial pattern, or recursive iterations afterintermediary material (which often is another collection of altering patterns) seems to be the largerobjective.

What Feldman considers a musical image, its primary materials and how they are modified as timeunfolds, may be more easily grasped by examining the nature of alteration applied to some example

patterns. Two works from the 1980s, Triadic Memories and Patterns in a Chromatic Field provide anumber of clear patterns that we can see from the score what kind of thinking is at work.

Irregular Rhythmic Groupings, Polyrhythms and Mixed Simultaneous Metrical Groupings

Rather than treat the notation of rhythms in his scores as a spatially accurate representation of howvarious patterns actually sound overtop of each other, Feldman is highly specific with his rhythms asthey pertain to each gesture by an instrument or instrumental group. This allows their incongruentshapes to interplay or chafe as they manifest in performance. What is notated is a specific rhythmicshape, often placed irregularly in relation to the beat, or it's simplest subdivisions (by casting shapesinto polyrythms like 5 in the time of 4, 9 in the time of 8, etc,), or avoiding clear downbeats. This shapeis set furthermore against an equally complicated, but altogether differing figure (often irregularlygrouped over the beat). In some pieces, this other figure may sometimes sit in an entirely different timesignature!

Here the notation comes not from an impulse to notate a complex texture representatively, but rather tocatalyze various relationships of movement of materials against each other in the manner of aninstruction to be executed to the best of one's ability in relation to the other material. The total accuracyof the overall event is very difficult to ascertain analytically. This ambiguity in conceptualizing anentire texture heightens the players' concentrations, increasing the need for calculation and sensitivitytowards each other's part as they play – all subtle, but palpable elements to the performance experience.

If notated exactly, they are too stiff; if given the slightest notational leeway, they are too loose.Though these patterns exist in rhythmic shapes articulated by instrumental sounds, they are also inpart notational images that do not make a direct impact on the ear as we listen. A tumbling of sortshappens in midair between their translation from the page and their execution. (from the essayCrippled Symmetry by Morton Feldman – various publications)

Further inference that the notation works with little regard to assisting an ideal realization can be seenin how various images of different length tend to fit into the same size bars! In the scores of many lateFeldman pieces one can observe that the number of bars and systems per page often are identical innumber, size and shape – uncannily resembling the grid he used in his earlier graphic notation pieces,but instead of numbers or other non-conventional music symbols, he supplies this grid with morsels ofcomplex notation that occupy their own time requirements. Later in life, when Feldman was asked toelaborate on his early use of grid oriented graphic notation, he replied, "I still use a grid, but now thegrid encompasses conventional notation." (from an interview with Morton Feldman by Jan Williams).

In some scores one can actually see Feldman abandon materials literally at the turn of the page.Keeping the underlying grid of bars and systems, Feldman often will fill each page with contrastingpatterns and sets of materials.

Digging deeper into the details of a late Feldman score reveals much about what Feldman mightconsider musical material and how he controls a balance of change and stasis in non-developmentalways.

The Roaming Dot

One of Feldman's most utilized manipulations is to switch the dotting of particular notes within anasymmetrical rhythmic grouping. In the cello line of Patterns in a Chromatic Field (1981), the elementof stasis in the first image (provided in figure 1) is a pattern of four sixteenth notes inside of a nonupletirregular grouping in a meter of 8/32 time. Rhythmically, four sixteenth notes fill an 8/32 meter, but thenonuplet requires one more notated thirty-second note; Feldman creates an ever changing rhythm byassigning a dot to one of the sixteenth notes (satisfying the numerical value of the nonuplet by addinganother thirty-second note) in one bar, and then reassigning the dot to another position within the bar orpattern in the next iteration. The effect is a continually changing yet always-asymmetrical gesture.

The Roaming Rest

Much like the roaming rhythmical dot, Feldman also alters figures smaller than the duration of ameasure by offsetting the position of a gesture with various length rests. Observing the piano gesturesin the same excerpt of Patterns in a Chromatic Field (figure 1), the sequence of pitch material andvertical spacing remain the same, but the division of the irregular grouping (triplet, quintuplet), dottingor flagging (1/16 and 1/32) and types of rests surrounding the figure all are subject to change.

Figure 1. from Patterns in a Chromatic Field (1981) Patterns in a Chromatic Field|für Violoncello und Klavier

© Copyright 1981 by Universal Edition (London) Ltd., London/UE 17327www.universaledition.com

Both the manipulation of the dot and rest are also at work in the first notational image from the solopiano work Triadic Memories (1981). Observe the reordering of pitches, dots and rests in the left hand,continually shifting against a steady minor third ostinato in the right hand (see figure 2).

Figure 2. from Triadic Memories (1981)Triadic Memories|für Klavier


As Feldman continues to explore every possible variant of this image, an exchange in register tovarious pitch elements of the pattern bring new shades of color to a mostly static collection ofmaterials. By the second page of Triadic Memories (see figure 3), the registers of the right and left handimages have moved closer towards the center of the piano.

Figure 3. from Triadic Memories (1981)Triadic Memories|für Klavier


The cello in Patterns in a Chromatic Field is treated with a similar shift in register of the cello whenthe first image returns (see figure 4 and compare to figure 1). In this iteration, the pitch content of thepiano part has also shifted slightly adding C#. This brings a new shade of color to the piano's pitchcollection.



Pitches

In figures 1 and 4 from Patterns in a Chromatic Field, the cello is essentially meandering through acollection of four pitches. These pitches, B double-flat, A-flat, F double-sharp and A-sharp, (forming afour half-step cluster) appear in various sequences, leading one to believe that there is no hierarchybetween these pitches. Feldman's harmonic style has been primarily chromatic and dissonant since hisearly pieces.

However, Feldman's use of enharmonic spellings in his late work plays a crucial role in eliciting acertain concentration and execution from the performer. On an instrument that can play any shade ofpitch like the cello, how notes and intervals are spelled engages a performer in specific ways. In thecello line, F double-sharp and B double-flat occur in the rotation of four pitches. These pitches could bemore simply written as G or A respectively, but a performer trained in the intonation of tonal musicmay read the double-sharps or double-flats as functioning in a directional way (G# going to A might beplayed sharper than Ab going to G depending on the melodic function). What arises in the performer isa question as to whether they should engage – and to what extent, at that – this directional tuning in adirectionless environment (in Feldman, these pivotal tones often defy their conventional direction in theway they move from one pitch to the next). Does the cellist strive to balance the intonation in relationto the piano's equal tempered tuning, or does one present a sense of shading that respects the spelling?How micro-tonally does one present this challenge? What is Feldman looking for?

Feldman roughly makes his analogy of this enharmonic device as akin to instruments' drifting in andout of tune, leading us to take this as an intentionally confusing notational object to execute in realtime, rather than a specific microtonal logic with exact pitch values intended. If the cellist chooses toengage these intonation explorations, a new dimension of color is added to the performanceunattainable on the piano alone. In an already densely chromatic sonority, how does one intimate aninterval smaller than the semitone or in between a semitone and a whole step? Or how does one ensurethe intimacy felt through the fragility of an imperfect performance? Essentially there is no right answeror singular approach. Once again, Feldman is not notating a representation of a desirable performancesound-object, but rather is encouraging a situation that requires a type of concentration from theperformer as one tries to mentally process and execute all of the complicated parts of an image.

So, how do you handle instruments that just have inherent problems of not sounding expensive? Andthat whole business of sounding expensive is part of the image of professional music as we know it. Theexpensive violin - the expensive bow, you see. Well, my approach to an instrument is findinginstruments where terms like "perfection" and "imperfection" of construction are not important. Thewhole idea of going in tune and out of tune with more precise acoustical instruments is taken intoconsideration. (from an interview with Morton Feldman by Jan Williams)

Repetition, Manipulation of Meter and Duration of “Silence”

Feldman's sparse sound world has reflected the importance of musical elements of non-action. The“silence” that frames his sounds is carefully calculated. Of course Feldman's silence around activelyplayed gestures is the most apparent juxtaposition of sound and its antithesis, but more precise controlover the decay of a resonated sound has evolved analogously to the precision gained notationally overthe shifts in his patterns. In the late works, Feldman allows sound-images to sustain with the pianopedal depressed (or allowing the cello to “breathe”) in “empty” bars. These empty bars reflect aduration that is just as delicately chosen as any other notational procedure. The following image (figure5) and successive re-iterations (figures 6 and 7) of it show that the entire image contains an empty barof 3 / 4 as integral to it's symmetry. In figure 5, an arpeggiated gesture is set beside the crucial 3 / 4bar. Observe also the “roaming dots” within the arpeggiations.



When the image returns, Feldman favors literal repetition instead of changing the rhythmic effects.Here the 3 / 4 bar is again integral to the experience of the gesture.



When the image returns yet again, Feldman returns to manipulating the distribution of dots. Again, the3 / 4 bar is retained. While the notational image on this third appearance has retained rhythmic andmetrical materials, upon closer look, the pitch material has been raised a whole step.



What I think of it now is that I’m watching some bugs on a slide, and I’m just watching how I feel . . .(from Feldman's notes on String Quartet No. 1)

These procedures that Feldman consistently employs to adjust the material of his late works give thelistener and score reader a purely musical way to navigate through the Feldman experience. To attributea symbolic meaning to any of these techniques may enrich a listening experience (such as relatingpatterns to Anatolian rugs, etc.), but are hardly requirements to perceive musical coherence in the lateworks. Observing the use of mixed polyrhythms and meters, relocated rhythmic dots and rests,enharmonic pitch shading, and the vehicles of image repetition (or reiteration) and framing silence, thelistener may be entirely content listening for these musical signatures alone. The experience of staticsaturation in dialogue with minute variation is enough to draw in our fascination and focus on thesubtle nature of the sounds themselves. – Matthew Welch

Documents

M o r ton Feldman: Triadic Memories - DRAM · PDF fileMorton Feldman's music has been steadily creeping back into my life these days. This has come after a relaxed kind of hiatus from