Rothko Chapel & Why Patterns?

This one is for Hortense. Morty-time again, with an excellent version of "Rothko Chapel", backed with a spacey sounding "Why Patterns?". Gotta love the beautiful Glockenspiel.

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MF: The Rothko Chapel piece was a very interesting commission because it was the only score where other factors determined what kind of music it was going to be. For example, it leaned very heavily on me that the first time I met Rothko, which must have been around 1962, I remember him standing against the wall talking to me about Mendelssohn. He liked the combination of the youth and the lyricism of Mendelssohn, all the fantastic pieces he wrote as such a young man. Rothko got a big kick out of that. So when I wrote the Rothko Chapel I remembered that Rothko did a lot of paintings with the WPA, social realist, and then I saw the whole life of this guy. So what I decided in the Rothko Chapel was to treat it very - not biographical, but my identity was such that I decided to write an autobiographical piece. The piece begins in a synagoguey type of way; a little rhetorical and declamatory. And as I get older the piece gets a little abstract, just like my own career. Then in the middle of the piece there is one thing that is really at odds with the other parts but which makes the piece a very interesting trip: where I just have the same chords, and I'm tripping for a long time, and it's very monochromey.

GB: Are those the vocal harmonies?
MF: Yes, that is a very monochromey section. It's going on for a long time and that's where I reach this degree of abstraction. Not that I'm imitating Rothko but I'm certainly closer to the late pictures that are in the Chapel in that kind of one hue of a colour, and the piece ends with the memory of a piece that I wrote when I was fourteen.

GB: There are a few features about that ending which are strange: for example, that very tonal extended tune with a very steady, vibraphone accompaniment.
MF: Then there is a tune in the middle of the piece, a dialogue between a soprano and timpani and viola, which was a little Stravinskyish on purpose: I wrote that tune the day Stravinsky died. So it was Stravinsky, Rothko, dead. It was the only piece - and it will never happen again - when all kinds of facts, literary facts, reminiscent facts, came into the piece.
FO: You wrote it for the chapel.
MF: I think the orchestration was to some degree affected by the fact that I was writing it for a big production at the chapel. I went down there and I just walked around the chapel. It is built in a kind of glamorous idea of his studio. Actually the studio was bigger than the chapel, and it just cried out - the octagonal situation - to do something at the sides. That's where the antiphonal chorus came in, and something in the middle, and then they had the benches in the middle and they could bring in others. Visually too the whole battery of percussion looks nice.

From: Morton Feldman Interview, by Fred Orton and Gavin Bryars, conducted in London on 27 May 1976

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Feldman wrote "Why Patterns?" for himself to play with Eberhard Blum, flute(s) and Jan Williams, glockenspiel. The score consists of three completely notated but metrically unaligned parts. Theoretically one could say the notation is thus fixed but in playing the piece many times, one discovers a fair degree of latitude concerning vertical coincidence. The musical material consists largely of differentiated, overlapping ostinatos, hence the title. Originally it concluded when the last player completed their part. This was always Feldman, not only because the piano part is the longest but also because he invariably played the slowest. The present ending (the vertically aligned pulsing with the glockenspiel playing a descending chromatic scale) was added after the first performance. (Nils Vigeland)
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[maybe reposted soon]