Feldman Chamber Music

Morton Feldman - Chamber Music

Performed by Ensemble Avantgarde:
Kerstin Klein - soprano (track 1)
Markus Kohler - baritone (tracks 2, 3 and 4)
Ralf Mielke - flute (track 8)
Matthias Kreher - clarinet (track 8)
Johannes Winkler - horn (track 1)
Jochen Pleb - horn (track 5)
Stefan Stopora - percussion (tracks 1, 3, 5, 7 and 8)
Winfried Nitzsche - percussion (track 8)
Steffen Schleiermacher - piano/celesta (tracks 1, 3, 5, 6, 7 and 8)
Andreas Seidel - violin (tracks 1, 2, 5, 7 and 8)
Ivo Bauer - viola (track 4)
Matthias Moosdorf - violoncello (tracks 1, 2, 5, 7 and 8)
Direction - Roland Kluttig (track 8)

I paint the white as well as the black, and the white is just as important. What the American painter Franz Kline (1910-62) said about his paintings - brusque, black brush gestures on a white background - can be applied equally to Morton Feldman's composition. Composition means defining sound space, and this is done just as much with the "black" of the notes as, ex negativo, with the "white" silence, the absence of sound. In its reduction of sound elements, its new balance of sound and not-sound, Feldman's music attains the magical, floating quality that the composer admired in the early - nonfigurative - paintings of his painter-friend Philip Guston (1913-80): the complete absence of gravity of a painting that is not confined to a painting space but rather existing somewhere in the space between the canvas and ourselves, as Feldman once wrote. Again and again, Feldman noted that the illusion of stasis in his scores could only be understood in the context of his intensive engagement with the visual arts: Stasis, as it is utilized in painting, is not traditionally part of the apparatus of music. [...] The degrees of stasis found in a [Mark] Rothko or Guston were perhaps the most significant elements that I brought to my music from painting. (Peter Niklas Wilson)

Tracklisting:

1. For Franz Kline {5:12}

2. The O'Hara Songs I {4:53}

3. The O'Hara Songs II {1:45}

4. The O'Hara Songs III {3:49}

5. De Kooning {14:46}

6. Piano Piece to Philip Guston {3:18}

7. Four Instruments {12:21}

8. For Frank O'Hara {15:49}

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